Ahab Has A Blog.

it was some third-or-fourth feature right hand page thingy that's always an interview, usually with an author. one of our favorite statements in that column was dick armey, not exactly known as a "nice guy", asked (paraphrasing: go use your cypherpunk lexis-nexis account and look it up, you lazy bastards): "you were a college professor. how does academia differ from being in congress?". and the answer: "well, you have to understand, in congress you're dealing with a much nicer class of person". and he's right.

anyway, this particular column was with an indian-american author (we trust we needn't clarify viz a viz "native american"). so she said, with the rolling of her eyes clearly visible in the cold print, and again we're paraphrasing but we'll do a barfight over the accuracy, "oh, all these americans doing yoga. i don't know a single person in india who does yoga." well excuuuuuuse me but i don't know any americans who go to nascar rallies eat cheeseburgers every day and pray before the opening pitch. but i don't doubt they exist, and i don't roll my eyes when people mention them, and when foreigners refer to these sorts of americans i don't haughtily correct their simplistic view of american culture.

which is why this irks me.

first, the presumption that americans are unsophisticates. many are not. worldwide, 50% of the people are dumber than average. many americans have all their teeth and have left their hometowns very often or have left the country and met non-americans in their native habitat. and there are so many foreign-born people from every corner of the earth that most relatively savvy americans have heard these sorts of statements all the time from foreigners. "all you silly americans think that switzerland is about cuckoo clocks and cheese, but it's really not like that. switzerland is very sophisticated, we also have discos and go crazy because we are so boring. you are an american, where is the tv set in your bedroom?" so we've heard this from EVERY culture, while other nations only have to hear it from americans.

second, americans as a whole don't know generally care about authenticity. go to disneyworld (if you haven't already) and see what we mean. when they go to taco bell, they know a gordito is some crap made up in the marketing department. and they don't care, as long as it costs a dollar and/or comes in heart-attack quantities. they actually have enough sophistication, including most of the constant 50% dumber than average, to understand that advertisers and people trying to sell you crap, get this, make shit up. they know that p-diddy pretends to be street and is just an ordinary middle-class kid. and honestly, NO ONE CARES. this is america; it's sort of generally assumed that "cultural authenticity" is something to be trotted out for yearly parades or arts festivals, which are charming and sometimes entertaining but generally not up to competing with Independence Day III for your children's attention or your DVD dollars. so no one cares whether college-educated people in india and their friends do yoga. or anyone else.

third, if you've been paying attention, you'd figure out that when we aren't making stuff up about other cultures, we only have enough room in our heads for one or two facts about another place. and if you look at expatriates and xenophiles all over the world, they tend to overemphasize high-brow culture and antiquated culture in their host nations, and they are generally unlikely to own snowmobiles or ATVs. this is why westerners are more likely to talk about kabuki than cantonese hip-hop, and why there are so many asian (and when we say asian we mean in the american sense of east asia and not the british sense of south asia) musicians playing western classical music. this works for a generation or two, until kids realize that they can either watch no one asks americans if they eat cheeseburgers. they only care if educated liberals pay lip service to their own cultural masturbation. wake up and smell the pop culture. your children have, and they think you are stale farts.

finally - and this is the real venom - what is it with south asians and food? we've never heard anyone from south asia speak approvingly of their native cuisine anywhere outside their native lands. we've heard time and time again "oh, that's not the real XDPOIWNJEFRFJ food. you can only get good food served off the back of a sweaty donkey in KSDFLKJALAMPUUR or from my dear sweet mothers breast." this is what makes us laugh at the original yoga jibe. leaving aside mexian food in the US - and there's a legit beef - it doesn't seem that any other culture has such a problem cooking outside their native land. what the fuck, do they imprison all the good south asian cooks? does the indian government have a secret program of spitting on all food products leaving the country? we have yet to hear of, for example, ethnic chinese complaining about the inauthenticity of chinese food, no matter how inauthentic it is. sure, they praise the good stuff, but if it's bad, it's just bad, nothing more to say. they never go out of their way to disparage the inauthenticity of what you poor americans are eating.