Nov. 26, 2006
Much ink has been spilled about the American bigotry exposed in British comedian Sacha Baron Cohen’s film Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan. I, for one, think it unfair to conclude from this film—many a blogger and pundit has done recently—that America is a nation “as backward as the fictionalized Kazakhstan from which Borat hails”, as one very good friend of mine here at Princeton's Nassau Weekly put it in a recent article of his.
My learned colleague wrote, “Sure, Baron Cohen and his cohorts selected the best clips from the endless footage they recorded, but the fact that they managed to cull such responses at all is off-putting at the least.” Surely, however, it takes more than one anecdotal “hateful old redneck” or three loutish fratboys to prove that a society as massive and complex as America is as hateful as he. My friend has a much stronger point about comfort levels and the light they may shed on cultural mores in situations like these. But I think this is canceled out by Borat’s potential backstory. We have no idea how many rodeos Baron Cohen had to visit in order to turn up a homophobe like Mr. Rowe—and we probably never will, since Cohen rarely conducts any interviews as himself, preferring to remain constantly in character whenever in public. (Even his recent exclusive Rolling Stone interview shed no light on this.)
Borat should be appraised more critically than the talking heads have done. “Slightly less appalling…is the moment when Borat is told, without hesitation, that a 9MM or a .45 would be the best defense against Jews,” my colleague writes. Never mind, of course, that the gun shop owner ultimately smells something fishy about this ignorant Kazakh and refuses to sell him a weapon. The next offense in this parade of horribles: “Don’t ignore the fact that the rodeo crowd applauds when Borat professes support for America’s ‘War of Terror’.” Dig a little deeper, I say. A crowd of rodeo fans are not going to be listening closely enough to distinguish the phrase “War on Terror” from “War of Terror”, especially coming from a completely unexpected interloper. This rings especially true considering Borat’s heavily affected accent. Some fans may well have noted the error but forgiven it as a slip of the tongue by a man who clearly can’t speak English well and continued cheering out of sheer charity. My Nass colleague himself admits that “a novice like Borat might make such a prepositional mistake.” Mightn’t the rodeo fans have reached that same conclusion and acted accordingly?
Remember that part of Sacha Baron Cohen’s shtick is to deliberately lead his subjects to believe that his character is not only primitive but also not very bright. Interviewees usually humor this bumptious Kazakh and play along perfunctorily, whether out of political correctness, condescension or sheer hospitality. That they cheered Borat’s vow to slaughter “every man, woman and child in Iraq”, for example, doesn’t necessarily mean that they took his words literally and actually endorse genocide. At least as likely is that they were just playing along, thinking the poor mook was merely mangling the King’s English. I might well have done the same—and I’m Canadian.
Think of that antique furniture store in Texas. I was as disgusted at the sight of the ubiquitous Confederate paraphernalia as anyone else. But why blithely ignore the elderly owners’ patience and even temper when Borat completely trashes their most valuable inventory—and offers them pubic hair as compensation?
Such “unthinking obsequiousness”—as my Nassau Weekly counterpart rightly decries this tendency—is often motivated by political correctness, as well as the instinct to give a tragically ignorant foreigner the benefit of any situational doubt. This is hardly a fair canvas for the brush of virulent bigotry with which my compadre tars his countrymen. The intentions behind this reflex are honorable, even if they may pave the road to Hell. The salient error is in attributing this slavish politesse to naked prejudice rather than to a cheesy postmodern cultural “sensitivity” and political correctness. (This error is shared by the legions of liberal pundits eager to read in Borat a searing critique of the conservative red-state American culture they constantly bemoan—a delicious irony, given that this sensitivity, and the cultural relativism it engenders, is largely a product of modern American liberalism.)
There is no better proof of this than the dinner party in Alabama. Put yourselves in the shoes of stodgy Southern blue-bloods welcoming a tourist to dinner to teach him American etiquette. Imagine being rewarded with a slur on one of the female guests’ looks, an insult to another guest’s wits, and a display of pictures of Borat with his buck-naked “son”—with close-up shots of the boy’s genitalia. Would you have mollified the other guests by pointing out the “huge differences” between Borat’s culture and your own, and insisting that he could be taught how to conduct himself in polite American society? How would you have reacted to Borat’s return to the dinner table with a big ol’ turd in a plastic bag? Would you have taken him back to the loo to give him a crash course on how to use a toilet and wipe himself, as one of those genteel steel magnolias did? My own Caribbean-Canadian upbringing has left me scrupulously deferential to my elders and guests; yet I doubt I would have been that polite. Anyone else? A show of hands, perhaps?
