Hypersensitivity/Cultural Sieving

Last night, situated in a nexus of internal and external chaos, some part of me figured it would be a good idea to watch American television. This may seem to reveal a masochistic tendency, because, judging by past encounters with the medium, the likelihood of increased intellectual anguish is high. On the other hand, there was the slim possibility of distraction. After some trawling through reality television and overdone re-runs, I spotted dry land.

The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are the only indisputably positive outcomes of living in a house with cable. They haven't yet become a part of my routine, but I suspect regularity is close at hand. Witty, handsome men with a passion for politics and parody? Yes please.

So there I am on the dreaded couch, watching Jon Stewart and the British correspondent chap argue over whether Canada should be under the Queen's jurisdiction or not, when Aasif Mandvi shows up as the Indian correspondent to persuade the Canadian correspondent to, well, 'kick 'em out', essentially. At one point, adding an emphatic punch to his argument, he says something to the effect of: "Even if India had traffic lights they wouldn't function because the streets are so full of cows. And we still managed to get rid of the British."

While it is amusing to watch India get more and more attention as it moves toward greater and greater global relevance, and while I know this was most likely an entirely self-aware joke, instances like these always shake me awake to the inadequacy and incompleteness of knowledge about India, not to mention the incredible reliance on cultural sterotypes. I think it has something to do with the suddenness of India's importance to the west. Too little time to play catch up means old knowledge persists for the sake of convenience. Of course, The Daily Show is not nearly as problematic as so many other 'agents of information'.

Later, Colbert was interviewing a gentleman named Matthew Alexander who has just written "How To Break A Terrorist", a book about the effectiveness of non-violent interrogation techniques. He explained that he believes the best way to get information is to establish a relationship of trust and mutual respect with the detainee. There was a moment, after Colbert decided to be mildly serious, when the sense of revelation in their conversation struck me. "You've just gotta respect 'em," he said. Or something to that effect. There were definitely a lot of 'them's. Pretty soon, the word started pounding in my ears and I had to turn off the television and go to bed.

Maybe it's all the Edward Said I've been reading, but my thought was (and is) this: "Centuries after the West 'discovered' the 'Orient', having attempted war, conquest, indoctrination, subjugation, anthropological curiosity, stereotyping, fetishism, and condescension, it finally occurs to them to try respect as a strategy to 'deal' with this dangerous other. Well Merry fucking Christmas." It's as if the entire rest of the world is some sort of unidentifiable species, and the West (and I use this term loosely) has, for the last millennium (at least), been conducting some sort of elaborate experiment in which various stimuli are posed to the mysterious creature in order to provoke responses, which are then recorded and analyzed to come up with some sort of conclusion about what it is and how it works. The entire 'Orient' has been placed in some sort of academic petri dish; prodded, provoked and problematized, pending identification.

What is it about the unknown that scares us so much that we feel compelled to seek refuge in the distant safety of third person? 'Them'. As opposed to 'Us'. 'The Other' as opposed to 'It'. God forbid we make the mistake of inclusion or, worse, oneness.