Some say she's a symbol of our great nation, but others denounce her as a traitorous wench for welcoming all those immigrants.
Being able to speak multiple languages is one of those things, like being a good cook or being good at math, that is just an objectively good thing to be able to do. Unless, it turns out, you are in the lowest rung of the well-stacked moron level of right wingers on Twitter, wherein the mere existence of other languages besides English is enough to set you off during an innocuous Super Bowl ad. The ad in question:
It's an ad for Coke where "America the Beautiful" is sung in a handful of languages besides English. It's so inoffensive in its suggestion---nay, factual portrayal---of a country built by various immigrant populations that I honestly have to assume most conservatives didn't think much of it. But of course, there were some:
Couldn't make out that song they were singing. I only speak English.— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) February 3, 2014
Shortly after bragging about being monolingual, Starnes went on to denounce other people who are monolingual:
So was Coca-Cola saying America is beautiful because new immigrants don't learn to speak English?— toddstarnes (@toddstarnes) February 3, 2014
Of course, there's no reason to believe any of the people who were singing in various other languages are, like Starnes, monolingual. In fact, most them, unlike himself, probably speak more than one language: English and Spanish, English and Arabic, etc. Immigrants are way more likely to be bilingual than native-born Americans. Having grown up on the border, I can safely say that children of immigrants are also way more likely to be bilingual than people whose family goes back a few generations.
The only way to reconcile Starnes initial praise of himself for being monolingual and then denunciation of other people who he assumes, incorrectly in most cases, are monolingual is this: He clearly thinks that the only way to be is a monolingual English speaker and all other people, with the insinuation that you are a bad person/inferior if your first and only language is not English. Why? Because reasons. Can't be racism, which the conservative media has assured me that only liberals can practice. The best that someone whose first language is not English can aspire for, based on Starnes' tweets, is to learn English and become bilingual. But they will always fall short of his ideal, himself, a monolingual English speaker.
Again, I think smarter conservatives just ignored the ad or even liked it, because non-morons understand that being able to speak multiple languages is not only good on an individual level, but that multilingual people are the only reason we have an international economy at all. But the whole commercial was good for demarcating exactly who the winners in the competitive "stupidest wingnuts" contest were online. As TPM notes, Allen West and some bottom-feeder at Breitbart.com also got all bent out of shape about the ad. Travis Gettys here at Raw Story also collected a bunch of tweets from angry racists, many of whom don't allow their love of monolingual English-speaking to get in the way of absolutely wretched grammar and spelling. For some reason, racists really struggle to understand that "Coke" is a brand name and should be capitalized. But this may be my favorite:
Is it just bad spelling, or is he creating a new curse word? If so, I think it really should be spelled "ass-wholes", as in people who are like the whole of the ass, instead of just the part that eliminates feces. Obviously, whether it's "asshole" or "ass-whole", it's a term better applied to people who think they're better than immigrants simply because their families have been here longer than to immigrants themselves. But you guys already knew that.
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