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The American nightmare
We're big fans of the comedian Eddie Izzard, finding moments to quote him almost every week. So, it was months in advance that we got tickets to see him at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.
- By Gautam Raja, Special to Gulf News
- Published: 00:55 October 21, 2008
We're big fans of the comedian Eddie Izzard, finding moments to quote him almost every week. So, it was months in advance that we got tickets to see him at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood.
Installed several storeys above the stage, it was debatable whether we could see him or not, and anyway the show was self-indulgent even by Izzard standards. However, in his pithy way, he gave us a few things to quote, and one of them was R.O.W.
It was Rest Of World that watched in horror as the biggest buffoon of our time was re-elected. And Rest Of World that scratches its head during the presidential run-up, wondering what they'll pick on next - the candidates' dental work?
R.O.W. is a useful handle, because there's little, apart from America, that ideologically unites so many nations. R.O.W. often talks about boorish American tourists, and world-over, eyes of warring cultures meet on public transport and roll in complicity over the decibel level of American twanged conversation.
Also, R.O.W. fondly believes that it knows America. Not just because it has watched Friends on TV, but because it has been exposed to a whole range of the country's cultural expression over a lifetime.
Sadly, R.O.W. forgets that it is usually being every bit as boorish and arrogant as its accusation. Americans in my wife's office return from work trips in Europe talking about how they were constantly harassed because of their nationality. "I may be American, but I'm not personally responsible for my country's foreign policy," said one recent returnee haplessly. (The irony was, of course, that he hated the policy just as much as the people who kept jibing him.)
First-time R.O.W. visitors think nothing of approaching America with a know-it-all attitude best described as arrogance. I was guilty too when I first came to the United States, of either reducing America to snippets of movie experiences, or thinking that I knew the American way, and then being surprised at the degrees of nuance.
I've met many visitors who land having decided, unshakably, that Americans are ignorant, over-talkative, shallow and fat. Or that they eat only junk food, shoot each other when they get angry, and get in a car just to get the newspaper from the end of the drive.
Blinkered judgment
Whether any of these views are eventually justified or not isn't the point, but rather that R.O.W. thinks nothing of forming preconceptions and then being insulting about America, in America, to Americans. And, more often than not, the Americans are good sports about it. At this point, it's R.O.W. that's looking really bad.
Once, I was at an international table where the sole American's expression of surprise over something was put down with a "That's because you're a blinkered American". There are, in America as in any country, all sorts of people: people who are blinkered, people who aren't, and people who are caught in the middle. This poor person spent the rest of the evening in confusion, not knowing how much it was okay to not know. For example, was it okay that he didn't know the main cities of Azerbaijan, or the second-to-last president of Burundi? Is this stuff that everybody from R.O.W. learns in junior school?
Burundi (as any cross-dresser-comedian fan will tell you) brings us back to Eddie Izzard, or rather, the new, pompous version. Disappointed with the show, we just had to write off the ticket expense and hope that Izzard would see the irony in all this... that in spite of everything Rest Of World says about America, it believes you've only really arrived when you hit big time in this country.
Gautam Raja is a journalist based in the US.
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