Truths Universally Acknowledged
Coincidentally I spent the afternoon seeing Borat and come home to find that Jesse Walker just posted my take on the movie:
Maybe Borat isn’t a particularly political film after all. Maybe it’s the world’s crudest comedy of manners . . . Borat is a movie in which a man at a formal dinner can hand his hostess a bag of feces and be greeted, not with a knee to the groin, but with a friendly lesson on the use of indoor plumbing.
I’m pretty sure Radley Balko made the same argument at some point but, yeah. Borat is about how Americans react to assholes. The trick of the film is that sometimes the asshole is Borat Sagdayev and sometimes it’s Sasha Baron Cohen. When people snap, some of them have decided that this Kazakh weirdo is a dickwad, while others have figured out that this dickwad is no Kazakh weirdo. (In Manhattan most people snap without taking time to figure it out.) But mostly people determinedly assume the best until there’s simply no room to do so.
I got up from the movie thinking that I totally saw how the 19 Very Bad Men got away with 9/11. A few years ago there was even a whole genre of stories of the anguished ordinary people at flight schools and ticket counters kicking themselves for not having done more. Because what we do here is we mostly try to be polite and if you’re a big enough asshole just shoe you off somewhere. We are too prone to coming to your country to fuck you up, but if you show up here acting all odd, we’ll try not to mention it.
Fun movie, and you’ve got to love the scene with Alan Keyes.
Comment by sean —
November 29, 2006 @ 10:09 pm
Isn’t it actually quite explicable, and isn’t this what drives libertarians to despair: individually, most people are polite, diffident and tolerant, avoid conflict and certainly avoid imposing their views on strangers, but put them in a group, and tell that their actions are legally sanctioned, and they’ll burn up hundreds of thousands of total strangers.