Some friends of mine used to play a game which consisted of being asked this question: When you leave a room, what would you most like people to say about you?

Mine was easy: “She’s too thin,” although there was a close second: “She’s a bitch, but talented!.”

An actor friend, noted for his humor and bonhomie and his pleasantly goofy look, hoped to hear something like, “well, he’s got no personality, but he’s gorgeous.”

You get the picture.

The personalty log-line that brought down the house came from that actor’s wife, also an actress, an extremely witty and beautiful earth mother bringing up two children, who wished to hear, “That woman’s a saint.”

Which brings me to Peggy Noonan and her latest apparently unconscious satire of Republican anti-immigration tropes.

I know, I know. Not her again. Why bother?

Trust me, this one is special. Here’s the setup.

It’s July 4th, this year, and Peggy is taking a pleasant stroll along one of Manhattan’s avenues when she comes upon a small brown woman, Latin-American, with some Indian blood, Peggy surmizes, who is passing out flyers, one of the army of what Peggy calls “the giver-outers.” Unlike others more callous, Peggy takes the flyer, despite her disinterest in its subject.

As she walks away, she thinks suddenly of another woman, someone Pegs knows who’s hard time was ended recently when she got a job working in a back room of a store. The woman is happy and grateful for this opportunity; her only complaint, there’s no air conditioning, and it’s terribly hot in that back room. In the comfort of her own Manhattan home, thinking of this woman, Peggy became aware of how she’d come to take air-conditioning for granted; henceforth, she tells us, she has remembered, in honor of her woman acquaintance, to be grateful for her luxuries, although Pegs’ sensitivity doesn’t have sufficient stretch to reach any conclusions about the value of good working conditions, or how they are achieved.

Meanwhile, the little brown woman is still handing out those flyers; Peggy looks back at her:

It’s summer and she’s in heavy jeans and a black sweatshirt with a hood. On top of that, literally, she’s wearing a sandwich board—MENS SUITS NEW YORK. Her hair is long and heavy, her ponytail limp on her shoulders. She’s out here on a day when everybody else, as she well knows—the streets are not crowded—is at a ballgame or the beach.

So, Peggy goes back to…uh…comfort the woman. But she can’t, darn it. Peggy speaks one language, this woman speaks a different one. Eventually, Peg manages to invoke God’s (a trip to Mexico has taught her “Dios”) blessings on the woman and…what can I say…they have a moment.

From this Peggy takes a message, and in the safety and comfort of Bloomingdale’s, she takes a moment to write down, “We must speak the same language so we can hearten each other.”

I told you this one is special.

We need poor people willing do any job for peanuts who can speak English so that the sensitive among us can cheer them on their difficult life path.

Or as Mellisa McEwen brilliantly rephrases it as a shorter Peggy Noonan:

Americans need to speak a common language or my condescending superciliousness might not be as deeply appreciated by brown people as it should be.

At that point, Peggy puts on her policy wonk hat and gets serious about whether or not we should declare that English Is Our Official Language, although being Peggy, she wants to avoid the arid debate of policy wonkery, to get at the heart of the matter.

When you look at papers outlining the facts of the debate, things break down into dryness very quickly. Should “issues of language diversity” be resolved by imposing “linguistic uniformity”? This is like asking if the robots should speak logarithmically or algorithmically. There are few things you can rely on in this turbulent world, but one is the tendency of academics to use language poorly, even when discussing language.

That, of course, is a fake-out, hence the quotation marks with no attribution.

What Peggy is really about is drowning hard right arguments in her own patented brew of dewy treacle — Pat Buchanan’s racist xenophobia slathered in the finest home-made marmalade offered in your local gourmet shop. She doesn’t quite come out for making “English” our official language, but she does warn of the dangers of “devolving” into a two-official language-country, and she makes clear, the language jostling for that second “official” place is Spanish, as spoken by our neighbors to the south.

Since when has anyone ever suggested that Spanish become a second language, officially, or by means of devolution?

Those of us who feel unthreatened by Spanish-speakers, even those who don’t speak English yet, or even by older immigrants, who may never be able to carry on anything but the most basic of conversations in English, aren’t the ones who are worried about the lack of an official American language.

