The Houses of Language in Peace, War, and Love

I want to thank all of you for your willingness to come sit here in Robinson Auditorium, this wonderful lecture hall that celebrates everything that is good about West Point as both military academy and institution of higher education. I thank you for listening to me; but I also thank you for being who you are: the pride and hope of America. Since the mission of West Point is to provide you with a first-rate college education, you are at the top of my chain of command. My thanks, recognition, and appreciation are also due to my own particular "chain of command": the creator and sponsors of the McDermott Chair endowment fund, which is the vehicle by which I have been able to be here this academic year; the Superintendent, GEN. William Lennox; the academic dean, Gen. Daniel Kaufman; COL William Held, Head of the Department of Foreign Languages; and COL Patricia Genung, Deputy Head of DFL. Still in my chain of command, I want to expression my appreciation to Dr. Samuel Saldívar, director of academic instruction in DFL. He is my West Point sponsor who has been a friend and colleague for many years going back to the time when together we worked on the SAT II test development committee. In addition, I want to express my thanks and appreciation for the staff and all my colleagues in DFL, both military and civilian. Lastly, before I launch into the message I will give you in a minute, I'd like to express my deeply loving thanks to my wife, Dr. Shifra Armon, who cannot be here tonight because she has to be where her job requires. She's in Gainesville, Florida, now, where we have a house and she is a graduate research professor in peninsular Spanish literature at the University of Florida (GO GATORS!).

This speech in a time of war calls out for a moment of silence in support of your comrades in arms in Iraq and for America's men and women in the Armed Services around the world. This minute of silence includes prayers of support for friends, for POWs, the dead and wounded, and also for the souls of our enemies. If you're not used to doing something during moments of silence, may I suggest a favorite spiritual discipline of mine that I learned from a Benedictine monk years ago. It involves, first, imaging the person or persons or thing you wish to honor and support during the silence; invoking the Deity in your religious tradition; then connecting to the very heart of the collective silence in this auditorium; and, finally, enwrapping what or whom you are imagining in light, a light that fills and invades your inner sight. Of course, many of you have highly developed spiritual lives, so you already know what to do. What I invite all of you to do now is consciously to map out what you plan to do, and then, when I say: "Let us remember in silence", begin. At the end of a minute, I will say, "Please look at me when you are finished". In that way I am inviting you, not ordering you—this is contrary to the SOP Army way—to each end your meditation naturally and at your own pace. I will try to gauge the time when it is appropriate for me to continue.

So, let us remember in silence.

[One minute]

Please look at me when you are finished.

I am truly honored and awed to address you about "The Houses of Languages". I intend to do something risky and something we hear very little about. Namely, to tell you the real, deep-level reason why you cadets are learning foreign languages and why the faculty and I in DFL are doing our professional best to model foreign languages and cultures and to lead you into a productive life of language learning. I assert bluntly that there is a crucial difference between languages and all other areas of human knowledge. Unlike mathematics, say, where it is important for successful living to know the concepts, to master some quantitative conceptual thinking, to balance a checkbook, and to calculate distances, angles, weights, and measures, the object of learning a foreign language is nothing less than the full integration of a foreign language and its culture into your whole being. Bear with me, please, because I'm going to attempt to tell you why foreign language learning is so essential to living a complete and healthy life. Note, too, that every time I say "foreign language" I mean "language and culture". Mastering a foreign language is like living in a completely new dream house. New style, new rooms, new floor plan, new entrance door, new roof, new everything.

When I accepted the challenge to give this speech in place of Dr. Warren Baker, the president of California Polytechnic State University—who, by the way, cannot be here due to the severe state budget crisis in California—I began by seeking my brother's advice. My brother is Laurence Little, a recently retired colonel in the US Air Force. Since I've never been in the Armed Forces, which is an accident due to history, not to physical disability, I needed a place to start. Larry told me this on a couple of occasions. All of the commanders whom he respected most told him that their values in order of priority were these four: (1) duty to G-d, (2) duty to family, (3) personal honor, and (4) protecting the soldiers under their command. After these four, the fifth value follows naturally: patriotism. He said, "That surprised me. I always had thought that they would say one must sacrifice everything to their military duty. But that leads to loss of personal identity and the strength that goes along with knowing who you are and who you are serving, and the resulting problems of careerism, concern for mission, but not for the men and women who serve under you."

