Not too long ago I heard an old episode of “This American Life” in which the subject of one of the stories was an Afghan man who had been in love with a girl whom he couldn’t marry because she had no dowry.
Wait – the subject wasn’t really the Afghan man, but the precious little feelings of the sheltered, over-educated, white, middle class media professional “producing” the story. As Ira explains in every episode, “Each week of course we choose a theme and bring you different kinds of stories on that theme, subsequently ditching the story in favor of our emotional reactions and miscellaneous quasi-philosophical musings.” So the Afghan man was maybe the nominal subject.
So this guy from BFA was sooooo in love some offstage girl – they were both about 20 if I remember correctly – and some sheltered, Western, white, overeducated, middle class woman decided to solve his problem by donating a dowry. It didn’t work, and the Afghan dude’s parents made him marry someone else anyway. The parents talked about objections to the son’s choice that nakedly betrayed a espousal of eugenics, which didn’t rattle the reporter half as much as the thought of Romeo not following his balls wherever they led, chasing his true love at all costs. “This is nothing at all like a Sandra Bullock romantic comedy,” the reporter must have thought.
So the reporter asks the guy whether he loves the woman with whom he has an arranged engagement to be married – with whom he has spent relatively little time. The dude says, “Yes, because she is my wife.” And the reporter/producer just lets it hang there, as if it was the craziest thing ever spoken. Of course loving your wife because it is the right thing to do – and lovely and happy and mutually beneficial – is what everyone did up until some time in the last 100 years. You either choose to love your wife because it is the right thing to do, or you pretend to love your wife in front of friends and neighbors because you don’t want them to know that you’re a selfish asshole. It’s what the reporter’s grandparents almost certainly did.
It was so striking to me that this Afghan cab driver, with nothing I would call education and not a pot to piss in or a window to throw it out of – this guy was so advanced in understanding beyond our pale American city dwelling friend on a subject so basic to everyday life, the American was blissfully unaware that he was not the one in possession of advanced knowledge.
Okay this next one is not an argument supporting any larger issue or anything of implied importance – it was just a disconnected thought that occurred while watching the doc “Afghan Star,” a chronicle of an “American Idol” knockoff in Afghanistan.
Two of the contestants were women, a move by the show’s producers that was already considered daring. One of the female contestants was very old-fashioned and literally had the support (via SMS votes) of the Taliban – LOL I know, right?! The other was a bad girl who, after she got voted off the show and got to sing one last song, used the opportunity to dance and remove her head covering. The whole country was in an uproar, and this induced a tangential exploration of clothing-related mores. The poor documentarians interviewed a lot of people, trying to get material on why the Islam-influenced culture felt so strongly about ancient clothing rules, but as is typical of such man-on-the-street business anywhere, they only got colorful reassertions of things everyone already knew; nobody was able to argue for the rules or even give historical perspective – just “You have to because it is what you do.”
In this expansive vacuum of ideas, sounds, and imagery, my mind wandered to what it would be like to force American women to cover everything but their eyes. Of course when you daydream about women, there is only one direction in which all hypotheses lead, so I wondered how hot would it be to get a woman in bed who had wrapped up everything but the corneas? Mighty hot, I imagine. You would probably sprout wood as soon as you saw her elbows; and your pulse could be taken visually by the time you had her down to what amounts to business casual in contemporary USA.
So there is an upside. I’m just sayin’...
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