The American way and a third of the world

There’s a moment in “South Park,” episode 509 — Osama Bin Laden Has Farty Pants — where Stan or Kyle or one of the other capitalist pigs ask their Afghan counterpart: “But why does a third of the world hate us?” It’s a clever pun, but it’s a question we all find ourselves asking every now and then. And it’s a question that’s just like the math quiz that I hope to cheat on later in the semester — it’s hard to ask, but even harder to answer.

Now I happen to come from the third world — I’m brown, I rarely shower and, to top it all off, my name is Arafat. And I don’t hate America.

Bangladesh — where I come from — is about as third world as it gets, and it’s also on the list of nine or so countries that George Bush thinks is likely to blow us up at the earliest opportunity. None of my friends, however, seem to want to join the Jihad anytime soon, and if they met an infidel on the street, they’d nod politely and ask (in accented English) how things went. But it’s not as simple as that.

The American Way, that glorious path that we so righteously hold up as a shining beacon of hope to the struggling masses etc., is open to interpretation (unlike the Koran). And the third world’s viewpoint is defined by more factors than mere economical jealousy or laughter at the concept of pants that are falling off. In any case, you can get those pants cheaper in the third world.

An important consideration might be the reality of the American image being an amalgamation of movies and television shows like “National Lampoon’s Animal House,” “Dallas,” “The Simpsons” and “MacGyver.” “The A-Team” is looked upon as an all-time classic (which it is), and, to someone who has never actually been here, America’s actions on the international arena seem to reflect the presumptions that work behind such movies as “Rambo: First Blood. “

The first thing that should come to your mind is the dichotomy in my listing cult favorites side by side with thankfully forgotten 80s mishaps. And not seeing that, ace, is a huge part of living the third world life. It’s a place where you can get pirated DVDs of “The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen” for about two bucks before the movie is officially released (though why anybody would want to is beyond me). It’s also a place where, unless you’re the Dictator-in-Chief, you have to deal with two hours of power outages every day during the summer.

That was supposed to be a funny example, but there really is a dualism inherent in Islamic cultures. With a religion that has been so literally interpreted for the last couple of hundred years, it’s inevitable. It’s not unnatural for my friends to go to Friday prayers at the mosque and then a club later on for some hard drinking. What’s more, they don’t feel a moral conflict in doing so. It’s not betraying the sacred trust of Allah, it’s just living your life.

And that’s what most people from the third world do — they live their lives. It sounds cliché; in fact, it is. So cliché that Jon Bon Jovi, another great American hero, has even written a song about it. But, to invoke another cliché, it’s true.

As is unavoidable when you’re separated by 10,000 miles, language and no end of cultural conflicts, our perception of Americans and the American Way is convoluted. On the one hand, it has such people in it as the gentle Chandler Bing and the beautiful Monica Geller united in holy matrimony. On the other, there’s a hatted cowboy going around bombing the Jahannam out of places that seem to us to be quite random. The question I’ve often heard asked is: if it was a self-proclaimed team of elite paramilitary psychos (to borrow a friend’s phrase) that did the job, why did Bush have to declare war on the entire nation? And, of course, the inevitable follow-up: isn’t it a regime his kind put together in the first place?

There aren’t easy answers to that. Any country, if put in the same position as America in 9-11, and having America’s power of retribution, would have dealt with the situation in exactly the same way: make sure that other terrorists (and potential terrorists) can’t do what these scum did. But when you’re living hand-to-mouth in the same way as the victims of America’s wrath did, maybe one in ten thousand of them being potential terrorists, it’s hard to not feel sympathy for Afghanistan or Iraq or whoever may be next in line. For all you know, it might just be you.

The ramifications of these feelings can sometimes be pretty comical. We saw how, in some anti-American processions in Bangladesh, there were pictures of Bert from the “Bert is Evil” website. My own father is famous for boring people for hours on end with conspiracy theories on the CIA. But at the end of the day, the third world, which is a third of the world, realizes that a government’s actions aren’t necessarily the sum of the nation.

Hard as it may be to admit, America’s done a lot of good for the third world as well. There are thousands of imperialist swine living in Bangladesh (and every other third-world country) teaching kids to read and write, or lecturing in villages on arsenic in water or something. Americans are known for their friendliness and generosity, and, like Soylent Green, are people. A lot of the time, when I’m back in the old country and talking about my experiences in Boston, my fellow third-world Muslims are shocked and surprised when I say that I haven’t been to any toga parties. But they’re always mollified when I tell them that there’s a Springfield in Massachusetts.

Arafat Kazi is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences