The Daily Cartoon and Live Briefing: Friday, January 5, 2023

Notably: Speaking to the governor of an Afghan province in 1980, in the early days of the Soviet invasion of that country, the British reporter Robert Fisk (now the late Robert Fisk) was hearing about the local culture when the governor told him: “But we have two societies in our country, one in the cities and one in the villages. The city people accept equal rights but the villages are more traditional. Sometimes we have moved too quickly. It takes time to arrive at the goals of our revolution.” It is the perfect little foreign-correspondent quote. So perfect that it is a cliche. It has the ring of authenticity, and I’m not doubting that the governor told him those very words, and that they were accurate. But reported as they were in a dispatch datelined JALALEBAD in 1980, they created–they create still–that sense of insistent otherness that they are intended to create, what Edward Said in Orientalism encapsulated in a few wry words: the quote creates “a political vision of reality whose structure promoted the difference between the familiar (Europe, the West, ‘us’) and the strange (the Orient, the East, ‘them’). This vision in a sense created and then served the two worlds thus conceived. Orientals lived in their world, ‘we’ lived in ours.” But this is how false., in that regard, Fisk’s decision to carry the reproduce the quote only with Orientalist assumptions as context: I recall, as you may as well, that in 2004 a book called The Great Divide: Retro v. Metro America was making the rounds of newspaper review desks and a few other places. It was almost 300 pages of graphic analyses (with CD) of exactly what the Jalalebad governor was talking about, but in America. It was nothing but the divide between mostly rural and mostly urban America, and the same divisions. Of course we could argue that there’s no comparison between the rural crags of Afghanistan where, around the same weeks Fisk was there in 1980, he came across a schoolteacher and his wife who were burned and hung as an example of what happens to people who run a school for both girls and boys, in the same classrooms. But when what would you make of Aaron McKinney and Russell Henderson, two ostensibly upstanding rural Wyomingians, who picked up Matthew Shephard at a bar on Oct. 6, 1998, then took him to an isolated somewhere, tortured him, cracked his skull, and left him to die, because he was gay? It’s not an exceptional example. From Human Rights Watch last October 16: “… the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released its annual crime report for 2022 showing that anti-LGBTQ+ hate crimes were up sharply from the prior year, with a 13.8% increase in reports based on sexual orientation and a shocking 32.9% jump in reported hate crimes based on gender identity. … The FBI’s report noted that there were 1,947 recorded incidents relating to an alleged victim’s sexual orientation in 2022, up from 1,711 the year before, and 469 relating to an alleged victim’s gender identity, vs. 353 the year before. The gender identity category included 338 instances that were specifically anti-transgender and 131 that targeted someone who was gender noncomforming. […] The FBI’s report comes amid an unprecedented spike in anti-LGBTQ+ state legislation, with more than 550 bills introduced in 43 states, and more than 80 signed into law — more than doubling last year, which was previously the worst year on record. The wave of harmful and discriminatory legislation — some of which was engineered and championed by extremist GOP candidates running for president and their allies — and the concurrent spike in anti-transgender rhetoric and violence prompted HRC in June to declare a national state of emergency for LGBTQ+ people for the first time in the organization’s more than 40-year history.” There are differences with Afghanistan. But the differences are not those we assume, or, with our usual orientalism, take comfort in.

—P.T.

 

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Any time spent with your child is partly a damn sad time, the sadness of life a-going, bright, vivid, each time a last. A loss. A glimpse into what could’ve been. It can be corrupting.

–From Richard Ford’s Independence Day (1995).

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