When Idiots Are Given Access to Technology

Here at Aunt Slugger HQ, we do still periodically find ourselves amazed by what people are willing to put on the internet. And here I am not referring to videos of animals bathing in time with an intolerably high-pitched version of a Bobby Darin song, because really, that's art. No, what I am referring to are people who do not realize that the magnitude of their ignorance is a.) not recordable by any standard cognitive tests, and b.) so outrageous it's comical.

The story I am referring to is, of course, the Twitter response to a performance of "God Bless America" at the All-Star baseball game. It seems that Marc Anthony, a well-known singer from New York, sang this song at the game. Your Aunt Slugger is actually familiar with Marc Anthony, despite being almost clinically unable to match a song with its artist; I was introduced to Marc Anthony in college, when a classmate in my "International Political Economy" class invited me over for a study group and played this song on repeat. So whenever I hear or read about Marc Anthony, I think about the 1997 Asian financial crisis.

Anyway, it seems that our fellow Americans took to Twitter en force to bitch about "a Mexican singing God Bless America."

Some examples of these Tweets include, but are not limited to, the following:

• "How they going to pick a got (sic) damn Mexican to sing God Bless AMERICA?"
• "Shouldnt (sic) an AMERICAN be signing (sic) God Bless America? #getoutofmycountry #allstargame"
• "Another disgrace (sic) Marc Anthony singing god (sic) bless (sic) America. Is he even an American citizen?"

Well, there you have it, readers. Apparently, our nation's xenophobes have decided to fight the allegedly deleterious influence of non-English speaking immigrants by having what is at best a weak grasp of the English language. They are going to preserve the nation's dominant language by making flagrantly false and racist statements in Tweets so laden with grammatical errors that we are left wondering if a feral animal has walked across their keyboard.

So to my foreign-born readers who sometimes think their English isn't great, or who are embarrassed by their language skills, stop. Because here we have a group of Americans who were born and educated here, and they are barely literate. You are already ahead of them.

And with that, I am going to go listen to some more Marc Anthony and think about Alan Greenspan.