By the way, along with you I've observed that our officers who are being interviewed in Iraq express the very same message. Larry also told me that the four pillars of military life are (1) chain of command, (2) family, (3) mission, and (4) care for your people. Each of these pillars stands co-equal with the others, like the pillars of a house. Although other architectural designs may be possible, it is soundest to build a house on four solid corners. When you, dearly respected young men and women, get past the syndrome of being career-oriented, gung-ho junior officers, and you learn simultaneously that you are a loving and lovable human being, and you learn that those who serve under you are real loving and lovable individuals, only then, will you become the very best of senior officers. This sharing of your self with others is the place, I submit, that houses the ideals of your military profession. This house of self and profession is the subject of my speech. We human beings achieve our fullest humanity when we construct our own home, appreciate how others are constructing their houses, and then enter each other's house with total confidence and understanding. We go back and forth from my house to your house with total ease. We are mature people. This is the essence of internationalism and multicultural diversity at their root. The end product is a self that is totally at home in two or more houses.

What I'm going to do in the rest of this address is connect several seemingly disparate items: love, national defense, the human condition, and foreign languages. You might say I'm going to attempt the impossible; namely, to lay out the Grand Unified Theory of Foreign Language Learning (GUTFLL). It's hubristic to attempt this, but no pain, no glory, right? Then I'm going to end with a Modest Proposal, which, in this case, emphatically does not involve, as Jonathan Swift proposed in 1729, eating Irish children. Wait until the end, and you'll hear what I propose.

I want to tell you a historical story about dignity, values, courage, a time of violence, war, crisis, and languages. This story is about the early stages of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. It involves Francisco Franco, more or less the Saddam Hussein of that time. It also involves Miguel de Unamuno, the foremost intellectual in Spain, who happened to be a professor of Classical and New Testament Greek: It also involves a university auditorium much like this one. But beware of the analogy: it's not—I emphatically repeat: not!—a crude analogy such that I'm like Unamuno; the Spanish Army is like you and the American Army; and Gen. Lennox is like a creepy general named Millán Astray. Here's the story:

In October 1936, Generalísimo Francisco Franco, commander-in-chief of the Nationalist or Fascist forces that rebelled against the democratic government of Spain's Second Republic, established his headquarters in Salamanca, in northern Spain. Salamanca is to Spain what Oxford is to England or Harvard is to the United States. It was October 12^th, the major national holiday in Spain, el Día de la Hispanidad —known in our country as Columbus Day, but Columbus is not celebrated in Spain because he wasn't a Spaniard. A great celebration was planned in the university's principal lecture hall. In Franco's absence, the ceremony was presided over by General Millán Astray. On the dais were Millán Astray, the current president of the university, the mayor of Salamanca, the papal nuncio, the dean of the Cathedral, Franco's Fascist political boss, and Unamuno. Millán Astray was the commanding officer of the Spanish Foreign Legion, which was composed for the most part of Moroccan soldiers, who, in battle, dressed like North African warriors, wielded scimitars, yelled the Arabic war cry, and, generally, slashed their bloody way to terrifying victory. Millán Astray himself was amazing: in Spain's African wars he'd lost an eye, an arm, and a leg. And still, he was the commander of the Spanish Foreign Legion. The audience was filled with Nationalist soldiers, political operatives, priests and officials of the Cathedral of Salamanca, and a few professors. Remember that Unamuno was on the dais. He was 72 years old, in weak health, had a white beard, and was known as Spain's most respected intellectual. He was a former president of the university, had been a professor of Greek there, was a philosopher, poet, novelist, journalist, and was one of the architects of modern Spanish democracy. But a few days before October 12^th, he signed a statement supporting Franco's uprising. So, there he was on the dais with the others. Then Millán Astray stood up and led a military-political harangue. Leading the audience in a chorus of several victory cheers, he shouted, "España: una, grande y libre!" (Spain is One, Great, and Free!). Also, the motto of the Spanish Foreign Legion: "Viva la muerte!" (Long live death!). And last, "Mueran los intelectuales" (Death to intellectuals!). And there sits Spain's greatest intellectual of the twentieth century, sort of the Albert Einstein of Spain, as it were. Eyes turn to Unamuno. He motions for the audience to be quiet. As he slowly stands, silence invades the hall. He says that they are all in a "sacred temple of the intelligentsia" and that, in that place, he, not they, presides. He says he is a multilingual Basque (he spoke eight languages fluently), that he is as Spanish as the monolingual Nationalists like Millán Astray, that he has spent his life teaching Greek and the Spanish language, a language, he adds, that they do not speak. Because, in that place, the motto is not: "Viva la muerte", but, he says, " Viva la vida!" With that final valedictory—¡Viva la vida!— the great professor was immediately arrested right there on the stage; he was stripped of his emeritus positions; officially declared persona non grata; and taken to his home where he died three months later while under house arrest.

