Coke chokes

A lot of people watching the Super Bowl last night were shocked and outraged by the Coca-Cola commercial that featured “America the Beautiful” being sung in several different languages, instead of entirely in English.

Col. Allen West, a former Congressman and an exemplary American, found the commercial disturbing, as did I.

He Facebooked comments, including this quote from Teddy Roosevelt:

Every immigrant who comes here should be required within five years to learn English or leave the country.

In the first place we should insist that if the immigrant who comes here in good faith becomes an American and assimilates himself to us, he shall be treated on an exact equality with everyone else, for it is an outrage to discriminate against any such man because of creed, or birthplace, or origin. But this is predicated upon the man’s becoming in very fact an American, and nothing but an American. If he tries to keep segregated with men of his own origin and separated from the rest of America, then he isn’t doing his part as an American.

There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn’t an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile.

We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, and American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boarding house; and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.

The commercial would have been much more powerful and considerably less incendiary if the song had been sung entirely in English, but by people of various regional and ethnic accents, eschewing multiculturalism for American unity with a common language.

As one Facebook member opined, Coca-Cola’s allegiance is to the U.N. and not the U.S.