The New Ugly Americans and Their World Series Syndrome — Part One
An old trope about boorish Midwesterners abroad has evolved to include miseducated false-flag activists and their allies.
This is the fourth and final Establishing Shots essay, part of a series that lays the foundations for my personal viewpoint on the causes and effects of Wokeism. It’s preceded by:
‘The Three Heads of Woke Cerberus’;
‘The Comforting Addictiveness of Victimhood (Parts One and Two)’;
‘The Meaning of Orthodox Atheism and the Three Forms of Religion.’
Like ‘Victimhood,’ I’ve had to break this into two parts so as not to overwhelm readers. The second part will conclude with a coda that explains how the four Establishing Shots fit together, and what readers can expect in the future as I drill down to the many themes and ideas that I planned for this newsletter, and others that I’m unearthing as I go along.
This is the point where I’m obliged by Substack to ask you to
“The essential American soul is hard, isolate, stoic, and a killer.
It has never yet melted.”
― D.H. Lawrence
STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND
My first major shift in cultural perspective happened when I was five. I was told that there was a major change of plans: I would not be attending Collegiate — putatively the oldest school in the New World, featured on the fridge in a recent episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel — but moving far away to a place called Rome, where they didn’t speak English.
To allay my apprehensions, the adults in my world were uniformly excited for me and this big new adventure I would be undertaking. I was given a picture book about Rome, a kiddy cassette tape player that didn’t record, and a set of Berlitz Italian language tapes, which I took with me to nursery school attached to the All Soul’s Church on Lexington Avenue on my last day to show everyone where I going.
When I got into the elevator with my nanny for the last time, teachers and kids waved goodbye as if cheering a departing ship. “Ciao, Jamie!” said a blond woman I liked — the memory has kept my affection for her intact.
“What’s that mean?”
“It means both ‘hello’ and ‘goodbye’ in Italian.” The elevator doors shut on my old reality, leaving me hugging the cassette player, whispering my first word in Italian, “Ciao.”
The tapes were useless, as I imagine they must be for most people in their current Rosetta Stone form. My younger sister and I learned it while playing with neighborhood kids on the dusty island dividing the road where we lived in the Parioli neighborhood. The fragments of memory are just as dusty and impressionistic: the frustration of Italian kids trying to communicate with us, shouting in my face as if I’m hard of hearing. An abrupt shift in time to a few months later finds me on the same island with the same kids, but now we understand each other. They’re still shouting and gesticulating, but that’s how Italians communicate.
We were enrolled in the British school, St. George’s, as much because it was within walking distance of home as it was closer to my Northeastern Anglo-American natal culture than the Overseas School of Rome (OSR), which was primarily for embassy kids. Similar versions of American public schools were established in most foreign capitals after the War.
The Foreign Service in America doesn’t attract the same caliber of employees as it does elsewhere, largely because we’re a mercantile society with business people at the top of the social hierarchy; a career in government isn’t the best way to get rich. As a result, government jobs rank lower on the restrictive American social spectrum that I was born into than they do in other social groups, unless they’re elected or appointed officials of a certain rank. You make your money and raise your family, after which you might choose to fulfill your civic duty with a politically appointed ambassadorship, a cabinet position, and/or lashings of philanthropy; America’s culture of philanthropy is unique and far more effective than the government-run arts and charitable institutions of Western countries.
That meant Halloween was over for us children. Neither Italians nor the English practiced trick-or-treating; they barely acknowledged the Day of the Dead on November 1st. The only place we could go trick-or-treating was the embassy compound, a typical fortified condo where American foreign service and military personnel lived together for security reasons. We weren’t allowed anywhere near it, as if it might be a contagion of the wrong sort of Americanness. As the years passed, we learned not to develop close friendships with embassy kids from democratic nations — they left too frequently. Dictatorships were there till the next coup d’état, and often beyond that.
I remember the end of trick-or-treating as distinctly as any unpleasant milestone in a person’s life. We were driving back from a typical weekend exploring the palace and museum of Urbino, or a place like that, the week before Halloween; Mum and Dad ate, wine-tasted, catacombed, museumed, churched, ruin-haunted and palace-gawked their way through every worthy restaurant, undiscovered resort, best restaurant, and historical and cultural site in Italy.