I trust that no one here feels even a hint of nervousness about this story that happened in Spain in 1936. As I said, I am not Unamuno, you are not the Spanish Foreign Legion, and, thank G-d, there is no one anywhere in the American Army remotely like the monstrous personage of Millán Astray. However, there are lessons to be learned here. First, this hall and this magnificent institution of West Point do represent a temple of the intelligence. Unamuno did embody multilingualism and ethnic diversity in the face of monolithic monolingualism and cultural centralism, and he opposed all forms of dictatorial violence. And, finally, like Unamuno, you and I celebrate and defend to our last breath the intertwined victories of freedom of expression, freedom of conscience, liberty over all kinds of tyrannies, and, as Unamuno and other religious and cultural heroes have proclaimed throughout the ages, the victory of life over death.

I invoke Unamuno and his message in order, very humbly and observing the obvious distance between me and him, to give some authority to my message about foreign languages, war, peace, and who we are in this auditorium and on this beautiful Blue Planet. So what are my credentials? Aside from the beard, I mean. Which reminds me of what Jonathan Swift said about people like Unamuno and me: "Old men and comets have been reverenced for the same reason: their long beards and pretenses to foretell events". My most significant credential, most assuredly, is my current one, that of the McDermott Endowed Chair of Humanities and Public Affairs. I suppose that I should add that my book on the fifth volume of Spain's chivalric romance epic, Amadís de Gaula, amounts to a significant contribution to understanding European attitudes about the first war that caused so many of the problems in Turkey and the Balkans. I'm referring to the Turkish conquest of Constantinople (modern day Istanbul) in 1453. Otherwise, I have the usual credentials you'd find in a person who has been a professor of Spanish, French, and humanities for 32 years at six universities in the US and abroad. I've created and directed several study abroad programs. I've lived overseas for about seven total years of my adult life. I'm as civilian as anyone can be. But I do have an Army pedigree: both my parents were officers in the US Army Air Force during and after World War II. What you're all waiting to hear is my military service credentials. Well, I don't have any, at least not directly. To be blunt, I've never served in the Armed Forces. However, let me explain something very delicately and carefully. By pursuing a career in foreign language education I have always felt I have been doing American "defense" work. How is this possible? Isn't this another way of saying that I'm simply a draft dodger? While I fully respect suspicion about my motives, I must say that my own answer to this question is NO! Here's my story, and this will lead directly to my thoughts about foreign languages, national defense, love, and world peace. When I was a senior in high school I was well on my way to being admitted to the Naval Academy, but, for reasons having to do with the world situation in the 60's, with my rebellious 60's generation attitudes, and a deep intuition based on prayer, I withdrew my nomination. After my bachelor's degree, I was awarded an NDEA Title VI graduate fellowship. NDEA stands for National Defense Education Act. As a result of Sputnik in 1957 and the Soviet Union's challenge to America in the 60's, the US Congress identified mathematics, science, and foreign languages as areas the United States urgently needed to strengthen in the name, truly, of national defense. Therefore, I got a Ph.D. in romance languages thanks to the NDEA. At the end of the 60's and the beginning of the 70's, i.e., during the Vietnam War, I was doing national defense work as a romance languages graduate student while others were drafted or enlisted (including my brother) in our Armed Forces. And for the rest of my life—and never more so than during the two years I've spent at West Point—I have dedicated my career to national defense through foreign language education. The NDEA may have ended in the late 70's, but what that act of Congress did was create a generation of professors who are dedicated to national defense through higher education. Coming to West Point, for me, is one way in which I have tried to repay my country for supporting for me 35 years ago.

