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• Wednesday, May 3, 2006 01:34 PM

  SPANISH, FRENCH, YIDDISH, AND EVEN SAMOAN TRANSLATIONS

  Oh what a tangled web we weave when first we practice to deceive. Shakespeare’s words definitely fit today when we’re told that up is down, war is peace, and the so-called leader of our country stands for one thing and then utters utterly stupid negative statements related to it.

  The flak about performing the Star Spangled Banner in Spanish sent me on internet search (you know, that vast land of bogus data?).

  On wikipedia.org I found that our national anthem has been translated many times in 150 years. It was translated the first time into Spanish in 1919 by the U.S. Bureau of Education. (That’s the government, isn’t it?) Well before that, however, it was translated into German by Niklas Müller in 1861. French Acadians of Louisiana translated it into French, and Jewish immigrants translated it into Yiddish. In 1999 a Latin version appeared. There’s even a Samoan translation!

  We know George Bush is not the most informed man in the universe, but is his memory so bad he can’t recall it being sung in Spanish, at his request I've heard, during his campaign? Now he's having Karl Rove spin things so that his "base" will forgive him for his idea of a guest worker program.

  I was proud to see those millions of gutsy people marching in cities across our country. Forget the crap about legal immigrants going through the process. What was the process when slave ships arrived at our shores with kidnapped Africans chained together in their hulls? They were met by people who planned to sell them—not assimilate them! At the other end of the spectrum, was there a process when the Mayflower landed here? Were they met by officials of the INS and made to fill out immigration forms?

  I thought Bush’s guest worker program was probably the only good idea he’s had since he took office in 2001. All the rest is just spin for political purposes, and we need to wake up and realize when we're being handled

  —greenholdt Read greenholdt's other letters
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