November 22, 2004

A reader asked what locals had to say about Ali G’s slurs against Kazakhstan in his HBO show. D’oh? There’s a lot that can be talked about here or broadcast on the news without me ever figuring out about it, but I’m inclined to doubt that, press secretaries aside, very many people here have ever heard of this British comedian. It’s the type of thing my students would tend to ask me about, if they knew about it, and so far, they’ve been silent (Oi bai. . . if they do, I might just punt and say, “He’s British. I don’t know anything more about this than I know about what an aubergine is or why ‘maths’ is plural”).

The November 20th issue of The New Yorker gives the only the information about this Ali G story that I’ve heard (Dept. of Foreign Relations, “The Borat Doctrine). Press secretary Roman Vassilenko was upset at some of what Ali G’s new character, the fake Kazakh named Borat, had to say. He debunked and commented on what the Borat persona said, and I’ll do the same to the press secretary.

At some points, I wonder why Borat went with a lie rather than the truth.

The national sport is not shooting a dog and then having a party.
There’s no basis in reality there, but then Vassilenko was pressed to explain that the national sports are wrestling and horse games. Two of the most famous horse games are “Kiss the Girl” and “Kokpar.” In Kiss the Girl, a boy chases a girl. If he catches her, he gets a kiss; if he doesn’t, she whips him. And Kokpar is the polo-like game where the tossed object is a headless goat carcass.

Less humorously, Borat left Vassilenko to dispel claims of an anti-Semitic Kazakhstan.

In Borat’s Kazakhstan, Jews attack people with their claws, and “Dirty Jew” is a popular film. [As Vassilenko noted,] But the real Kazakhstan has long embraced its thriving Jewish community, according to the National Conference on Soviet Jewry, and earlier this month the country dedicated the largest synagogue in Central Asia.
Two dinner-table surveys, at separate homes reveal the same: there are no Jews in Kazakhstan (yes, I realize that these polls, like my classroom surveys, are entirely unscientific and often give factually incorrect results. The latter is why I like to ask them). I don’t know if there’s political dislike of Israel (I haven’t asked). I suppose among many people, there’s about as much prejudice against Kazakhstani Jews as there is against Kazakhstani Amish: “Who? They don’t exist.”

And then there’s what Borat said about Kazakh women. [I realize I complain about women’s situations in Kazakhstan a lot. It’s something that’s visible to me and affects me. Many other problems, like corruption and poor-quality drinking water, only touch me tangentially: I work for a non-corrupt organization and I haven’t been asked for a bribe; I have a water distiller to purify what I drink unboiled. But my next two posts will give this theme a rest, if anyone thinks this horse is dead.]

According to Borat, a Kazakh man gets a wife by buying a woman from her father for fifteen gallons of insecticide.
Oh, please. I don’t think insecticide is that expensive, it would be sold by the metric system, and I wonder if it’s that widely used, since I haven’t seen it at the bazaar. The going rate for a dowry among the middle class is closer to 100,000 tenge, or $740 (a senior teacher’s monthly pay might be $140).
Vassilenko disputes this, too: “The men propose marriage with engagement rings.” There is an old tradition—“maybe a hundred years ago,” Vassilenko said—of men kidnapping their brides, but he claims that the practice is virtually obsolete. Also, he said, “If you want to do it for fun, you can do that,” but the woman has to be in on it.

Vassilenko has not been talking to our host mothers, who do claim that bride-napping still continues in South Kazakhstan. I’ll go with their judgment over the press secretary’s. Earlier this fall, a thirteen year-old girl was bride-napped in Shaulder, a town of 20,000 about 60 km north of mine, and where another volunteer lives. If a girl is bride-napped, the police are afraid to interfere. Yes, most men do propose marriage with rings, and there is consensual bride-napping when husbands can’t afford dowries, but even if the nonconsensual bride-napping is obsolete, it still occurs.

Vassilenko is also chagrined at Borat’s portrayal of women in Kazakh society, epitomized by his claim that “in Kazakhstan we say, ‘God, man, horse, dog, then woman, then rat.’” Vassilenko said, “I don’t think our women like that, not to mention the men. We have women ministers, women judges, businesspeople.”
Oh, come now. That list leaves off the much-respected camel. One volunteer got in trouble for bringing a small stuffed camel to class and letting the students throw it around; that was disrespectful (teaching tip: if you throw a ball to students instead of calling on them, they pay attention better. Chose a ball that doesn’t hurt the students when they get beaned for letting their minds drift).

