Cultural Learnings of America
Your honor, it was the beer talking. Not me. It’s a lame excuse coming from Mel Gibson when he’s caught being himself (a sexist, anti-Semite yob), but even lamer when coming from drunken frat boys being drunken frat boys, on camera no less! The unnamed frat boys in question were the ignominious stars of “Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan.”
I don’t need to tell you that Borat is the brainchild of comedian Sacha Baron Cohen, a fake TV journalist from a former Soviet republic who baits Americans to say outrageous things (that they likely believe) with his seeming innocence. On his TV show, he famously got a bar room full of country-western fans to sing along with a song called “Throw the Jew Down the Well.”
The movie is savagely funny. It has a fair amount of poop jokes and Jackass-style gross-out humor, but it also has a keen eye for mocking the elite and the powerful, and the racism and sexism of ordinary Americans. While everyone is baited, some of our fellow citizens pass their tests with flying colors, such as the driving instructor who responds to Borat’s “traditional” two kisses on the cheek with a grumbly, “Well, I’m not used to that, but that’s fine.” But most take Borat’s bait and reveal the ugliest tendencies of Americans. A crowd of rodeo fans applaud Borat’s speech, in which he wishes that Bush drink the blood of every Iraqi man, woman and child; a gun store clerk responds to Borart’s query of the best way to protect against Jews with the instant recommendation of a very large handgun.
Unlike these other victims of the fake foreign journalist, the frat boys in question – who are so embarrassed by the spectacle they made that they are suing the filmmakers to have their appearance removed from the film – needed no prodding at all. As soon as Borat hitchhiked his way onto their RV, they were extolling the virtues of slavery, the innate inferiority of women and how tough it is to be a white man these days where no one gives you any breaks.
I saw the new Borat movie on opening night with a raucous Times Square crowd, and the scene with the frat boys was the only part of the movie that hushed the crowd. It wasn’t funny. It was scary and depressing. These morons are the future of America. They’re probably future Congressmen.
Writing in the Nation, Richard Goldstein accuses Borat of double standards, of couching bigotry in humor in order to get away with the bigotry that Borat himself employs. Goldstein either did not see the movie, or did not get it. It is significant that the only black people (other than Alan Keyes, who deserves mockery) who appear in the movie are in on the joke, and help satirize genteel white racism. Everyone is not fair game, just the rich, the powerful and the intolerant.
Gender, Identity and the Grey Lady
Like a brontosaurus trudging into a tar pit, the New York Times just blundered into a debate that up to now has been best left to feminist journals and Queer discussion groups, in the Fashion & Style section, no less. With the nuance of a brickbat and the keen understanding of someone who has watched “The L Word,” writer Paul Vitello takes a look at lesbian response to transmen and finds (surprise!) some unease.
Unhip and straight as I am, I still know that not every woman who identifies as a man pauses to identify as a lesbian in between and that any woman who successfully passes as a man never quite gains the male privilege that the rest of us are born into.
I’ll leave further criticism of the Times for being out of its league to more qualified blargers, but did want to highlight this illuminating quote from Natasha, a lesbian whose partner became a man, putting an end to their relationship:
“You’re in love with a person, but there is something about gender that is so central to identity it can be overwhelming if the person changes,” she said.
What I had never quite gotten about transgender identity is that if gender is supposed to be just a social construct, like “race,” something that we made up and that has nothing to do with biology, then why change the physical form? Why go through a series of expensive and less-than-satisfying surgeries and hormone treatments just so that you can be who you always felt you are? Why not just be?
As I thought more about what Natasha said, I realize that I can accept my trans friend who identifies as a man, because to accept him as a man means to drink beers together and talk about what’s the best strategy for grooming facial hair. But if it was a man asking me to accept him as a woman, I could do so, or tell myself I could. But I wouldn’t countenance dating her. I would view her as a sexless being, like nuns or my grandma.
