IV.xi. The English Empire
"All this time you were pretending, so much for my happy ending."
- Avril Lavigne
I can't escape the blaring, forceful ballads of that young songstress from Napanee, Ontario, no matter where I go. It doesn't surprise me much anymore. From the time I first heard her voice echoing down the Quai du Mont Blanc during my summer in Geneva I have had to get used to it.
In Italy, she is everywhere. She echoes through the fifteenth century porticoes on Via Zamboni, and even seeps past the padded doors of old San Giaccomo Maggiore, like a dissonant incense from the crappy, modern world. I suppose that if she weren't so Canadian and Attractive she would annoy me even more, but she is the least of it. Her, and her innumerable English speaking colleagues, are trouncing their foreign opponents.
What is this language? Why do radios, televisions, cinemas, broadcast these guttural, inelegant sounds? No one understands it. It is like church mass in Latin before the uncomprehending medieval populace. Why do they even bother? We are in Italy, the birthplace of arguably the most beautiful language in the world, but Italian falls by the wayside and someone insists on Avril, dollars, and Big Macs.
No one can go a single day without being exposed to this, the footsoldiers of the English Empire. It is, after all, right there on Via Zamboni. It spills out onto the grimy arcade. Most people need to pass it to go to class. The English Empire is a pub. Its name is uncanny, not only because it demonstrates a lack of understanding of Anglo-Saxon historical concepts, but because, beyond that, the name is all too apt. Inside, in big letters above the bar, is written: "A day of pleasure is worth two of sorrow." Likely some ill-appropriated proverb, a typically Mediterranean misuse of English akin to other signs saying "Welcome in the bar" and "We speak in English as wells." The whole place reeks of unconscious irony and unobserved allegory.
English is everywhere here. Like a cancer, it spreads and infects indiscriminately. Italian, of all the Romance languages, is probably worst hit, because any word including the letters y, j, k, or w (not present in the Italian alphabet, as one quickly notices when searching through rows of seats at a theatre) becomes suspect and immediately identifiable. In French, for example, it is much easier to transform foreign words in neologisms (email becomes mél, short for message éléctronique). Italian, with its beautiful insistence on terminal vowels, clashes with the cisalpine, or cisatlantic, invaders.
Less severe but still a problem, Anglicization has infected the whole continent. Most of my European friends don't really regard this as a problem, indeed for the most part they aren't even aware of it. A few outspoken nationalists or newspaper editorials might cite it as another curious example of globalization. Denglish or Franglais has made inroads. Linguists, removed from judgment in a typically academic way, remind us that languages have borrowed from each other for centuries. Nothing to worry about, they assure.
But no one seems to ask what it is that elevates one culture above another? What gives English culture, my culture, the right to eclipse and obscure yours? In nightclubs, advertisements, record stores, and on television, from Toledo to Tokyo, English dominates. Why? Why aren't American youth made to listen to music in languages they don't understand? It will be a glorious day for world culture when the American (or Australian, or British) teenager has to struggle to understand the lyrics of a song in Arabic, Spanish, or French that, for reasons totally beyond his control, is both popular and necessary to memorize. In China a civilization that has lasted millennia is disintegrating in the face of imported cultural values; in Italy, the land of Dante, Petrarch, and Boccacio, prime time television shows dubbed over reruns of Sabrina the Teenage Witch and Full House. These incongruities are amusing, of course, but their humour obscures their gravity. Entertainment, as an economic good, is superceding culture. Never has the variety and beauty of the world been under such threat.
We should resist this assault, or they should, at any rate. Their existence is challenged, and they welcome it with open arms. Freedom is a concept with a much wider definition than many today would admit. There is, of course, political, economic, religious freedom, but there is, or ought to be, cultural freedom as well. Rather than being bombarded from a young age by images and sounds of a single other culture, shouldn't young people be exposed to representative samplings from all over the world? Culture, as the last bastion of unassailed freedom, is under attack.
After a drink at the "English", which I had sworn never to enter but found myself in Saturday evening, Alaric, myself, and our female posse of American students, headed out to dance. In a discotheque in Bologna, the mostly Italian audience puts up with the English music. It doesn't bother them, and occasionally they can mouth the words, without grasping their meaning. When, at a decimate interval, an Italian song is played, the masses erupt in a fit of energetic dancing, singing, and all-round good vibe. Why then is this so rare? People adore their own music but, through cultural impositions, slavishly buy into a cynical commercial model. They have been granted citizenship in the Empire.
My friend Alaric reminded me of an interesting fact the other day. The number of people speaking and learning English is naturally at an all time high, achieving a hegemony and universality hitherto unknown in human history. However, the number of people who speak and use English properly is steadily declining. What was once one of the richest languages in the world is rapidly being reduces to a few thousand buzz words. "Speed English" and "Business English" attempt to put a sixteen-month cap on language acquisition. Striving for enviable accents outstrips emphasis on proper usage. English is in decay. Latin underwent the same metamorphosis in the dying days of the Roman world. The Empire will fall.
Our English Empire
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