To put my message in a phrase: a deep knowledge of both the arts of war and the humanistic art of foreign languages are essential for our Army to win the current and all future wars. With your magnificent military training, you will win the battles and the war, but only by hearing my message—Unamuno's message, the message of everyone who teaching languages and international cultures— will America "win" the peace. So, listen up.

I identify language as one of the two great defining characteristics of being human. (You have probably already divined what the other characteristic is, in my view.) Let's proceed inductively. Thirty years ago, the linguist Mario Pei, in his classic book Story of Language, pointed out that 80% of humanity code switches more than once daily. In the US, that percentage is much lower, about 30%, which is a lot higher than most of you would have guessed. Code switching means changing from one language to another, or, within the same language, from one dialect to another. So, how many people are there on the planet right now? Well over six billion and rising by the second, right? This means that 5.0 billion people code switch as a regular part of their lives. Also, keep in mind that language is an almost totally symbolic system; you could almost say a spiritual system, though that might be stretching the point somewhat. Another fact about humanity, and this one is incredible to my mind: over half of all the people who have ever lived on the planet Earth are alive at this very moment. Do some quick math with me: more than 12 billion people have lived over the past 6007 years or the last 3 million years, depending on your belief either in creationism or biology. Therefore, 10 billion people did or do code switch as part and parcel of their lives and identity and coping mechanisms. I posit, therefore, that, due to nature or nurture or design or accident or biology or Providence, bilingualism or multilingualism is a defining characteristic of being human.

What does it mean to code switch competently? Of course, there are as many degrees of bilingualism as there are people who code switch. But a rough outline looks like this: Every language is a linguistic and cultural code. I define language thus: Language is a complex coded grammar composed of arbitrary symbols and kernel rules that develops in individuals and speech communities allowing people to understand the past, cope with the present and create the future.

I define culture thus: Culture is a complex coded grammar composed of language, values, beliefs, stories or myths, material artifacts, and kernel rules that develops in individuals and speech communities allowing people to understand the past, cope with the present and create the future. Code switching means going out of one language-culture house and into another one.

Here are visual metaphors for my principal language houses. [.ppts] What are yours?

Language and culture, then, are complex, dynamic, creative, and intimately personal. Each of the two intertwined coded system lays neatly over the other forming a living palimpsest, an organic whole. Every human being derives their identity through the pre-set human mechanisms of the language-culture continuum. Each person's language-culture module is a safe house for personal identity, self-protection, and safety within the local speech community. What happens, then, when the all-too-human condition of code switching occurs by choice or by necessity? Think about this: are you, here at West Point, in your life, code-switching by choice or necessity? Or, in your career and lifetime, will you be code switching by choice or necessity? Since it's natural for us humans to protect our identities from outside aggression and invasion as much as possible; and since our language and culture are psychological and emotional castles with high walls and motes around them and only tiny drawbridges to the outside, it's obvious that code switching is as threatening as an attack by barbarian hordes on our safe inner castles. How did you feel when you had to give your first oral report in a foreign language class in a foreign language? How did you feel when you traveled abroad for the first time and had to speak in a foreign language? If you belong to an American ethnic minority, how do you feel when you have to switch from Spanish at home to English at McDonalds or from Black English at home to standard American English in your history classes? I know how I felt when as a child I first ventured out speaking Spanish with my Mexican friends. I know how frightened and threatened I was when I first arrived in Spain and forced myself to use my Mexican Spanish at a downtown restaurant in Madrid. I was so petrified I realized that, if I didn't say something—anything—I might starve to death! So, I said, "una manzana, por favor", pronouncing the 'z' in 'manzana' in perfect Mexican not Castillian Spanish. For my effort, I was sweating, my pulse was racing, I felt faint, and in return I got a cold, disdainful stare and, in a moment, a lone apple shoved at me in the inimitable style of Spanish camareros (meseros, ¿no?). I had an apple for dinner. And un vaso de agua. Tap water! In other words, code switching is dangerous to our mental, physical, and social health; it's difficult; it's threatening; it's frightening. And above all, it represents an assault on our self-identity. What happened to you in your first threatening inter-language, inter-cultural exchange? For me, the walls of my cultural castle were smashed to pieces: the waiter and all the people sitting around me in Madrid knew I was—horror of horrors—a foreigner! Different. Possibly or even probably threatening. I couldn't hide my identity. I was exposed. Naked psychologically and culturally.