This is the lesson Borat teaches Americans about themselves: that, far from being hopelessly bigoted, they are an at times idiotically courteous and hospitable people.
“Watch how the camera focuses on nodding children when a preacher calls America ‘a Christian nation’,” my Nass friend writes. He seems to reflexively take this as a sign of religious prejudice, which itself strikes me as rash at best and prejudicial at worst. And to implicitly smear all who believe America to be a Christian nation as Bible-thumping bigots is less than fair in a country whose currency bears the words “In God We Trust” and two of whose greatest social justice movements—for the abolition of slavery and for civil rights—were heavily influenced and driven by Christian altruism and idealism. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not called “Reverend” for nothing. And let’s not forget the Battle Hymn of the Republic, arguably America's greatest patriotic anthem—written by a Christian abolitionist during the Civil War. If ridding America of the scourge of human bondage is what Julia Ward Howe meant by “the coming of the Lord”, I don’t know you all, but mine eyes have seen the glory.
I come from a family of mostly evangelical Christians. Their churches are attended by people of all backgrounds, their services characterized by the very same talking in tongues, “flailing about”, and general religious rapture that my friend so tellingly slips into quotation marks. I can name countless anecdotes showing that such faithful folk are far from the execrable haters so many left-wing pundits suspect they are—enough to outdo Sacha Baron Cohen himself. In the South, mind you, it may be a different story…maybe. But am I going to assume that, based on Borat’s Cultural Learnings of America? I could dig up better primary sources for this thesis. Fear not your God-fearing countrymen, liberal brethren: they are not all out to get you.
My learned colleague wrote, “Sure, Baron Cohen and his cohorts selected the best clips from the endless footage they recorded, but the fact that they managed to cull such responses at all is off-putting at the least.” Surely, however, it takes more than one anecdotal “hateful old redneck” or three loutish fratboys to prove that a society as massive and complex as America is as hateful as he. My friend has a much stronger point about comfort levels and the light they may shed on cultural mores in situations like these. But I think this is canceled out by Borat’s potential backstory. We have no idea how many rodeos Baron Cohen had to visit in order to turn up a homophobe like Mr. Rowe—and we probably never will, since Cohen rarely conducts any interviews as himself, preferring to remain constantly in character whenever in public. (Even his recent exclusive Rolling Stone interview shed no light on this.)
Borat should be appraised more critically than the talking heads have done. “Slightly less appalling…is the moment when Borat is told, without hesitation, that a 9MM or a .45 would be the best defense against Jews,” my colleague writes. Never mind, of course, that the gun shop owner ultimately smells something fishy about this ignorant Kazakh and refuses to sell him a weapon. The next offense in this parade of horribles: “Don’t ignore the fact that the rodeo crowd applauds when Borat professes support for America’s ‘War of Terror’.” Dig a little deeper, I say. A crowd of rodeo fans are not going to be listening closely enough to distinguish the phrase “War on Terror” from “War of Terror”, especially coming from a completely unexpected interloper. This rings especially true considering Borat’s heavily affected accent. Some fans may well have noted the error but forgiven it as a slip of the tongue by a man who clearly can’t speak English well and continued cheering out of sheer charity. My Nass colleague himself admits that “a novice like Borat might make such a prepositional mistake.” Mightn’t the rodeo fans have reached that same conclusion and acted accordingly?
Remember that part of Sacha Baron Cohen’s shtick is to deliberately lead his subjects to believe that his character is not only primitive but also not very bright. Interviewees usually humor this bumptious Kazakh and play along perfunctorily, whether out of political correctness, condescension or sheer hospitality. That they cheered Borat’s vow to slaughter “every man, woman and child in Iraq”, for example, doesn’t necessarily mean that they took his words literally and actually endorse genocide. At least as likely is that they were just playing along, thinking the poor mook was merely mangling the King’s English. I might well have done the same—and I’m Canadian.
