What’s Kazakh For “Jagoff?”

The City Pages’ review of Borat takes an all-too-predictable turn – which sparked an idea.

More on the idea in a bit; first, the drearily-predictable turn. Apparently, Sacha Baren-Cohen does what is in Hollywood nearly unthinkable – satirizes conservative caricatures!:

That both Barr and Keyes are right-wing moralizers suggests something about the Baron Cohen agenda. It’s hardly coincidental that the antique store he trashes specializes in Confederate memorabilia. Interviewing “veteran feminists” or Atlanta homies, Borat baffles them with his chauvinist stupidity. But picked up by a van of South Carolina frat boys or chatting with the owner of the Imperial Rodeo, he has alarmingly little difficulty getting them to articulate the idea of reinstituting slavery or making homosexuality a capital offense.

Wow. I guess rednecks and fratboys are stupid! Especially after their japes, y’know, get through an editing process!

Baron Cohen has gleefully involved the government of Kazakhstan in a campaign against Borat—showing up at the White House on the day President Bush hosted Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev. But his target isn’t really an imaginary version of Nazerbayev’s nation (nor its enemies, the “evil nitwits” of Uzbekistan); it is rather the domain of the “great warlord Premier Bush,” red states in particular. “I think the cultural differences are just vast,” the Mississippi matron hosting Borat for dinner at her Magnolia Mansion (on Secession Drive) confides to the camera while her guest is away from the table. Those differences become unbridgeable when Borat returns with a stool sample, and then with the arrival of his indescribably inappropriate date—recruited from the back-page ads of the local alt-weekly.

The City Pages have managed to make Borat sound as interesting as a poli-sci masters dissertation.

The review makes much of Baren-Cohen’s “agenda” – and how eagerly many conveniently-lampoonable right-wing middle Americans queue up to serve as comic fodder for it.

But I have to wonder – given that:

• Americans love to be on TV, and
• there’s nobody in the world as smug and personally-overweening as a Twin Cities’ liberal,

…I think that if a film crew from “People’s Television of Berkeley” (or perhaps a French TV documentary crew) showed up at Macalester or Nordeast or in Merriam Park, you’d get at least as much comic fodder.

Hmmmm.

I say again – Hmmmm.

Anyone got a camera?