OK. Go back to the human condition: 5.0 billion people do this to one degree or another every day. Why bother? Why go through such torture? The answer is, because it's simply and radically human. Herein is where I connect our inter-language human relationships with the phenomenon of love. Like languages, love is predicated on, first, identity, then pain, and hopefully, at the end of a long journey, spiritual growth. I maintain unequivocally that love and foreign languages are linked in the human condition, perhaps even in the soul. Let's go deeper into the houses of language, deeper into the rooms for pain and for growth.

If confronting a foreign language in context—the foreign people, the foreign smells, foods, customs, body contact, and all the rest, even in the simplest situations like me ordering an apple for dinner in Madrid—causes pain, then what happens when we deliberately go about the business of internalizing a second language within our own mouth, body, mind, even soul? Think about truly and sincerely praying in a foreign language! Go ahead, think about it; then jump to the conclusion. I'm talking about two personalities in one person, right? What's that known as? Schizophrenia, right? Yes, being bilingual and bicultural is a kind of schizophrenia. So, some of you are saying right now: this bearded guy is crazy, I'm out of here?

Let me tell you another story, a true story. Years ago, when I was a very young graduate research professor of Spanish and comparative literature at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, I was made the department's assistant chair. It happens that I was the only professor in that department whose native language was English. All other colleagues were native Spanish speakers. They were from Spain, Puerto Rico, Cuba, México, Italy, Chile, Argentina, Portugal, and one was from Hungary. For several years I lived, worked, and partied entirely in Spanish because that was our common language. For several years on Long Island I never spoke a word of English with my colleagues. One night we were having a party at the home of one of the professors. We were having a totally Hispanic party. Latino music, Latino food, Latino gestures and attitudes. We were all Spanish speakers after all. And I was the department's assistant chair. About midnight the host's wife came home. She entered the living room. It turns out that the host and his wife were a bicultural couple, but she spoke no Spanish. Well, here's a Latino party roaring along, and in walks a monolingual English speaker, and we're in her house. What to do? People look at me for a decision. I think fast. Conclusion: the party has to shift to English. So, virtually mid-sentence, I shift from Spanish to English. But, remember that shifting from one language to another necessarily involves shifting the cultures that go with the languages. Jokingly, I welcome her home to her own home. I try to make her feel comfortable in the middle of a Latino party. So, I speak English for about a minute or two. Everyone else is silent. The wife leaves the room to change into comfortable clothes. Then a colleague from Chile—a long-time friend—changes the language back to Spanish. He's visibly shaken. He says: "Guillermo, no sabía que hablabas inglés. Nunca te he oído hablar inglés." I'm surprised, but I realize that it's true. I simply never noticed that I had never spoken English with him. For over two years. Then he throws this grenade right into my bunker, "Cuando hablas inglés tienes una personalidad muy desagradable. ¡Qué horror!" There it was, an intercultural conflict of a very painful kind. But what had happened? Unconsciously, when I shifted from Spanish to English I shifted my entire person from one complex code to the other one: tone, sounds, rhythm, body gestures, the whole kit and caboodle. And my unwary and unwarned friend was shocked. I suppose it was then that I discovered that I had fully internalized two personalities into my being. Yes, in this sense, I have become, I am culturally, schizophrenic. As are all fully bilingual, bicultural people. So, my friends, right now I'm telling you the hard truth about the goal of all foreign language learning. The path is long and hard, but the goal, for the sake of peace among the peoples of the Earth, is absolutely necessary. Besides, it's absolutely synonymous with being fully human.

