Who Cares? It is French!

 There is much that is baffling about Trump's needless unprovoked trade war against our closest neighbor, biggest trading partner, and quondam ally Canada. But perhaps the strangest point yet to emerge is the specific issue over which trade negotiations apparently broke down. 

When Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney declared yesterday that he was walking away from trade talks, he said that U.S. negotiators were insisting on concessions that were simply too extreme to be considered, and would implicate fundamental principles of sovereignty. 

Among the examples our ally cited—as summarized by the New York Times: "American negotiators pushed to roll back Canada’s efforts to promote Canadian and French language content [...]and even mandatory labeling in French, an official language in Canada [...] on packaging."

Wait, what? 

I get that the Trump administration is fighting its own brain-dead xenophobic war on the Spanish language as well as any other form of cultural diversity here in the United States. But why on Earth do they care one way or the other about Canada's relationship to the French language? 

Is it just that they have such a mindless allergic reaction to any form of inclusion that they insist on fighting a completely different country's culture war for it as well? 

It would be like if the Trump administration were suddenly weighing in on the visibility and representation of Hoklo vs. Hakka people in Taiwanese culture. 

Except—it's not just that they are expressing an opinion on Canadian linguistic policies. They are wielding the full coercive power of the world's largest consumer economy in order to prevent French words from ever appearing on plastic packaging on American shelves.

Let me put a finer point on this: the Trump administration appears to have such reflexive loathing of any overture toward linguistic inclusion that they are willing to blow up our own economy, as well as that of our largest trading partner—and with them possibly the whole global economy—

—all to shield their eyes from being forced to behold the accents grave and aigu of the French tongue. 

That's how much they dread the mere language. 

I am reminded of a passage from Wendell Phillips's great lecture on "The Scholar in a Republic":

When I first entered the Roman States, a customhouse official seized all my French books. In vain I held up to him a treatise by Fénelon, and explained that it was by a Catholic archbishop of Cambray. Gruffly he answered, "It makes no difference: it is French." 

He goes on: 

As I surrendered the volume to his remorseless grasp, I could not but honor the nation which had made its revolutionary purpose so definite that despotism feared its very language. I only wished that injustice and despotism everywhere might one day have as good cause to hate and to fear every thing American. 

So too today, it can only make us respect the French language the more to realize that Trump and his idiotic accomplices apparently fear so much the very sight of its letters. 

And we may hope that one day soon our own nation will inspire dread among despots once more—instead of playing the despot ourselves.