roachboy

first off, gingrich is just a washed up old reactionary and anything he says has to be considered in light of that.
second, the meme that he generated has the primary effect of generating the illusion of continued relevance for gingrich himself. it is only secondarily something to be taken as a serious commentary on anything.
third, like most neofascists, gingrich's politics are geared around a kind of obsession with national identity, a category that operates more efficient when posited alongside a real or imagined threat to it. so what i think you mostly have here is an empty statement aimed at sounding out the continued viability of right-wing republican ways of framing their pet issues, most of which also--surprise--turn on an obsession with national identity which is a category that operates most efficiently when posited alongside a real or imagined threat.

the rhetoric is vaguely interesting--this business of the "language of the ghetto"--mostly because it positions gingrich as articulating a particular type of class paranoia, a petit bourgeois class paranoia that construes the poor as some internal "other"....this is of course nothing new, being a stock characteristic of neofascism. gingrich in this case sounds like poujade. it is indicative of the strange ideological world of the rapidly imploding contemporary right, however, which dreams of homogenous self-enclosed and self-enclosing spaces the boundaries of which are outlined across stupid "us vs. them" statements.
typically, gingrich simply references class anxiety, looking to reinforce it and thereby to use it for his own political gain. another classical rightwing tactic. he offers and can offer nothing coherent in the way of account for the sources or meanings of this anxiety--and in fairness even if he did, it would not fit into a neat little cnn soundbyte package and probably would have been left out for "editorial" reasons.

however gringrich being gingrich, i do not think there is anything even remotely like a coherent sociological analysis behind such remarks. were you inclined to be politically sympathetic, you could impute one, as seaver does above.

speaking of the paper you are doing, seaver: i do not think the premise of is without problems because i do not see any way to reduce the complexity of questions of either immigrant or migrant labor communities and their integration or nonintegration into the social formations of which they are parts (regardless of status) to one of language. but this is a response to the barest of outlines: i'd be interested to hear more about it at some point, seaver.

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