As we approached Rome, I brought up Halloween, wondering what my costume would be, perhaps. I was learning Italian, connecting English words, as well as how to read and write. I’m probably conflating memories: at that moment I was puzzling as to why, if the word in Italian for ‘hospital’ was ‘ospedale,’ the sign on the side of the road was a white H in a blue circle.
“No trick-or-treat this year.”
“Why?”
“They don’t have it in Italy.”
“But what about the compound?” I’d likely heard about the compound from Brian Stieglitz, an American boy a year older than me who lived in the apartment next door. He and his sister went to OSR.
“We’ve decided that there will be no more sugar in the house. Sugar is bad for you; rots your teeth.”
Were there tears? I’m sure there were — wailing, too. Never the sort of American-tantrum wailing, the psychotic break kind that Demi Lovato and her Twitterati might unleash in the green room on the Tonight Show if Jimmy Fallon messed up and said, “I hear you’re no longer bipolar,” when he was supposed to share the bravery of her struggle with self-victimization by praising her courage for coming out, again, as “no longer nonbinary.”
It would’ve been a muted wailing, internalized, from the kind of children who might send their mother’s obstetrician a thank-you note on monogrammed Tiffany stationery the day after they were born, “for slapping me on the bottom so I could draw my first breath.”
And so there was no sugar in the house for the next ten years. To this day I prefer savory foods to sweet, although I am addicted to Talenti and Ben & Jerry’s.
This means I spent my formative years completely isolated from mass American culture. Even when we resumed summering at our country house in Upstate New York again, in a gated Victorian summer colony overlooking the Hudson, it was a bubble of perfectly preserved settler-colonist Yankeeness, “British culture with the fun bits taken out,” as I describe it.
Dad was constantly caught between two thoughts: We weren’t growing up American, but there were too few American children our age in Rome from our rarified socio-cultural group with whom we could associate. There were the legendary Cheever family of Formula One racing driver Eddie, who also went to St. George’s, but he was six years older than me. His younger brother, Ross, was closer to my age, but they lived on another side of town.
The almost-as-legendary Griffiths lived around the corner with a pack of four or five male human Labrador puppies, none exactly my age, who so overwhelmed me the one time Dad took me there for a play date, which was more akin to juvenile warfare, that I spent the afternoon examining the incisors on the snarling head of their leopard-skin rug and daydreaming that I was Young Tarzan destroying the beautiful, aggressive Griffith boys with my benevolent superhuman strength.
When I was 9 or so, before Dad gave in, ended our self-imposed exile and we began going back to the States for summers, he took me one Saturday to Little League practice at OSR, the one and only time I went there. By then I saw Americans as the rest of the world sees us in general, as arousing and life-threatening at the same time. The American kids at OSR were bigger than European kids their age, as I was; louder, casually powerful; more attractive and healthier than Europeans; block-shaped and rudimentary, with little sense of sarcasm or irony; most notably, feral-sounding with their growled vowels and rhotic Rs.
I was already swimming competitively, but I was hopeless at land sports: I could barely run, owing to an as-yet-undiagnosed congenital hip defect inherited from my mother, thanks to which I’m about to have my second total hip replacement.
When the coach saw that I ran like a juvenile geisha in broken geta sandals, he made me a catcher. I caught a few balls in the unwieldy mitt and did okay. After practice, Dad said he was proud of me. He was lying, as usual, probably following a chapter on proper communication with a sensitive child from Dr. Spock. He never took me again.
Aside from the differences in culture, my observation is the reason White Americans look like hardy farmers even in tailored business suits is our milk consumption as children, as well as being descended from European agrarian stock.
Part of my daily chores — a phenomenon far-more-coddled, less-well-to-do Italian and European children didn’t have — was to walk the dogs in the morning and after dinner. Once a week, I’d go down to the local café and pick up seven liters of milk for the week, our consumption between three children, one of whom was a toddler, and two adults: Mum and Dominic the Houseman, who drank a cloud in their morning tea. Dad didn’t eat breakfast and traveled from Sunday night to Friday evening, making the world safer for democracy advertising.
