Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group

Too Famous To Be Funny? How Sacha Baron Cohen’s Fame Is Undermining His Comedic Project

By Robert A. Saunders

Sacha Baron Cohen is up to his old tricks again—literally. The masterful comedian who brought us Da Ali G Show and Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan is—much to his dismay—being recognized nearly everywhere he goes. Baron Cohen is currently filming his third motion picture based on one of his original characters. In this case, it is the flamboyant Austrian fashionista Bruno. The film, which carries the cumbrous working title Bruno: Delicious Journeys through America for the Purpose of Making Heterosexual Males Visibly Uncomfortable in the Presence of a Gay Foreigner in a Mesh T-Shirt, is being produced by Jay Roach of Austin Powers fame and is expected to be released early summer 2009. Unfortunately for Baron Cohen (who could safely count on his anonymity when making the Borat film), his global stardom has transformed Bruno into self-parody even before the movie has been released: a cruel turn of fate for a true satirist.

Throughout the past year, Bruno has been spotted in the Americas, Asia, and Europe, generating media coverage in each case. It began with sightings at the Wichita airport which were quickly posted to the Web, followed by much a publicized controversy over a gay wrestling match in the Ozarks. In Israel, his interview of Mossad agent and a Palestinian academic instantly made news around the world. In California, his abortive attempt to interview Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger (a fellow Austrian, of sorts) attracted even more media attention. The scene created a strange post-modern simulacrum of the main stream media reporting on a faux journalist trying to report on a mass-mediated personality. In Milan, he stormed an Agatha Ruiz de la Prada fashion show before being escorted away by police, who soon recognized him as a world famous trickster. He then made headlines in Paris after disrupting English designer Stella McCartney’s show by sucking on a tampon among other things. While such media saturation makes one hell of a pre-release marketing campaign, it simultaneously deflates Baron Cohen’s singular form of humor.

This is not the first time that Baron Cohen has had to grapple with the bittersweet effects of over-exposure. After the initial season of Da Ali G Show, he was so well known in his native Britain that he had to take his show on the road to find new rubes to ridicule. Freed of the shackles of familiarity, he was able to entice amicable Southerners into anti-Semitic rants and provoke fatuous fashion designers to prescribe concentration camps for the poorly frocked. It was during those years that Baron Cohen (as Ali G) scored most high profile interviews, including Newt Gingrich, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Gore Vidal, and James Baker. Operating under the cover of an “educational program” for British youth, Baron Cohen’s cunning staff could rely on the insularity of Americans to guarantee both access and laughs. However, since the release of Borat—a film which grossed $260 million worldwide, the English mountebank is almost universally known across the Anglophone world (and well beyond it).

It is already becoming apparent that Baron Cohen’s social commentary cum guerilla comedy may not be able to withstand the fame he has single-handedly generated. Such a verdict was reinforced in October when Esquire named him as one of the “75 Most Influential People of the 21st Century,” but implied his once unique characters have already become a bit uninteresting. With the advent of globalized 24-hour news media transmitted via satellite TV, mobile phones, and personal computers, memes like Borat (and Ali G before him) are quickly injected into the cultural bloodstream of the world. An effective inversion of the dilemma faced by late 20th century anthropologists, Sacha Baron Cohen must go to ever more remote areas of the globe to interact with those who do not known him. These “field trips” ultimately detract from the original intent of Baron Cohen’s humor, which was to tell us about ourselves.

Unlike Ali G’s antics, which exposed a raw resentment to multicultural Britain, and Borat’s buffoonery, which exposed lingering racism and intolerance in the American South, Bruno will probably fail to break new ground. Surely, a few forced laughs will be gleaned from incontrovertible evidence of persistent homophobia in Arkansas, and we will smirk at the spoiled phantasmagoria of the contemporary catwalk fashion show—but to what end? Baron Cohen is inarguably a talented comedian and is already emerging as a bankable leading man (future roles include Sherlock Holmes and Abbie Hoffman), but there is a price to pay for such good fortune. Just as Aristophanes, Juventus, and Jonathan Swift learned in centuries past, fame and fortune blunt the rapier wit just as hunger and rejection sharpen it. However, it appears that Baron Cohen’s mass-mediated international recognition will wither his ability to speak truth to power long before the insidious lure of lucre saps his will to do so.

Robert A. Saunders is assistant professor of politics at the State University of New York at Farmingdale and is the author of The Many Faces of Sacha Baron Cohen: Politics, Parody, and the Battle over Borat.

