Borat exposed!

Earlier today, I linked to a Borat-backlash piece in which the “journalist” was whining that he couldn’t get any real journalism out of this move. He couldn’t interview Sacha Baron Cohen except in character, and so he determined that he couldn’t report on the movie—meaning that he couldn’t explain to his readers, with solemn quotes from the creator of the character, what the disturbing Kazakh means: about us Americans, about our culture, etc., etc.

Relax, says Hitchens, who takes issue with a New Statesman review which claims that Sacha Baron Cohen is making fun of grotesque Americans in his movie. [emphasis mine] ***

Among the “cultural learnings of America for make benefit glorious nation of Kazakhstan” is the discovery that Americans are almost pedantic in their hospitality and politesse. At a formal dinner in Birmingham, Ala., the guests discuss Borat while he’s out of the room—filling a bag with ordure in order to bring it back to the table, as it happens—and agree what a nice young American he might make. …

The concept is essentially the same as the imperishable Black Like Me, which really did get people to say what they privately thought and felt. Kazakh Like Me has been a howling success because it has induced the luckless Kazakh government to make solemn disavowals, as if to dispel mistaken “perceptions” about horse-urine cocktails and the obligatory date rape of sisters. It’s too much like Karen Hughes making nice with audiences of unsmiling Saudis, pleadingly reassuring them that the United States is not one long replay of The Running of the Muslim. But it’s that attitude of painfully maintained open-mindedness and multiculturalism that is really being unmasked and satirized by our man from the ’stan.

Yep.