Wednesday, October 11, 2006

Exchange Rate Ecclesiasticism

"Ask yourself, 'What Would George Soros Do?'" ~ My econ prof (unintentionally, I think), while explaining arbitrage.

Tuesday, October 10, 2006

eli's wit

"You are a failure as a mammal" ~Eli, last night, when I got out of bed to put socks on because my feet were cold.

Wednesday, October 04, 2006

thoughts on Borat

I was watching video photage of Sasha Baron-Cohen (aka Borat) crashing a much awaited statue unveiling at the Kazakhstani Embassy (http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2006/09/29/AR2006092900006.html), and I realized why the DC press and the public love Borat so much.

Borat cuts through the superficial sameness of official international affairs. Foreign leaders and diplomats mouth whatever the West wants to hear, and we always wonder," What do they really think?" Official foreign afffairs seems to be about foreign dignitaries saying that they're just like the Americans, that they value the same things, and any real difference is whitewashed. And you wonder what it's really like in their home countries, what dirty secrets the regime doesn't want us to know, and how their values differ from ours.

Borat tells us, unashamedly, about his "Kazakhstani" values, about his pride in the Tishnik massacre, about his multiple wives, about his sister (the best prostitute in all Kazakhstan), about evading gypsies and "the Jew with the claw." On the one hand, you could say that he fulfills our American expectation that we're culturally superior. But I think that there's something more to it than that. I think that we want exoticism and difference. We suspect that there are people out there who take pride in their slayings and have sisters who work as prostitutes, and we wonder what they're like, but they're not the face of foreign affairs that we see. We wonder about people whose differences are less titallating that murder and sex work. We wonder about the guy with a cow living in his house. In a world that's shrinking, where you can find a Taco Bell in Thailand, Borat provides that amazing and amusing difference, naively and without shame.