Myth of Arrival

In case you were curious, here is Kazakh TV Host Borat Sagdiyev's homepage.

They say real life is stranger than fiction; unless real life is a fiction. A couple of weeks ago the news that Kazakhstan's Foreign Ministry had threatened legal action against a certain British comedian, Sacha Baron Cohen, who portrays the central Asian country as a state populated by drunks who enjoy cow-punching as a national sport circulated the Web. The New Yorker reported:

Roman Vassilenko, the press secretary for the Embassy of Kazakhstan, wants to clear up a few misconceptions about his country. Women are not kept in cages. The national sport is not shooting a dog and then having a party. You cannot earn a living being a Gypsy catcher. Wine is not made from fermented horse urine. It is not customary for a man to grab another man’s khrum. “Khrum” is not the word for testicles.

Borat (Cohen) appears to have drawn Kazakh wrath after he hosted the annual MTV Europe Music Awards in Lisbon, arriving in an Air Kazakh propeller plane controlled by a one-eyed pilot clutching a vodka bottle. The Kazakh Foreign Ministry later reported in a news briefing: "We do not rule out that Mr. Cohen is serving someone's political order designed to present Kazakhstan and its people in a derogatory way." Someone's political order? Hmmm.

And here is where it turns even stranger. Apparently under the guise of "not getting it," the Anti-Defamation League has now condemned Cohen for the casual but relentless anti-Semitism Borat spouts in his interviews of local Americans on the mock show Borat in America (but the women-caging, urine-drinking, dog-shooting went unquestioned). What I think is brilliant about Borat/ Cohen is just that — his ability to draw out the racism/ sexism of my fellow Americans by his off-handed comments.¹

For example, at one point Borat appeared in a country-and-Western bar to lead a sing-along of In My Country There Is Problem. The chorus goes: “Throw the Jew down the well / So my country can be free / You must grab him by his horns / Then we have a big party.” The camera keeps panning around the room and at first everyone (all very white and very drunk) seem unsure but as the song progresses the audience start to clap and stomp and whoop it up. By the end of the song Borat has everyone singing the chorus.

In real life, Cohen is an observant Jew, but the Anti-Defamation League has argued that “the irony may have been lost on some of the audience.” So the answer is to not bring these problems into the light and talk about them? The answer is to ignore them? I think that is why they call it irony, folks.

1. Which reminds me of The Onion.com's hilarious Local Jew Feels Left Out Of Worldwide Jewish Conspiracy. [back]

This entry was posted on Sunday, November 27th, 2005 at 10:56 am and is filed under Poetry News & Events. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.