“Rather than everyone here having to learn Chinese — I understand it’s a rather difficult language — do you think that it would behoove you and your citizens to adopt a name that we could deal with more readily here?” State Rep. Betty Brown [R-Terrell, TX] said.
“Can’t you see that this is something that would make it a lot easier for you and the people who are poll workers if you could adopt a name just for identification purposes that’s easier for Americans to deal with?”
If not for the thickness of my skull, I am certain, without a doubt, that reading the above statement by an elected member of my state legislature would have made my brains explode all over the walls of my den. As it is, I believe the speech centers of my brain have been fried, as I can’t even come up with anything to say about it. The stupidity of that statement is so unbelievable, what response can there be other than exploding heads and maybe some laughter (at Ms. Brown) and outrage?
Once my brain cells have recuperated, I will be sending off a brief email missive to Ms. Brown stating what I would hope would be obvious, and pointing out the one thing I actually found most offensive about what she had to say.
If these people with hard-to-pronounce Asian names are voting, then wouldn’t it be safe to say that they TOO are Americans? Or are Americans only white people with big eyes and easily pronounced and spelled generic names … like Brown?
I have to stop thinking about this ignorance right now. The pressure in my skull is already maxed out, and I am sure Lin doesn’t want to clean up the aftermath of my head exploding … nor listen to me rant about this for a minute longer†.
Footnotes- † When he’s home and I am writing a ranting post, I rant in between sentences. No doubt, it makes his head want to explode, but bless him, he (almost) never tells me to shut up. [↩]
You realize, don’t you, that many non-Texans view the state pretty much as portrayed in ‘King of the Hill,’ and in that context wouldn’t find Ms. Brown’s statements all that shocking?
Expect boxcar loads of stupidity in the near future. It’s going to be our stock in trade vis-a-vis the rest of the world. If we could commoditize and sell it, America might become rich again.
Surely, what needs to be done is to standardise whether they are meant to use their standard English names or their transliterated names.
After all, I mean, my name is Hebrew.
AS far as voting goes, having worked with registration drives and such, I’ve never seen any Asian name on a driver’s license or voter card that wasn’t the transliterated one. I think a few times there was like a John Wang or something like that, but their ID matched what was put on the voter card, so it’s not like they were using two names (might have been their birth same anyway, who knows). I assure you, nowhere in Texas does any official printing device print Asian characters. I don’t even think they are capable of printing umlauts (or the people typing in the data don’t know how to input them – never seen a German name on anything official that had them, which is statistically odd). So if they get their silly voter ID act passed, as long as the two documents match, who cares. It’s not like anyone has to pronounce the names out loud or anything.
Which is neither here nor there, because this woman seems to think there are two (or more) kinds of American. Ones with good old-fashioned American names like Betty Brown, and anyone who has a name that isn’t easy for her brain to comprehend as soon as she looks at it. That’s really the mind bender on this is her saying Americans were having trouble with the names. Um, they are Americans too moron!
I don’t even have a weird last name. Perfectly standard, though rare, Scots-Irish name, and anyone in Texas who has ever listened to a sports cast about Texas baseball should be able to pronounce it. Still, it’s regularly mangled. I know what half the people I am distantly related to added a “y” in it, just so people would stop mangling their last name! My mom’s side of the family? Boy, so people around here not know how to pronounce Germanic names at all. The outcome is always hilarious. :lol:
And John, I know full well how everyone not in Texas sees Texas. There are more than enough damn Yankees on the message boards and community blogs I visit telling me regular what a bunch of stupid redneck hicks Texans are. Always pisses me off, seeing as we are ALL like that … though the stupid does seem a little thick outside the major urban centers (or really, outside of Austin). It’s getting better, but we really need to get the idiots out of our legislature. Truly, many of them make my head hurt daily, and does give the impression Texas is full of idiots.