Borat

The Borat movie is coming out soon, and Kazakhstan is back on the map. So much so that in a hostel in San Francisco, when I challenged a new acquaintance to guess where I had lived for the last two years (which usually stumps people, even if they're given the first three letters), his first guess was "Kazakh-a-stan". It's the new default backwards foreign country (a role I remember Djibouti playing in my youth).

I love Kazakhstan and Kazakhstanis very much, and it's a little painful to see it being represented so negatively. That third goal of the Peace Corps (to educate America about the place we served) is needed badly right now for Kazakhstan. Borat is a loathsome character who inaccurately and offensively portrays a great country and people.

But that doesn't mean what Sacha Baron Cohen is doing is bad. At the heart of it, how could he be making fun of Kazakhstan, when his portrayal has so little to do with the real thing? The language, the landscape, the "Kazakh" laws and customs in the show: everything is entirely unresearched and untrue. Like all of his characters, Borat is actually making fun of the people he interviews, whether it's their stiff inability to handle such a coarse, ignorant personality or better yet, their hidden similarities to the Borat character.

The sketch that best exemplifies this actually isn't funny at all. It's a very disturbing clip where Borat sings at what looks like an open mic at an Arizona bar. The song he sings is called "Throw the Jew Down the Well", and as he sings it, the bar patrons gets into it, singing and clapping along, and gives him a hearty round of applause at the end. You can watch it on Youtube.

Sacha Cohen is a dedicated, practicing, orthodox Jew himself. To accuse him of anti-Semitism is absurd. But by presenting the character Borat to people with latent anti-Semitism, allowing them to sympathize with him, a dark side of America that is rarely seen emerges. This is the genius of Borat, and this is why I expect this movie to be much more deeply embarrassing to America than to Kazakhstan.

Kazakhstan's ugly side is coming out into the light as well, but they have nobody but themselves to blame. The suppression of his website and the terrible idea of running a pro-Kazakhstan PR campaign in America to counter the movie show have done more to advertise the Borat character than anything Sacha Cohen could have done. Moreover, it reveals the Kazakh government's very real inability to accept criticism (even when, like Borat, it would be absurd to consider the criticism dangerous or meaningful), and their heavy-handed way of dealing with viewpoints they disagree with.

In a word, this is what free speech is all about, and exactly the sort of free speech that needs to be defended most stridently. I haven't even mentioned that Sacha Cohen is usually hilarious, but that certainly doesn't hurt. I know I'll be going to see the movie.