To clarify what I'm saying, remember what I've just said, but now let's shift the terms of analysis to love. Yes, love. In The Road Less Traveled, M. Scott Peck's famous book on love and grace, Peck defines love this way: "The will to extend one's self for the purpose of nurturing one's own or another's spiritual growth." Love is acts of love, not loving, romantic words or even feelings, just as foreign languages are not words or superficial gestures or tourist trips. Can you imagine how grotesque it would be to view love as a tourist trip around someone else's heart! According to Peck, the act of extending our self beyond ourselves is work, it takes courage, and it is painful. Similarly, becoming bilingual is hard work, it takes a lifetime commitment of courage, and it's painful. So, listen to what Peck says about love. Remember, he's talking about love:

True listening [to] the other [person] is always a manifestation of love. An essential part of listening is the discipline [of] giving up or setting aside one's prejudices, frames of reference and desires so as to experience as far as possible the speaker's world from the inside, stepping inside his or her shoes. The unification of speaker and listener is actually an extension and enlargement of ourselves, and new knowledge is always gained from this. (127)

Echoing what I said earlier, but speaking about love, Peck adds, "A full life will be full of pain" (133). Just as fully learning a foreign language is risky business, so is love. Now let's integrate these ideas about love with our concept of foreign languages.

What I'm maintaining is most dramatic: you can't be a fully integrated person without connecting to another person or persons in deep, real, committed love. But in real life this functions only on the level of two people or at most a small group, like a family or a community. On the level of our life on this planet, I maintain that you cannot be, no one can be, a fully developed person without going outside your monocultural self and then integrating an already different, that is, foreign, self within your newly complex, but entirely enlarged self. Your original, monolinguistic self first gets threatened, then it takes a risk to expand, then it goes through the courageous process of integrating a different self into your own self so that the original self becomes a dynamic duality. Once this happens in your self, then you can interact with others in a deep, rich, productive, self-loving and other-directed way.

The often-quoted G.K. Chesterton long ago said this: "The whole object of travel is not to set foot on foreign land. It is at last to set foot on one's own country as a foreign land." Or take what St. Augustine, Bishop of Hippo, said in the fifth century: "The world is a book, and those who do not travel read only a page." Chesterton, the Brit that he was (bless him), spoke several languages fluently. So did St. Augustine. So can you. Five billion people do. Monolingualism and monoculturalism are only one page of a book. That page may be well written, it may contain useful information, it may contain hints of an interesting plot, it may refer to several characters, but it is emphatically not the whole book.

Now, what does this have to do with you as you embark on your military careers? Especially in a time of war. You need the whole book. You need to inhabit more than one house. You need to do this for the sake of your own personal development. Now that you've already been exposed to languages at West Point, there is no turning back. Your project is bigger, more exciting, more dangerous than many other people's. Especially, you have accepted the responsibility to experience the whole world with the mission of keeping the peace. And this means a commitment to love, and a parallel commitment to expand your self to the maximum. To love, you need a partner. To expand your self you need to insert what is totally foreign into your very mind, heart, and soul. A foreign language is a door to humanity, first your own, then everyone's.

Here's the last story I'm going to tell you tonight. I tell you this one because it puts very concrete flesh on the theoretical and ideal skeleton I've been anatomizing for you. It's also painful to tell.

During the academic year of 1988-1989 I was the Resident Director of the overseas studies programs in Spain for The California State University. The CSU changes Resident Directors every year. In August 1988, I arrived to take over my duties from the previous Resident Director at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. The immediate past Resident Director was selected because he could speak some Spanish, but mostly because he was a nice person and he was known to be a good administrator. He was there to correct the errors committed by a string of previous Resident Directors, who were all well intentioned but quite inefficient. Knowing this, I set about doing my work. I naturally accessed my Spanish-language and Spanish-culture modes. I got to know the Resident Directors of other American university programs in Spain. They were either native Spaniards or long-time resident spouses of native Spaniards. I enjoyed working with them, and we got along really well. I gained their trust and confidence as a natural part of being a good co-worker and a good American citizen abroad. After a month or so I began hearing comments about my predecessor. Since I had their confidence and they had mine, they shared their honest opinions about him. This is a really really rare experience. Foreigners simply don't do this. It turned out that he was so incompetent in Spanish and in Spain's culture that they took to ridiculing him behind his back. Please understand that he's a really nice person, and he meant well. Meantime, in California, he was honored as a success because he carried out the program's business. What happened in Spain, however, was the opposite. In other words, in a foreign study program, he did more harm that good. He was the unfortunate cause of CSU becoming a laughingstock at the University of Madrid. And our students suffered. Ultimately, America suffered.