Changing and Shaping Our Econmic Future: Reforming and Re-Building a Failed System

By Gerald L. Houseman

Many or most of the greedy and destructive games played on Wall Street persist in the wake of the housing and market melt-downs: unregulated credit default swaps, usurious consumer credit practices, excessive executive pay and perks, borderline (or worse) mergers and LBOs, a continuation of the opaque and unknown activities of hedge funds and the largely unreliable rating services, to name a few; and neither the Fed, the SEC, nor the Treasury can reassure us about any alleged benefits of the super-sized $700 billion bail-out. Arbitrary decisions have been made about which financial institutions will be given help or allowed to fail without any obvious reference to underlying criteria or decision-making. And a host of questions persist: Will the spirit of deregulation and “laissez-faire,” that is so costly to us all, be allowed to re-assert itself? Will the executives and decision-makers affected by all of this actually learn from their new experiences and take heed of useful lessons for the future? (The evidence so far can hardly be reassuring.) Will people continue to lose their homes and their savings? Can banks, insurance companies, and other financial institutions re-acquire trust and confidence? And, most importantly, how long will the printing presses be employed as the vehicles of all of this supposed economic salvation?

The national mood is cynical and mistrustful. There is a feeling abroad in the land, confirmed in various opinion measures, that the pain wrought by this chaos is not equally shared. It could even be asserted that the public believes that a giant shell game is now underway and that we will be victimized by the political and economic elites.

No one knows how the election will affect these issues and circumstances, but it appears that few of us are taking anything for granted. We should hope, from an ideal standpoint that the people who took us down this road would not be allowed to try to drive us out of it. But all of our wailing and gnashing of teeth should pause, all the same, so that we can think about the policy priorities and goals that must be brought to bear upon our plight.

We are in a recession, after all, and it is one which threatens to be peculiarly destructive and likely to last for a long time. Minimizing human suffering and misery has to be our central goal. And the response to this economic downturn must be aimed at society’s most needy groups. The first of these, quite obviously, are the home-owners faced with the loss of their property. Mortgage debt moratoriums must be combined with re-negotiated terms and a ban upon forcing people out of their homes. (When foreclosures occur, no one wins: neither the homeowner, neither the lender, nor the general public.) Secondly, we must look after those who have lost their means of support through no fault of their own. These people can be helped with extensions of unemployment benefits, job training, and, most of all, through a program of public works aimed at ending the neglect of the public domain that has cursed us through the past eight years --- re-building our roads, bridges, parks, schools, and community centers and, hopefully, carrying this out with green priorities and formats. This re-building program, the kind of program which has worked well in the past, can be the centerpiece of our recovery, and we will be doing ourselves a great favor by restoring these badly-needed public facilities. The third group that is badly in need of assistance is the state and local governments --- the school districts, the engineering and public works departments, and the various agencies in a position to promote this public works renewal. States and localities are faced with budget-busting finance and service-provision crises in addition to the problem of re-inventing and re-dedicating our public commitment to useful and needed capital projects.

There may be complaints voiced here and there about the need or efficacy of such programs; but the unemployed, the many people who support and rely upon public works, and our state and local governments will be happy to get behind what might be called “a Green New Deal.” One element of economics that has survived well through the years, and through the present collapse, is the Keynesian path to recovery. It is the key to turning away from the printing presses, at least eventually, and towards the creation of real growth.

Gerald L. Houseman is professor emeritus of political science at Indiana University, Fort Wayne, and is the author of Economics in a Changed Universe: Joseph E. Stiglitz, Globalization, and the Death of "Free Enterprise".

Bill Ayers: An Unrepentant Terrorist

By Paul Hollander

As some political commentators attack Barack Obama for his ties to radical Bill Ayers (a cofounder of the 1960s Weather Underground, which bombed public buildings), many academics have rushed to Ayers’s defense. These professors share Ayers's political beliefs and seek to dissociate these beliefs from his past actions; the latter are outright denied, ignored, or obfuscated. Some have even gone so far as to sign an online petition demanding protection for Ayers's right to free speech, as though that were the issue in question.

I wrote about Ayers in my book The End of Commitment: Intellectuals, Revolutionaries and Political Morality (2006), which included a chapter about intellectuals who refused to reconsider their radical leftist beliefs. Ayers preeminently belongs to this group. I came to this conclusion after reading his memoirs and other writings. What is most unusual about him is that, unlike so many other sixties radicals, he has refused to express any regret for his past record of political violence, most notoriously in a New York Times interview. In that interview he said, “I don’t regret setting bombs.... I feel we did not do enough.” As reported elsewhere, he summed up his radical-activist career as “guilty as hell, free as a bird—America is a great country.” In his memoirs he redefines the political violence he and his comrades engaged in as “armed propaganda.” He escaped prosecution on serious federal charges due to a technicality.