In fact, Pegs leans over backward so far not to seem to be liming hard-right arguments, one isn’t sure, in the end, what the hell she’s advocating. The whole question of English as an official language seems old-fashioned, as she points out. It is our de facto official language.

Because we all know America has an official language, and a national language, and that it is English. In France they speak French, and in China they speak Chinese. In Canada they have two national languages, but that’s one reason Canada often seems silly. They don’t even know what language they dream in.

And the Pegster don’t want none of us to become silly by making like what those Canadians do.

That more than one version of English is spoken here Pegs has to go out of her way not to notice, or consider. And, by the way, there is more than one kind of Chinese spoken in China.

I suppose it’s a plus that Noonan feels constrained by a fear you will think she doesn’t appreciate the immigrant experience.

As for the inner life of America, the language of the family, it would be just as odd to change longtime tradition there, which has always been: Anything goes. You speak what you came over speaking, and you learn the new language. Italian immigrants knew two languages, English and Italian. They enriched the first with the second—this was a great gift to all of us—and wound up with greater opportunities for personal communication to boot. Talk about win-win. And so with every group, from every place.

Well, not quite, else why all this talk of devolving into a two-language country, and why is that fear focused on Spanish?

Yes, I know, brown skins. What’s almost funny, in a mirthless sort of way, Italians were once considered to have skins too brown. But the racism being expressed is more complex than that. It’s part of a persistent strain in American culture and history which simultaneously welcomes the idea of immigration, while often fearing and despising the actual immigrants, and the un-American changes they will bring to some notion of what a true America is all about.

What Noonan insists on being unaware of is that there is nothing new here; the arguments of a Tom Tancredo can be found, almost word for word, in a Harper’s Weekly and other such magazines of the late 19th and early 20th century - dirty immigrants, they come here, they take our jobs, they don’t bother to learn the language.

Nor is our linguistic tradition lacking in diversity; yes, English has been our main language, but the variations within English, plus the other languages that have co-existed with English through-out our history have only been a problem in the minds of some Americans. Take a look at the rich diversity of Native American languages, and the mind-numbing damage to the children who were often forced into mandatory programs to assimilate them.

Multiculturalism isn’t a movement, or a theory, or a political program. It is a fact of American history. We’ve always been a multicultural and multi-lingual society.

Assimilation is also a fact; immigrants who come to live here become Americans, it is a process which is irresistible; it doesn’t require anything of us but to let it happen. It is also a two-way process, and yes, the meaning of being an American is enriched with each new wave of immigrants.

It is no different for the object of all this recent bile and sympathetic concern - immigrants from Mexico and the rest of Latin America. The rates of learning English among Latinos is exactly the same as for other groups; all the children learn it, many of the parents do, and among grandparents, not so much.

As to the issue of many of them being here illegally, when someone like Peggy Noonan extols the virtues of her immigrant Irish grandmother, who waited her turn, as Noonan proclaimed in another recent column, that is the usually bullshit. Her grandmother had to have arrived during that period of our history when there was no wait, when American needed labor, and immigration was almost unrestricted, just as my Russian-Jewish grandmother did.

There is one characteristic that distinguishes Latinos from other immigrant groups; generally speaking, they have managed to produce a first generation born in America that is bilingal; they have learned English and still retain their parents’ language, an enormous achievement. Oh, and while I’m on this subject, bi-lingual education does work and it’s a tragedy that prejudice is forcing school systems to abandon it.

But such is prejudice and racism and xenophobia that all items on a list of desirable cultural traits, like knowing more than one language, become transfigured into a negative. My grandmother spoke Russian, Ukranian, Polish, Yiddish, and ultimately English. My mother was a Russian-speaking 8 year old when she arrived here, her old sister was 12, and neither one of them retained a word of Russian.
And of course I grew up feeling slightly ashamed that my grandmother, a Jewish woman who had gone to university in Russia and and was about to start her medical internship when her husband was killed in a pogram, came to this country, got a Masters and became a pharmacist, spoke English with such a heavy accent.

You know what, Peggy, I think we can do better than that.