Borat's Odyssey and the War on Terror.

I’ve read a few articles discussing Sasha Cohen’s latest film, Borat, but they mostly seemed strangely deficient. I’ve heard it described as “the rebirth of snobbery,” as a haughty attack by intellectual elites on uneducated Kazakhstanis or similarly uneducated Southerners. I think that’s just plain obtuse. What about Borat’s slavish obsession with Pamela Anderson, which mirrors America’s obsession with celebrity? What about Borat's stunts in New York, most of which were meant to demonstrate the absurdity of New Yorker’s infamous fear of casual public communication? I mean, there's obviously a sort of symbolism in this foreigner traveling across the entire American nation. This movie is about America as a whole.

Now, this may sound odd, but Borat actually follows a great tradition in Western literature. It’s like Moore’s Utopia or Rousseau’s Second Discourse. It’s one of those works which uses a foreign, exotic, society, real or imagined, to gain a critical prospective on one’s one society.

Of course there’s a way those sorts of works generally tend to operate and Borat does precisely the opposite of that. Generally these types of works critique the dominant society implicitly by showing the way in which things can be done differently. Borat works the other way. It takes a society that we know very little about, and sets it up as something radically different, and inferior. We open up the movie by finding out that people in Kazikistan have sex with their sisters, hate Jews, and consider women vastly inferior to men. Not only does Sasha Cohen highlight differences between us and them, he highlights those things which are almost unanimously considered backwards in American society, things like incest and anti-Semitism, for example.

Borat’s cross-country trip is a journey of discovery and reconciliation, which ends symbolically with Borat marrying an American woman. After we open up with the assumption that his Kazikistani journalist would be radically out of tune with America, we eventually discover that a lot of his beliefs are echoed in the American heartland. While most narratives of cultural difference critique the dominant society via a process of highlighting differences, in Borat, interestingly, it’s the similarities between Kazakhstan and America which reflect poorly upon us. It’s a brilliant rhetorical strategy, because no one wants to be siding with the backwards, sister-kissing journalist, Borat.

But it’s important to remember the most fundamental difference between Borat and the average American -- Borat is a Muslim, not exactly a supporter of Al Qeada mind you, but a pretty reactionary Muslim nonetheless. He is the sort of person we’re supposed to be winning over in the war against terrorism. We’re supposed to be teaching Borat not to subjugate women, not to hate Jews, not to suppress fundamental liberties in the name of religion. However, Borat goes home finding many of his most objectionable beliefs validated by American society.

The fundamental question which Borat ought to provoke, is whether or not we’re in any position to be fighting the war on terror. The war on terror has to be an ideological war. We can’t just go over to the Middle East and shoot everyone in the head who has a Koran. We need to be attacking their heads with something different -- ideas -- but as Borat demonstrates, we might not be in any position to do that. How can we, for example, seriously hope to deal with Muslim intolerance of Jews, when we can’t seem to deal with our own intolerance of homosexuals? How can we tell them to separate religion and the state, when we’re trying to bring them back together here? If we really hope to change the middle east, we need to show them a positive example of what a free, tolerate, liberal society can accomplish. We need to be setting a better example. The first front in the war on terror should be the home front.