Читать книгу Livin' la Vida Barroca. American Culture in an Age of Imperial Orthodoxies онлайн

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Yet here we are in 2011 and all our major news organizations are still hostage to an overwhelmingly monolingual cadre of reporters, people who are themselves pitifully dependent—yet ironically and tragically unable to ever determine really just how much—on an army of “native” interpreters possessing wildly varying linguistic skills, political inclinations and critical-thinking abilities.

Though it might surprise many people to hear this, the situation is not all that much better among the ranks of the many academic “experts” paraded across our television screens and given prominent places on the Op-Ed pages of our major dailies.

Sometime during the post-World War II era, the leaders of American universities decided that it was much more important to have people on their faculties with the ability to talk about foreign cultures than with the ability to talk to them or, better yet, with them. It is a change that coincided with the rise of departments of Political Science and Strategic Studies on our campuses.