At one point a dairy farmer’s strike in Italy created a dire milk shortage that went on for months. It was severely rationed: one liter per household per week. On my milk-run day, I had a spat with Mum: I didn’t think it was right to ask for our full weekly complement under the circumstances. “Just do it, would you please,” Mum said. “Think of your baby brother.”
I entered the café, called a ‘bar’ in Italian, my juvenile-geisha steps narrower than usual to delay the embarrassment; plus, it was far more crowded than I wanted it to be. In the memory, the chatter dies down when I walk in, even though I’m maybe 10 or 11; Americans were constantly stared at, sometimes followed in the streets when we visited smaller towns — post-War Italians were obsessed.
“Good evening. Seven liters of milk, please,” I said to the owner, the same line every week.
Unbelievably, he obliged; I was hoping for the same rations as everyone, or maybe haggling down to half. The patrons standing at the bar and sitting at tables agreed with me, and Italians, Romans especially, do not hesitate to make their feelings heard full throttle. The commotion was worse than I’d feared.
“Bah, shut up and leave him alone!” the owner shouted. “They’re Americans. They need it.” With the uttering of that word of power, “americani,” the Balrog of dissent was instantly banished into the hissing of the coffee machine. Humiliated, I left with seven families’ worth of rations. If I slow down the memory and scan the patrons, they were mostly middle-aged men who likely remembered the Liberation of Italy, ancient history for a boy my age, but only thirty years ago for them.
Like every Westerner, I made a big deal about what seemed to be yawning differences between the various cultures of the Global North, delineated by languages, dialects and regional accents until I was twenty-four, when I stepped through the looking glass into India.
If indeed “everything in life happens for a reason,” my formative years in Rome, New York, France and Australia can be seen as basic training that prepared me to adapt more easily to living in a million-layered country that is the rest of the world turned inside out, upside down — it’s easily the most different place on Earth.
That ultimate shift in realities happened while I was the features editor of a glossy monthly magazine in the late ‘80s. The fashion editor, Saskia van der Lingen, was fixated on doing a special issue on India. The Government of India was willing to give in-kind sponsorship provided I go with the team and write three articles about the different aspects of the country.
I’d never had any desire to go; my impression of India was of a desperately impoverished, famine-and-disease-riddled country from One Thousand and One Nights as imagined by Hieronymus Bosch. Had Saskia not also been my closest friend at the time, a fellow Ameropean of the Rome Chapter, I would’ve told her to take a hike. I feigned indifference, but I was terrified of going there, as most Americans are.
One of the three articles was to be about Bollywood. With no idea where to start connecting with that world. Did they have publicists? They didn’t. I called a fashion designer friend, Mary McFadden, who went to India often, and asked if she could hook me up with a lead into the largest film industry in the world. She introduced me to an Indian director friend who happened to land in New York on the day I called her, one of the more momentous synchronicities of my life.
My impression of India wasn’t wrong; it was indeed a maze of One Thousand and One Nights tableaus imagined by Bosch, and so much deeper and further than that. By stepping into India, every cell of my being, every neural pathway was rewired to view all of humanity, our places in the world, and our interactions with each other from a viewpoint so much broader as to seem like it’s from a fifth dimension.
If I thought I was worldly, I was merely Westernly. Thirty-five years later, I see the four European languages that I speak as mere variations of each other, not a big deal; it’s also perfectly normal for Europeans to speak a few languages, the world’s lingua franca, English included.
Hindustani, or conversational Hindi/Urdu, is the special one that unlocks the memories and experiences swirling my personal Pensieve, Dumbledore’s magical basin of memories and experiences. Much as I would love to flood America with what I’m seen and how I’ve processed it, I can only use my wand to pluck so many strands of my experience at one time to articulate my perspective.
