Mr. Codrescu speaks English as fluently as is his written English...probably far more proper than most of us. He does speak, however, with a delightful accent that may have at one time seemed attractive to many women in the U.S.

Accents were once considered exotic or attractive. Times change I suppose. Now it seems they are considered a threat. Very sad...I love recalling my great-uncle's voice with his English accent. He'd lived as a U.S. citizen for 3/4 of his life, but still had that accent when he passed.

Arizona's new immigration law is outrageous to anyone who's had the bad luck of living in a country where fear of the police was a constant source of suppressed rage. A huge weight lifted off my psyche when I came to the U.S. from Communist Romania and was told that the police couldn't stop me just because I still wore my commie trench coat and spoke with an accent.

That was in 1966, and now in Arizona in 2010, the police can target both my trench coat and my accent. The Arizona Department of Education has told schools that teachers with "heavy" or "ungrammatical" accents are no longer allowed to teach English to kids just learning to speak the language.

Oh boy! Did I land back behind the Iron Curtain half a century ago? My last 40 years of teaching would have never happened if the Arizona law had been the law of the land in 1966. Forty years of accented instruction gone by the wayside! Gone also the 40 years when American education, lower and higher, finally recognized the diversity of America.