Yes, there are successful and prominent women, and one of the most powerful people in the country is a female media magnate and leader of a political party; not by coincidence, she’s also the president’s daughter. I don’t know about the Kazakhstani women, but I don’t like the way men here truly are respected above women. Sons are strongly preferred to daughters. I think this ties into the fact that the men really aren’t accustomed to hearing “no,” even on minor things:

“No, older brother of one of my students, I do not want you to buy me a glass of flavored water from the stand on the street, and I do not believe you when you promise me it contains no giardia,” or “No, someone’s husband, I don’t want my cheek kissed, so as much as you pull my hand, I won’t step forward until you pull me off my feet,” or “No, fellow teacher of my friend, once again, we do not want a tour guide, please do not follow us around the museum, and please do not tell us we must come and look at a different display case when we’re still reading another display” (in America, you might say ‘bad tour guide,’ but here, it feels like a piece to the same pattern). Silly, yes. It wears on you. Or, it wears on me.

More seriously, one volunteer changed sites because her host father would repeatedly beat her host mother in front of her. Another volunteer reports that male guests to his home have a way of embracing his host mother in ways that really aren’t appropriate as she looks uncomfortable but unwilling to do anything. That same volunteer found himself sitting next to a cute couple, husband and wife in their twenties, on the inter-city bus to Almaty. When the wife got off at a rest stop, the man asked the volunteer if he thought his wife was pretty. The volunteer replied yes, and when the wife got back on the bus, the husband cupped his hand under her breast and announced, “She’s mine.” Again, the wife did like other wives do, and just looked uncomfortable. And the host mothers say that bride-napped girls can’t say no.

Yes, these problems are universal, but also, we volunteers aren’t a large group of people, so either a few events have skewed the sample, or we (wittingly or unwittingly) have been running with shady crowds, or these events are disturbingly common.


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Other Reversals

Congratulations to the Honorable Terry Teachout for being confirmed to his NEA gig. Is it only a coincidence that this is nearly contemporaneous with liberal champ Jonathan Chait's suggestion that liberals should turn their fire on the NEA to gain ground in the culture wars?

[Answer, yes, of course it's a coincidence, but I was eager to draw both links under the ambit of a single post.]


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Turnabout

Like Amber Taylor, I am a grudging believer in Rust v Sullivan, so I don't think it is truly coercion when the government bribes doctors to surrender their rights to perform (or to suggest) abortions. [Of course, query the limits of this doctrine-- what about bribing libraries to surrender their right to carry pornographic books? Bribing state university professors to give up their right to criticize communism? Bribing African Americans to give up their right to vote?]

Thus, it's a little rich to see the rhetoric Amber points to in creating a new conscientious objector rule letting federally-funded health care providers refuse to provide abortions without losing their government cash:

Douglas Johnson, a spokesman for the National Right to Life Committee ... added, "This is in response to an orchestrated campaign by pro-abortion groups across the country to use government agencies to coerce health care providers to participate in abortions."

The Slithery D attempts to make hay with the action/inaction distinction, but it's not clear that really goes any place. Governments, after all, bribe people to do things they find distasteful, or even immoral, all the time-- teach American law, arrest and prosecute drug addicts, shoot enemy combatants during war, etc. etc. etc. The action/inaction distinction fails to explain which briberies are problematic and which not.

All that said, there are still two reasons to be cautious in tarring Mr. Johnson and others as hypocrites. 1: Rust was about what the First Amendment prohibits, this issue is what Congress will allow-- it may well be that Courts should sometimes take a narrow view of constitutional strictures while creating space for Congress to make allowances. Eugene Volokh has suggested this before.

2: Not all pro-life advocates are created alike. I don't know if Mr. Johnson himself was involved in the Rust litigation, but it's not necessarily fair to criticize person X just because person Y, broadly construed to be on the "same side" made a contradictory argument once before.

All of that said, this is still an example of what's troubling about the rule that the government can levy very heavy taxes and then return the money only if people give up rights that the government couldn't have singled out with the tax burdens. When the government is using money to enforce one's own moral code, one's much less likely to criticize it as coercion than when roles reverse.


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Farewell!

12:17 AM

Thanks to Will and fellow denizens of Crescat for your hospitality this week. It was a pleasure stopping by.

A reminder. . . It remains Super November! over at The Fly Bottle (Tyler Cowen's favorite philosophy blog!) for the rest of the month. That means at least three fresh posts per day! I would be honored to have your custom.

Oh, and before I go, let me report a Jacob Levy sighting. He has appeared in my comments to report that his Myers-Briggs type is INTJ, on the cusp of P.

See ya!


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