Think of that antique furniture store in Texas. I was as disgusted at the sight of the ubiquitous Confederate paraphernalia as anyone else. But why blithely ignore the elderly owners’ patience and even temper when Borat completely trashes their most valuable inventory—and offers them pubic hair as compensation?
Such “unthinking obsequiousness”—as my Nassau Weekly counterpart rightly decries this tendency—is often motivated by political correctness, as well as the instinct to give a tragically ignorant foreigner the benefit of any situational doubt. This is hardly a fair canvas for the brush of virulent bigotry with which my compadre tars his countrymen. The intentions behind this reflex are honorable, even if they may pave the road to Hell. The salient error is in attributing this slavish politesse to naked prejudice rather than to a cheesy postmodern cultural “sensitivity” and political correctness. (This error is shared by the legions of liberal pundits eager to read in Borat a searing critique of the conservative red-state American culture they constantly bemoan—a delicious irony, given that this sensitivity, and the cultural relativism it engenders, is largely a product of modern American liberalism.)
There is no better proof of this than the dinner party in Alabama. Put yourselves in the shoes of stodgy Southern blue-bloods welcoming a tourist to dinner to teach him American etiquette. Imagine being rewarded with a slur on one of the female guests’ looks, an insult to another guest’s wits, and a display of pictures of Borat with his buck-naked “son”—with close-up shots of the boy’s genitalia. Would you have mollified the other guests by pointing out the “huge differences” between Borat’s culture and your own, and insisting that he could be taught how to conduct himself in polite American society? How would you have reacted to Borat’s return to the dinner table with a big ol’ turd in a plastic bag? Would you have taken him back to the loo to give him a crash course on how to use a toilet and wipe himself, as one of those genteel steel magnolias did? My own Caribbean-Canadian upbringing has left me scrupulously deferential to my elders and guests; yet I doubt I would have been that polite. Anyone else? A show of hands, perhaps?
This is the lesson Borat teaches Americans about themselves: that, far from being hopelessly bigoted, they are an at times idiotically courteous and hospitable people.
“Watch how the camera focuses on nodding children when a preacher calls America ‘a Christian nation’,” my Nass friend writes. He seems to reflexively take this as a sign of religious prejudice, which itself strikes me as rash at best and prejudicial at worst. And to implicitly smear all who believe America to be a Christian nation as Bible-thumping bigots is less than fair in a country whose currency bears the words “In God We Trust” and two of whose greatest social justice movements—for the abolition of slavery and for civil rights—were heavily influenced and driven by Christian altruism and idealism. Martin Luther King, Jr. was not called “Reverend” for nothing. And let’s not forget the Battle Hymn of the Republic, arguably America's greatest patriotic anthem—written by a Christian abolitionist during the Civil War. If ridding America of the scourge of human bondage is what Julia Ward Howe meant by “the coming of the Lord”, I don’t know you all, but mine eyes have seen the glory.
I come from a family of mostly evangelical Christians. Their churches are attended by people of all backgrounds, their services characterized by the very same talking in tongues, “flailing about”, and general religious rapture that my friend so tellingly slips into quotation marks. I can name countless anecdotes showing that such faithful folk are far from the execrable haters so many left-wing pundits suspect they are—enough to outdo Sacha Baron Cohen himself. In the South, mind you, it may be a different story…maybe. But am I going to assume that, based on Borat’s Cultural Learnings of America? I could dig up better primary sources for this thesis. Fear not your God-fearing countrymen, liberal brethren: they are not all out to get you.
Ultimately, Borat teaches Americans little more about themselves than that there are many bigots in their midst—other than that they take their politeness to jokey extents. The latter lesson hardly warrants outraged condemnation. The former is meaningless, not only because it’s scarcely news to anyone not living under a rock, but more importantly because it says nothing about America that couldn’t be said about just about any other country. From the slurring of dark-skinned European soccer players in recent years, to riots against African exchange students at Chinese universities, to a Palestinian cartoonist’s recent depiction of Condoleeza Rice as being pregnant with a monkey, I suspect that any country’s hateful underbelly could be exposed just as shockingly by Baron Cohen’s pop culture “investigative journalism”. America is simply the country he chose to take potshots at in this case. Ah, well. Don’t let it turn you around, my Yankee friends. It’s always lonely at the top.
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