For the purpose of this essay, I see the seven, seventy, seven hundred liters of American privilege eclipsing all our petty gripes, perceived offences, alternate facts and “my truths.” Out there, over there, abroad among the billions who look to us for leadership and beg for our protection; who dress like us and clamor for our technology; who listen to and mimic our music, and devour our filmed content; who still dream of a land of limitless possibilities inhabited by gruff, badass, healthy giants, who call us meiguo ren, the people of the Beautiful Kingdom, as the Chinese word for ‘Americans’ translates — to them, we are all the same, and they are not wrong.
But they are not the same as us, something that far too many Americans assume, to the detriment of our national discourse as well as our responsibility as humanity’s single parent. True, they have chosen us, adopted us as their guardians; no matter the manipulative slogans of unworldy social justice activists, we are no empire, no colonial power. Still, we have a responsibility to broaden our understanding of humanity, if only to reach a better understanding of ourselves.
Wokeism in particular makes too much of the petty differences that are really just so much manure to fertilize their delusions of victimhood, to reinforce their warping of history in order to demonize and criminalize Whites. Wokeism is a lecture-hall charade, an unseemly, vulgar joke that the rest of the world rightly thinks of as absurd, even as we’re forcing them to buy it.
Let me pluck another strand of experience from my Pensieve that devours a snarling Woke threat-elevation device: the evils of “othering.” Take it from the gay boy exiled within his own family while growing up as one of the few Earthlings on Mars, who was for a long time the only American screenwriter in Bollywood: Otherness is a beautiful thing, something to be celebrated, nurtured and cherished, not suffocated under an avalanche of American sameness calling itself “diversity.” Otherness is the only true diversity there is.
Ugly American
A stereotype depicting American citizens as exhibiting loud, arrogant, demeaning, thoughtless, ignorant, and ethnocentric behavior mainly abroad, but also at home.
— Wikipedia
CLOTHES MAKETH THE MAN
American kids growing up as expats quickly learn what an Ugly American is, especially if the city you live in has heavy tourism traffic. In the 70s, when few Americans had passports, our top destinations were London, Paris, and Rome; with a population of around one-third of the first two cities, Rome had the highest per capita. It wasn’t just ruins and lots of cats, but many tourists, the most embarrassing of whom were the Americans, which is saying a lot: the English, Scandis and Germans wearing socks with sandals were almost as noxious.
A lot of the ugliness of American tourists had to do with stylishness; Italy is obsessed with superficial appearances and aesthetics, with showing a beautiful face and avoiding an ugly one. American tourists also tended on the side of obesity and wore drip-dry, indifferently designed clothing, and breached common cultural proprieties, like wearing shorts in the city. Ugly Americans back then could be spotted in a dense crowd two hundred meters away.
In general, America was far less sophisticated and worldly than it is now: there were no Starbucks, just Folgers; no proper pasta, San Marzano tomatoes, or olive oil, just Chef Boyardee. But don’t mistake this for a classist judgment on Americans who weren’t raised in the sort of precious, Jet Age privilege that I was. As I put it, “I was born with a silver spoon in my mouth and a passport in my diaper bag.” Expecting Americans to be as worldly as I am would be pure, Marie Antoinette-level snobbery, and Yankees try not to do that.
I likewise find European disdain for American ignorance about geography and world affairs to be even uglier than what amounts to a lack of experience and knowledge about every corner of the world under American influence, which is expected of every one of her citizens. If you were to ask those same Europeans to point Iowa out on a map, or to explain any number of basic facts about American life, they wouldn’t be able to do it.
If those same casually anti-American Europeans understood the full breadth of the American government’s sophistication in foreign affairs, the scale of our combined State Department and intelligence communities, their jaws would drop under the pressure of cognitive dissonance. I’m thankful for Showtime’s Homeland and Netflix’s The Diplomat for opening a window into the complex, sleek machine that is our single-parent-to-the-world apparatus, much as I wish the former had been created by Armando Iannucci.
I’ll let my über-worldly Australian American mother set the record straight: “The average American is far better educated than the average English yob.” Let me add another observation to that: Europe’s most significant contributions to mankind in the 20th century were communism, fascism and civilization-threatening world wars. That’s some pretty damned ugly shit right there.
"The blacklist was a time of evil, and no one on either side who survived it came through untouched by evil."
