Borat the Kazakh is a fictional character that is single-handedly destroying the Gross National Cool (what little there was) of the Central Asian nation. Or perhaps he is adding to it through his ridiculous portrait. After all, who knew or cared about anything to do with 'FoSROK' (Former-Soviet-Republic-Of-Kazakhstan) before Borat started telling tall tales?Here's an article in the SMH.
The problem for the real Kazakhstan is that Borat's fake Kazakhstan is threatening to become better known in the West.Heh. The funny thing is that there actually is a nation whose international standing is threatened by a single comedian to this degree. I guess this is why totalitarian states try to eliminate comedians along with writers, philosphers, painters, composers, thinkers, playwrights along with strippers and hookers.
Borat's new film Cultural Learnings of America Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is hitting the cinemas.
This coincidence has not gone unnoticed by Kazakh officialdom or the Western media.
"I can say unambiguously that the question of this film or of the art, let's call it that, of Mr Sacha Baron Cohen, will not be discussed (by Nazarbayev and Bush)," Yerzhan Ashykbayev, a Kazakh Foreign Ministry spokesman, told a news conference in the capital Astana.
He was responding to reports in several British newspapers suggesting Borat would be top of the agenda when the two leaders meet.
Another problem for Kazakhstan, ruled by Nazarbayev since 1989 and flush with oil reserves, is that its representation of itself often does not live up to the facts on the ground.
Nazarbayev frequently talks about the country's free media but a government-appointed organisation suspended Cohen's http://www.borat.kz site last December.
The Foreign Ministry's Ashykbayev has some form on Borat who has clearly got under the government's skin.
He was the one who last November threatened Cohen with "legal measures" and, in language echoing the Central Asian state's Soviet past, said the ministry did not rule out that the comedian was "serving someone's political order".
That backfired. Dressed as Borat, Cohen, who is Jewish, said: "I like to state, I have no connection with Mr Cohen and fully support my government's decision to sue this Jew."
The government has learnt its lesson. Official pronouncements have since been dull and on message: we understand that it's satire, we just don't like it.
As Socrates said, "They'll hang you for irony", but obviously *they* must grab hold of you first.
:)
2 comments:
Saw a doco about the pres. of Forsrok. Apparently he routinely has perceived opponents butchered.
The US is keen to support him, however, because of oil interests
and the countries strategic pozzy.
The difference between him and Saddam is only one of the number of people murdered, but there is no
talk of the US 'liberating' the country so far.
BaronCohen(Borat)is lucky he doesn't
actually live there; he would most likely be dead by now.
That part of the world is really brutish (that's Brutish, not British). As such, they don't share the calm, peacefulyl sensibility we have developed in the first world of anglophone nations.
Another way of looking at it is that if not for Borat, nobody in the genteel anglophone world would have bothered to look at how barbaric it actually isin FoSRoK.
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