It turns out that I'm an extremely competitive person. And I hate it when America is laughed at. I hate it when we Americans think we're successful overseas just because foreigners smile at us, and all the while we are losing our place, losing respect, doing an imperfect job on behalf of whatever enterprise we're representing, be it universities, government, businesses, or the military.

I've told several stories tonight. They are all intended to represent highly generalizable phenomena. Remember my definition of culture? Culture is a created human phenomenon that enables us to interpret the past, cope with the present, and create the future. I've told stories about the past and I've talked about the present. I've suggested a way for you personally to create your future, our country's future, and even the world's future. Now I would like to end by proposing that you do something real to create a better future for all of humanity, and most especially for America. Here is my "Modest Proposal".

The US should create a national peace academy. It should be modeled entirely on West Point! Let's call it the United States Military Peace Academy (USMPA). It would have 4,000 cadets. It would be a military academy like West Point with the same honor code, same discipline, same funding, parallel academic programs, and so on. Please note: I'm proposing a new military academy, not a civilian university. This point is absolutely crucial. It would have the same NCAA and intramural athletic programs, the same physical training regimen, and, above all the same mission; that is, the defense of America. It would have the same oaths of office; the same length of commitment afterwards. It would have the same military ranks as the Army's. The difference would be that where USMA focuses on professional training for the Army, the USMPA would train for what's known as the integrated services, in the largest sense of that term. The United States Military Peace Academy would aim at all of the institutions in American governments whose goal is the maintenance of peace, prosperity, and security. Therefore, the USMPA would lead to military careers in any of the three services, and also the CIA, the State Department, state and local governments and many intelligence and law enforcement agencies. Life at the USMPA would be military, but instead of heavy combat training, cadets would be educated in the rigors of intense negotiation, the hard art of diplomacy, and every dimension of multiculturalism as it applies to America's role throughout the world. If Beast Camp is painful, Peace Camp will be equally painful. All USMPA cadets would be required to have four years of one or more foreign languages. They would be required to study overseas for one semester or more.

What would the crest look like? Surely, it would be a version of the world, much like the DFL crest. A view of the planet could be placed over a background of the word "peace" in a number of languages. And certainly, the crest must have an image of both Pallas Athena and Eirene. According to Bugle Notes, the Greek sword on the USMA crest symbolizes the military profession while Athena symbolizes wisdom and learning. According to Greek mythology Eirene is the daughter of Zeus and Themis. Eirene represents peace. She is usually represented with an olive branch in her right hand, and in her left hand she holds a cornucopia and a child, who represents Pluto the god of abundance. In Latin, the word for peace or Eirene is Pax. I'm talking about a new millennium kind of Pax Americana!

I hope you're at least partially convinced that there does exist an intimate linkage between these three things: (1) acts of love; (2) the military arts of war; and (3) the need to house at least one other near-native level foreign language within your own fully mature mind, body, and soul. Just as I urge you to actively make this linkage, so, too, I believe America must do the same. Each one of us is a microcosm of our nation. This fact is more obviously true here at West Point than at any other place I know of. Just as each of us needs to embed a foreign persona into our native person, so, too, does the United States need to create an institutional link between, on the one hand, the American military—which, in my view, is the most unassailably competent institution on Earth—and all of our public policy institutions, on the other hand. Without such linkage, we will win all the wars you are ordered to fight, but we will never establish Peace on Earth. So, I close, earnestly and humbly, by asking you this one last question: Is there a finer goal for all Americans than establishing Peace on Earth?