— Dalton Trumbo
When I was looking up the definition and origin of the term ‘Ugly Americans’ for this essay, Wikipedia mentioned a long-lost book from the 1920s, Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad, written by my first boyfriend Oliver’s* grandfather, Donald Ogden Stewart Sr., a member of the Algonquin Roundtable and an Oscar-winning, blacklisted communist screenwriter who, betrayed by Hollywood during the Red Scare of the 50s, fled McCarthyism to live in self-imposed exile in London.
There’s more to this particular synchronicity than Oliver’s grandad: Wokeism is often compared to an inverted form of McCarthyism, with the commie chickens having now come home to roost in Hollywood in the form of Wokeism, to seek revenge for what happened to talented people like Donald Sr., meted by the professional descendants of those who betrayed him.
Hollywood is the greatest cultural influencer in the world. Its cowardly culture and boorish behavior are no different today than when Oliver’s granddad went into self-imposed exile rather than testify before the House Un-American Affairs Committee (HUAC). As Donald Sr.’s close friend and colleague Katharine Hepburn wrote in her memoir,
Donald Ogden Stewart is a man who is willing to pay the price of his own passionate beliefs. He went in one quick step from being the highest-paid writer in Hollywood (Spencer Tracy and I were only two of his beneficiaries) to a man without a job. … He never regretted it, never moaned, never excused himself. He simply believed passionately.
I use ‘Hollywood’ as a synecdoche for an industry that spans the entire Anglosphere: Canada, the UK, Australia, Ireland and New Zealand. I’d argue that, as an anti-Woke writer-creator, Graham Linehan of Father Ted fame is something of a modern Donald Sr. character; having been blacklisted by Greater Hollywood in the UK for heresies against gender-queer activism in the name of truth and biology, for standing with JK Rowling, he’s now broke, unemployed and single.
His wife was spooked by the death threats and the relentless game of Whac-a-Woke that an activist on the frontlines of the culture wars must manage all day, every day — good riddance, I say. Linehan himself says that he can’t help it; it’s something he has to do. As he said in an interview with The Times of London:
“I did it for my wife and daughter, even though we broke up,” he said of messaging that left him accused of being transphobic and crowdfunding to try to fight lawsuits. “I did it for them and I’d do it again. I don’t think I’d have been doing my job as a father if I hadn’t been fighting against this stuff.”
I understand that sentiment; it echoes precisely what drove me to create this newsletter. I’m fully aware that adding myself to such august company is flimsy, at best: I’ve never attained anything near the success of Donald Sr. or Linehan. Still, I see my decision to step aside from filmed content for the foreseeable future, perhaps forever, as philosophically no different than what either writer did in the spirit of standing with their truth.
I’m certain that even if I had their stature in the business and stood to risk more than I am now, I would still do it; finding the connection between Donald Sr. and the Ugly American for this piece is a synchronicity that I choose to take as a pat on the back of encouragement and affirmation for this segment of my strange, eventful life journey.
I’m expanding the Ugly American trope beyond the badly dressed, loud, entitled, drip-dry yokel from the Midwest — the direct descendant of whom is MAGA Republicans, who don’t travel abroad much — to include the Woke both overseas and at home, who must make up the batter part of the ~40% of Americans who now have passports. All annoying critical theorist sophistry aside, it’s a welcome improvement.
However, whether it’s dancing under the full moon with other firangs on a beach in Thailand or hovering in a hot balloon over the Bagan temples of Myanmar, it doesn’t mean the New Ugly Americans understand the Burmese, just that there is more to the world than they knew before the trip. Their worldview hasn’t been expanded by much — they haven’t connected with the culture, and the only way to do that is to speak that language automatically.
An expat friend of mine from San Francisco’s Liberal establishment who lived in India for thirty years, taught art history for many years at an American study abroad program in Delhi. She was forced to resign after American students objected to her use of triggering words like ‘civilization’ in the context of Indus Valley Civilization, which is what it’s officially called, and filed official complaints to the program’s administration that, as a White person, she shouldn’t be teaching Nonwhite history.
