laura.fo

A BBC reporter referred to Persepolis as a "non-fiction cartoon."

I listened to an NPR program on revolutionary Islam this morning (on the way to the mosque, no less) and was only annoyed twice.

Once, when the reporter said that criticizing the government is taboo in Egypt, but criticizing Israel is just fine. The reality is more nuanced than that, because a certain kind and level of Israel-bashing is interpreted as Egypt-bashing, too. Sadat was killed because he signed the Camp David accords. Anti-Zionism in the extreme puts you in league with his assassins.

Lila Abu-Lughod touched on this in Finding a Place for Islam, which isn't online as far as I can tell but is worth digging up.

Then, the reporter visits a museum full of anti-American symbols and asks a 14-year-old boy what he thinks of it. The boy says he has "no special opinion," but when pressed, he comes up with something. This is then used as evidence of the indoctrination of children against America, as though this boy does nothing all day but sit around hating the U.S. Forget soccer, forget homework, this is Iranian Boy, 14-Year-Old America-Hater. Children memorizing the Qur'an are similarly presented as young inductees into militant Islam, as though American children don't also go to Sunday School and sing songs they don't understand in happy Christian unison.

It's not so much that shows like that are inaccurate – I just get tired of reporters marching all over the world asking everybody and their mother what they think of America. Who cares? Tell me what you think of your own reality, tell me what you think of your mother-in-law's cooking or your school or your new haircut or whatever it is you're really thinking about today. If a Reebok representative comes up to me and asks me what I think of Reebok, I can probably invent something on the spot, but honestly, Reebok is not part of my day-to-day reality and anything I spit out upon questioning is going to appear to give Reebok a priority in my life that it just doesn't have. And if Reebok makes decisions based on my sputtered response, well, they're going to be misreading the situation in a way that gives them an exaggerated sense of their own importance, no matter what I say.