Ayers was and probably remains an idealist, but his idealism is the kind—all too common among supporters of extremist movements—that allows the idealist to resort to sordid means in pursuit of the glorious ends. In the Inside Higher Ed piece, Ayers is euphemistically and misleadingly described as “a passionate participant” in the civil rights and antiwar movements of the 1960s. Passionate he was, as well as intolerant, authoritarian, fanatical, and enamored with the grandiose and unrealistic political fantasies embraced by the most radical and most embittered groups (such as the Weathermen) of the period. In his defense we are informed that he is “a personable professor known to invite his classes over for dinner at his home” and that he “cooked pasta” for his students. Surely these moving gestures wipe the slate clean—a man of such warmth could not have planted bombs, could he? Many disreputable political figures have shown themselves to be capable of warmth on selected occasions, but this has little to do with their political beliefs and actions. Concentration camp commanders played (or listened to) classical music and took very good care of their pet animals, many mafiosi were good family men, and serial killers have often been described by their neighbors as nice, considerate people. I am not suggesting that Ayers belongs to these categories, only that acting kindly on nonpolitical occasions is compatible with displaying violent hatred in the political arena.

Ayers’s memoirs suggest that not only did he find it easy to justify his own and his friends’ political violence by the lofty goals pursued but that he was positively intoxicated by it; he expressed great pride in having been a good street fighter, in “fighting like madmen” the police and in the “warrior rising up inside me.” It cannot be ruled out that Ayers changed his mind about his past, modified his utopian longings and became more tolerant of those who don’t share his views of the world; it is even possible that he no longer believes that American society is the most detestable that ever existed. I have yet to see any statement of his that would indicate that such a transformation of his political persona has taken place.

Paul Hollander is professor emeritus of sociology at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and author or editor of numerous books, including most recently The Only Superpower: Reflections on Strength, Weakness, and Anti-Americanism (Lexington Books, November 2008).

Vote “YES” on Proposition 1!: Medicinal Marijuana Use on the Ballot in Michigan

By Matt Stolick

Entering the 21st century, the neurological has become central to the treatment of disease. In 1988 neurological receptors activated by THC in marijuana were discovered. Receptor cites for THC are found clustered in the basal ganglia and cerebellum of the brain, likely accounts for its effectiveness in alleviating muscle spasms and symptoms of other body movement disorders as these parts of the brain are associated with these same disorders. Marijuana promises to help reduce if not eliminate seizures, spasticity and bladder control problems. The main experienced and observed effects of marijuana use are relaxation and increased appetite, quite valuable therapeutically for enduring cancer chemotherapy treatments, including regular nausea and vomiting, aversion to food. Almost half of oncologists in 1991 would have prescribed marijuana were they legally able. Today the second largest physicians group in the U.S., the American College of Physicians, has endorsed therapeutic uses of marijuana. This proposal would enable physicians to recommend marijuana where clinically beneficial and thereby providing informed consent to patents.

For many or most of sufferers who find marijuana therapeutically beneficial, no adequate treatments currently exists. Synthetic alternatives in the form of THC pills have failed to provide adequate symptom management for a variety of reasons, including difficulty swallowing, metabolizing, and titrating. From a moral perspective, justice demands a citizen have the right to effective medical treatment. To deny this right, there must be provided very good justification. Society has none to justify wielding justice so as to punish and criminalize citizens merely treating their illnesses in the privacy of their own homes. Medical marijuana users have a valid claim on society, to protect them from government interference with their medical treatment. Rather than protecting medical marijuana users from harming themselves, they are preventing them from healing themselves and creating additional problems in already stress-filled lives.

Laws forbidding effective medical treatment are violent and unjust. Rather than being a matter for retributive justice, medical marijuana has to do with distributive justice, namely of suffering citizens having respected their most basic human right of pain control (a right few if any would forfeit to even live in a society in the first place). By prohibiting medical marijuana use, repugnance develops, one for the aggression of a law that creates criminals out of otherwise law-abiding citizens, and for the law more generally. Voting “Yes” to Proposition 1 demonstrates compassion and a basic sense of justice, as well as the scientific realization that marijuana may actually work to alleviate the pain and suffering associated with a variety of medical conditions.

Matt Stolick, Ph.D. author of forthcoming book, Otherwise Law-Abiding Citizens: A Scientific and Moral Assessment of Cannabis Use (Lexington Books of Rowman and Littlefield, November 2008)