In a Facebook DM the other day apropos of something else, my friend handed me an example of the New Ugly American abroad:
I used to get push back from American students in Delhi when I would insist that they dress in a culturally appropriate manner. Somehow it seemed like a good idea to go out in miniskirts and stilettos until they were harassed by men who thought the worst. Many tears were shed in my office the morning after an awkward encounter.
Sounds like a modern version of overfed Midwesterns in piazza Navona in the 70s, in the center of the capital of the most stylish country in the world, wearing garish polyester tops over shorts, socks and sneakers. Except donning “the never-ending hooker look,” in India far worse — the thought makes me jittery with fear for those thoughtless young women.
Those old-school Ugly Americans in piazza Navona were merely lost in the maze of ancient streets pre-GPS, trying to get their bearings with paper maps. The New Ugly Americans come trailing entitlements like the politics of offense, respect and victimhood as they saunter around the capital of the caste system, Untouchability, colorism, and Hindu-Muslim sectarian strife.
Ever attuned to the politics of heresy, they sacrifice a White professor, the expert on the subject they pretend to want to learn, by burning her on crucibles of intersectionalities that have convinced them that Woke chimeras like ‘systemic racism’ exist in their homeland, when none have existed for generations. In their relentless selfie-hunts for cheap empowerments, they terrorize the wise, the experienced, and the cultured, those who have dedicated their careers to their education.
Fortified with the righteousness of communal narcissism, they have become vampires draining America of common sense, basic truth and objective reality, replacing them with lies and willful ignorance in order to reflect a more beautiful image of their juvenile, Ugly American minds.
* There is good reason to believe that André Aciman’s novel Call Me By Your Name was inspired by my relationship with Oliver Ogden Stewart. One of the more obvious similarities is that Armie Hammer’s character is also named Oliver.
KIDNAPPING CLEOPATRA
My split with Hollywood began in earnest in 2021, when a faux scandal erupted over the supposed lack of “diversity” at the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), better known as the charitable organization that hosts the annual Golden Globes.
The Golden Globes aren’t nearly as derided by the rest of the world as they are by Hollywood itself; that is, until publicists, of all the professions barely related to the filmmaking process, decided to take them seriously and make an example out of them.
During the 2021 awards season, a group of 100 publicists dragged the HFPA, a charity that has distributed $55 million over the past 28 years, out to the guillotine because they had no members of Sub-Saharan African descent. This didn’t mean that it wasn’t diverse: from 2018 until 2020 it was headed by a South Asian, Meher Tatna, then by a Turk, Ali Sar, from 2020 until 2022.
Even by Hollywood standards, the hysteria was unbelievable: This, they claimed, was evidence of real systemic racism, within Hollywood itself. Jane Fonda, who in March of this year said she’d thought about murdering anti-abortion Pro-Lifers, threw her weight behind the boycott. Arch-Scientologist stuntman Tom Cruise returned his three awards.
As a filmmaker living in Los Angeles, I have considerable experience with how unworldly Hollywood is: if New York is the capital of the world, L.A. is the capital of Americanness, both its ugly and outrageously beautiful meiguo ren sides. I was also once the comically underpaid features editor for the American edition of an Italian magazine; I know how shallow-pocketed, seat-of-their-pants foreign publications are compared to their American counterparts, and I was working in the heyday of supermarket glossies, when ad money flowed in a rush down Madison Avenue.
On top of that, I’ve had the benefit of third-person experience with the HFPA: In 2001 I briefly dated a member, a journalist from a British publication, who explained in detail the grind of the foreign entertainment press in Hollywood, who barely make enough to cover the cost of living; when his boss came to town, the journalist slept on an air mattress in the living room of his tiny one bedroom.
As “soft” journalism, covering the entertainment industry doesn’t rank highly in the news categories of any publication’s departments in any country. The few celebrity interviews that I’ve done in my career were a slog: the stars are all talked out from the press junket; they’re unlikely to tell you anything new; and the filmmaking process is not that interesting — long hours on set, sleep camp for a couple of weeks, then on to the next one.