Yes, yes, nuns and grandmas are women, and femininity and womanhood comes in all varieties. I could certainly be saying this more eloquently, but I am writing this in the first flush of realization that saying that gender is a social construct (much like saying the same about “race”) does not make it a contemporary fact. Saying it is merely the first step towards making it true. In the meantime, we live in our culture and society today, where gender is so central to our identities, and sometimes extreme physical changes through medical science are important for acceptance.
Goal.
I was at the H Mart buying creatures of the deep for a Fathers Day meal when I was startled by the sudden roar of cheers and a polite, but enthusiastic, burst of applause. The Japanese and Korean checkers and baggers were gathered around a teevee that had a terrible reception of Telemundo. Korea had just scored against France to tie the match. Oh, that’s right. The rest of the world is intensely focused on the World Cup these days. The native lawnguylanders scowled at all the fuss and went back to their shopping routines.
I’m jealous of all the fuss and wish I could really get into soccer – er, futbol – the way hundreds of millions do. Aside from the occasional rioting and hooliganism, it does seem a wonderful bit of global togetherness. Back at the university – itself, a model United Nations – the student activities center has been a ghost town while all the international students hunker down in the basement to catch broadcasts from across the pond. Meanwhile, I was out in the cold at the happy hour in one of the labs as my friend, the Ukrainian scientist who’s an unapologetic union supporter, chatted with the skittish Chilean tech who’s got Visa worries about…some team or match or other. They really were in their own world when having that conversation, so I wandered down a little further to try to chat with the Argentinean scientist who refuses to talk to me. A friendly, casual, non-union ice breaker chat is just what the PhD ordered. A grad student mentioned Argentina’s team and she beamed with pride, “Aren’t they wonderful?” If only I caught a match, or had a clue.
At least America is apparently losing. The last thing we need, really, is to win at the sport that the entire world is bonkers about, but that we could give two shits about if we even bother to call it by its proper name.
Overpopulation, or Overconsumption?
Ward Sutton, who was much funnier when he was drawing cartoons that lampooned rock-n-roll culture, makes an extremely dubious point about overpopulation and the “culture of life” in this week’s “Sutton Impact.”
In it, Sutton mourns the loss of greenspace and farmland in his hometown to “exurban” housing developments, blames overpopulation and then mocks the right-wingers who want to ban contraception. While the effort to ban contraception is ridiculously puritanical and begs for mockery and outrage, I find it extremely hard to blame American urban sprawl on “overpopulation.” The great big land mass under the stars and stripes is a whopping 5.9 million square miles, while our population is – as Sutton points out – soon to be 300 million. That means that, on average, we have to squeeze about 83 people to each square mile.
India, on the other hand, with its billion citizens, has to find enough living space for about 328 people per square mile. Taiwan gets comfy with about 636 people per square mile, the Gaza Strip makes room for about 3,823 in its relatively few square miles, and even prosperous countries like Britain and Germany accommodate 243 and 230 subjects and citizens to the square mile, respectively. The United States, in fact, ranks just 144th out of nearly 200 countries in terms of population density.
So, is the problem that there are too many people in the world, or that there are too many Americans in the world, demanding strip malls, office parks, sport utility vehicles and McMansions? Do we need fewer Americans, or do we Americans (who, with 5% of the Earth’s population, consume 20% of its resources) need to consume less?
Now, don’t get me wrong. I like the idea of sex and contraception as the next single male hornball, but cries of “overpopulation!” often sound to me like cries of “There’s too many damn brown people!” And countries like India and China, while poorer than the U.S., somehow find a way to accommodate their masses without uprooting every forest in sight to build more goddamn Best Buys and 7-11s.
Perhaps I’d be less antagonistic to Sutton’s cheerleading for contraception if it was accompanied by a call for massive new immigration into this country. After all, there are places in this world where there is legitimate overpopulation (India, Palestine and China being good examples), and here we are in the U.S. of A. wasting perfectly good greenspace on giant styrofoam houses and honking huge parking lots. Brown people of the world, help fill our wide open spaces!