This is not an area where we are strong, as a nation: A recent poll showed that 82 percent of the Americans surveyed speak no foreign language at all. Unfortunately, the same poll showed that 41 percent also cannot speak English, 53 percent cannot name the state they live in, and 62 percent believe that the Declaration of Independence is “a kind of fish.” So we can see that we have a tough educational row to hoe here, in the sense that Americans, not to put too fine a point on it, have the IQs of bait. I mean, let’s face it, this is obviously why the Japanese are capable of building sophisticated videocassette recorders, whereas we view it as a major achievement if we can hook them up correctly to our TV sets. This is nothing to be ashamed of, Americans! Say it out loud! “We’re pretty stupid!” See? Doesn’t that feel good? Let’s stop blaming the educational system for the fact that our children score lower on standardized tests than any other vertebrate life form on the planet! Let’s stop all this anguished whiny self-critical fretting over the recently discovered fact that the guiding hand on the tiller of the ship of state belongs to Mister Magoo! Remember: We still have nuclear weapons. Ha ha!

Getting back to the central point, we should all learn to speak a foreign language. Fortunately, this is easy.

HOW TO SPEAK A FOREIGN LANGUAGE:

The key is to understand that foreigners communicate by means of “idiomatic expressions,” the main ones being:

GERMAN: “Ach du lieber!” (“Darn it!”) SPANISH: “Caramba!” (“Darn it!”) FRENCH: “Zut alors!” (“Look! A lors!”)

Also you should bear in mind that foreign persons for some reason believe that everyday household objects and vegetables are “masculine” or “feminine.” For example, French persons believe that potatoes are feminine, even though they (potatoes) do not have sexual organs, that I have noticed. Dogs, on the other hand, are masculine, even if they are not. (This does not mean, by the way, that a dog can have sex with a potato, although it will probably try.)

PRONUNCIATION HINT: In most foreign languages, the letter “r” is pronounced incorrectly. Also, if you are speaking German, at certain points during each sentence you should give the impression you’re about to expel a major gob.

OK? Practice these techniques in front of a mirror until you’re comfortable with them, then go to a country that is frequented by foreigners and see if you can’t increase their international understanding, the way jimmy Carter did during his 1977 presidential visit to Poland, when he told a large welcoming crowd, through an official State Department translator, that he was “pleased to be grasping your secret parts.”

When You Grotto Go

The travel rule I wish to stress here is: Never trust anything you read in a travel article. Travel articles appear in publications that sell large expensive advertisements to tourism-related industries, and these industries do not wish to see articles with headlines like:

URUGUAY: DON’T BOTHER

So no matter what kind of leech-infested, plumbing-free destination travel writers are writing about, they always stress the positive. If a travel article describes the native denizens of a particular country as reserved, this means that when you ask them for directions, they spit on your rental car. Another word you want to especially watch out for is “enchanting.” A few years back, my wife and I visited The Blue Grotto, a Famous Tourist Attraction on the island of Capri off the coast of Italy that is always described in travel articles as “enchanting,” and I am not exaggerating when I say that this is one Travel Adventure that will forever remain a large stone lodged in the kidney of my memory.

We never asked to see The Blue Grotto. We had entered Italy in the firm grip of one tour, which handed us over to another in such a way that there was never any clear chance to escape, and the next thing we knew, they were loading us into this smallish boat and telling us we were going to see The Blue Grotto. They told us it was Very Beautiful. “But what is it?” we said. “It is Very Beautiful,” they said.

So our boat got into this long line of boats, each containing roughly 25 captured tourists sitting in the hot sun, bobbing up and down and up and down and up and down and up and down, and soon we were all thinking how truly wonderful it would be to go sit in a nice, quiet, shady sidewalk cafe somewhere and throw up. We were out there in the sun for two hours, during which time—I cannot emphasize this point too strongly—we continued to bob up as well as down. We agreed that this had damn well better be one tremendous grotto they were taking us to.

When we got close to it, all we could see was this hole in the rock at the bottom of a cliff, and it became clear that they intended to put us into even smaller boats, boats that would bob violently on dry land, and take us into this hole. So at this point an elderly woman on our tour told the tour leader that maybe she and her husband better not go along, as her husband, a very nice man named Frank, was a stroke victim who had some trouble getting around, but the tour leader said, in a word, no. He said the way the system was set up, you had to see The Blue Grotto. He said there was no other way out. He said it was Very Beautiful.

At this point I am going to interject a seemingly irrelevant fact, which you will see the significance of later on: Also on the boat with us were three recently divorced women from California who had been drinking wine.

So finally our boat was next to the hole, and they had us climb down, four at a time, into the tiny boats, which were rowed by surly men with low centers of gravity who smelled like the Budweiser Clydesdales. The rowers were in a great impatient hurry to load us into the boats, such that if my wife and I had not been right there to grab Frank, the stroke victim, by his shirt, he would have been—this is not an exaggeration—pitched right directly into what travel writers traditionally refer to as the Sparkling Blue Mediterranean Waters. So we scrambled in after him, and so did his wife, and we all went bobbing off, away from the main boat, toward The Hole.

I have since read, in travel articles, that because of the way the sunlight bounces off the bottom, or something, The Blue Grotto is a Natural Wonder Transfused with a Blue Light of Almost Unearthly Beauty. It looked to us more like a dank cave transfused with gloom and rower-perspiration fumes and the sound of the official Blue Grotto Rower’s Spiel bouncing off the walls. The spiel has been handed down through the generations of rowers from father to son, neither of whom spoke English. The part I remember is: “You pudda you handa inna da wadda, you handa looka blue.” We didn’t want to put our hands in the water, but we were about to do it anyway, just so we could get out. This was when our boat got hit by the wave that ensued when one of the recently divorced California women decided that it might be fun, after being out in that hot sun, to leap out of her boat and go swimming in the famous Blue Grotto.

Well. You cannot imagine the stir of excitement this caused. This was clearly a situation that had not been covered in Blue Grotto Rowers Training School. Some of the rowers attempted to render assistance to the woman’s boat, which was sort of tipping over; some of them were trying to get the woman out of the water, which she was against (“Stop it!” she said. “You’re hitting me with your goddam oar.”); and some of them continued to announce, in case anybody was listening, that if you pudda you handa inna the wadda, you handa looka blue. I think I speak for all the passengers on my boat when I say I felt exactly the way Dorothy did when she realized that all she had ever really wanted was to go back to Kansas.