Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

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Tal G in Jerusalem
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Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Wednesday, January 15, 2003
17:30 - Someone smell something?	(top)
The other day on NPR I heard a rather odd story. It was a recounting of the events portrayed in a new book out of France, written by (or from the perspective of) someone working with an aid group whose purpose is to find children in Afghanistan who have life-threatening illnesses which can be treated with Western medicine-- such as heart and pulmonary conditions-- and select a few lucky children to be taken to France for the life-saving surgery. Along the way, though, the kids were to get a taste of good old-fashioned immersive culture-clash. The very kind of traumatic plunge into an utterly alien, painfully decadent and soulless world-- so unlike the honor and purity of the native soil-- that I'd thought had been made to seem so hateful and colonialistic in recent years. The kids in question, aged 8-12 and thereabouts, obviously had never so much as flown in an airplane. They'd learned some French phrases, which the tale recounts as being the basis of a heartwarming introduction to the kids' new French foster parents. Bonjour, Madame! Merci beaucoup, s'il vous plait! Le plume est sur la table! Precocious, eager to please, obviously intelligent little jewels of human beings. This took place, however, only after the kids had been beseiged by the foster parents advancing on them with open arms, brandishing teddy bears. They'd never seen toys before, let alone adult women wearing t-shirts and jeans. It took ages before they were able to bring themselves to recite their memorized phrases. Settling in to French life was rocky. The account took pains to point out how the kids refused to eat, pushing away proffered croissants, saying that everything was so strange here-- how could they be sure the food was safe to eat? The account then shifted to the kids' impressions of urban France. On this front is where the ruminations on culture-clash seemed so surprising. the foster parents took the kids downtown, showed them the crowded plate-glass toy-store display windows, but (the narrator said) the kid in question simply furrowed his brows. This country is so odd, he said. All the houses have roofs. There is no dust, no broken-down buildings. He pondered for a moment; then he brightened. I wonder who built this country? Perhaps whoever it was could help Afghanistan! Now... I don't know about you, but when I hear stuff like this, I have to wonder just how precocious a kid has to be in order to say the exact things that someone would make up in order to further an agenda of guilt-for-being-Western and shaming-the-rich-West-into-rebuilding-war-torn-bombed-out-Afghanistan. Don't get me wrong: I'm all for doing whatever we can to rehabilitate Afghanistan and any other country where we have had to clean house; it's what we do, and have done, after nearly every war where we've accomplished our aims; besides which, we have a vested interest in making sure the people we've been trying to liberate actually get to keep their newfound opportunity. (We just can't erode their sovereignty in order to do it, or else we'll end up making them feel "occupied", like in South Korea, after the antebellum days have been forgotten.) But-- and maybe I'm just being a cynic here-- it seems just a little too convenient that these sentiments would be falling so irresistibly from the lips of bewildered little heart patients in a land far from home. I wish I remembered the title of the book in question, so I could get a closer look. Maybe it's entirely legit; I don't know from my offhand recollection. But I'm suspicious of anything that seems to be trying to pluck the strings of the aawwww reflex.