From: Lee Corbin (lcorbin@tsoft.com)
Date: Thu Apr 17 2003 - 16:54:10 MDT
Ron writes
> I walked into my favorite Pakistani grocery store and was greeted by
> the proprietor a sharp young entrepreneur. He was watching a video while
> waiting for a customer.
> I commented that the movie looked like something out of Hollywood when
> I was a teenager. His eyes flashed and he gave me a big grin. He explained
> that the movie was a takeoff from Hollywood and said, "America is popular all
> over the world, it is the best." As he said this he was nodding at the
> screen.
> I asked why? He explained that the contents of the movie, the song,
> the dance, the styles and the conduct all represented America and that the
> middle eastern young adults all wanted America because that was freedom. In
> that piece of frivolous entertainment they saw an entire social contract and
> they wanted it for themselves.
> It appears that where our diplomats and news media cannot effectively
> represent us our movie industry does.
Yes, it manages to dangle in front of poor people everywhere
that things are great in America. I speculate that the tendency
to envy and resentment is genetically determined; that is, I
bet it runs in families. If this is correct, then for a huge
percentage of the world's people, these images create immense
longing and frustration. Your acquaintance appears to either
be relatively free of such tendencies, or is now exulting that
he's living in America.
(So the message of U.S. diplomats and the message of the movie
industry are definitely about two different kinds of things!)
But in the book I've almost finished, "World on Fire", author
Amy Chau quotes the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk. I admire Mr.
Pamuk's astuteness, perceptivity, and objectivity. He wrote
It is neither Islam nor even poverty itself that
directly engenders support for terrorists whose
ferocity and ingenuity are unprecedented in human
history [sic]; it is, rather the crushing humiliation
that has infected the third-world countries.
At no time in history has the gulf between rich and
poor been so wide....at no time in history have the
lives of the rich been so forcefully brought to the
attention of the poor through television and Hollywood
films....But far worse, at no other time have the
world's rich and powerful societies been so clearly
right, and "reasonable".
Today an ordinary citizen of a poor undemocratic Muslim
country, or a civil servant in a third-world country
or in a former socialist republic struggling to make
ends meet, is aware of how insubstantial is his share
of the world's wealth; he knows that he lives under
conditions that are much harsher and more devastating
that those of a "Westerner" and that he is condemned
to a much shorter life. At the same time, however, he
sense in a corner of his mind that his poverty is to
some considerable degree the fault of his own folly and
inadequacy, or those of his father and grandfather. The
Western world is scarcely aware of this overwhelming
feeling of humiliation that is experiences by most of
the world's population.
So long as people feel pride in achievements that they personally
had nothing to do with, so long as people resent others who have
or achieve more, nothing will change. The only ray of hope is
that perhaps before long one will be able to choose what feelings
to have.
Lee
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