In addition to the low pay and status among peers, there are considerable criteria that HFPA members must meet. These are the bylaws:
Applicants should be working journalists who live anywhere in the United States and cover entertainment for foreign publications. They already should be a member of or accredited by a recognized journalistic organization. Applicants may report for print publications, radio, television or online and may be photojournalists. Applicants must submit eight examples of their journalistic work product from the past two years, evidence of payment for their journalistic work, and at least one letter of recommendation from a professional active in the journalism industry.
Representing a foreign publication in Hollywood is rather like a politically appointed ambassadorship: You need to have your own money. Meher Tatna has lived here for 20 years; having also written for the sort of publications Tatna scribbles for in India, I can say with some confidence that she funds her red-carpet life here by other means.
The remuneration from being associated with Hollywood and its second-most-important awards show is almost entirely prestige and ego-stroking. I’ll bet that when Tatna goes back to Mumbai for a favorite niece’s wedding, the guests and relatives bow their heads a few degrees more respectfully when they greet her; she will gift relatives with discreet bits of high-wattage international gossip to share on the verandah of the Willingdon Club.
I’m not familiar with West African publications, but I’ll take a guess and presume they pick up what few tidbits they publish about Hollywood from the news wires. Barring a smattering of representation in other European countries, that leaves countries with a history of slaves of West African descent: the UK and the Caribbean.
The highest per capita income of the Caribbean nations is the Bahamas at $27,000, or one-third of the U.S.; the lowest is Jamaica, with $5,500, around one-eighth of the UK, its former rulers. I’m going to assume none of those countries have entertainment journalists willing to relocate to Los Angeles and use their own money for the honor of interviewing celebrities nobody outside the Anglosphere cares about much.
What Fonda, Cruise, most of Hollywood, and wailing antiracism activists on Twitter assumed was that the rest of the world is broken down demographically the way America is. After all, the brouhaha was about representation, and the demands were specific: despite being an explicitly “foreign” organization, the HFPA needed to bring its membership in line with America’s demographic breakdown, meaning from zero to 13% people of West African descent, immediately, or the hundred dizzy publicists would boycott it, and take the stars they represent with them.
Constrained by its bylaws and the lack of any star-fucking Black foreign entertainment journalists anywhere in the world who were professionally unambitious and rich enough to fund that lifestyle, the HFPA was unable to pivot fast enough to find 13+ new Black members. Under pressure, NBC refused to broadcast the 2022 ceremony, depriving the charity of ad revenue to support its commitments to the organizations it supports.
In a saner America, there might be some variant of diplomatic courtesy extended to a foreign organization dedicated to the promotion of Hollywood’s products. Note that there is no expectation of reciprocity from the American entertainment press to cover the entertainment sectors in the member countries of the HFPA. I follow the American trades pretty closely, and there is almost no coverage of India or other regional countries with robust filmed-content sectors. How is that “diversity”?
In 2022, the HFPA cleverly elected Helen Hoehne, a German America, to recruit members of Sub-Saharan descent. The charity’s website states that 10% of current members are Black. I have no idea how that was pulled off, whether the rules were bent, or how these miraculous Black fishes and loaves suddenly materialized from countries that don’t share our demographic makeup or our interest in the American entertainment industry, but I’m glad they were able to “get it done!” as Hanoi Jane told them during the brouhaha in 2021.
I’m sure things are back to normal, and the HFPA will continue to be treated as third-rate citizens of the most crass, venal, egotistical culture in America. Hey, they’re adults; I might not approve of their decisions — I advocated getting rid of the Golden Globes altogether — but I support their right to make them.
Another incident that underscores the one-way street that is American Wokeism’s attitude toward the rest of the world erupted a few days ago over the upcoming release of Netflix’s docudrama Queen Cleopatra. Since at least the Civil Rights Era, Black Americans have insisted that Ancient Egypt was a Sub-Saharan culture that they were within their rights to lay claim to. Despite the fact that every respectable historian and Egyptologist has debunked that belief, it has taken root and flourished in the collective psyche among a large majority of Black Americans. Sub-Saharan Africans themselves make no such claim.
This appears to result from pushback against the perceived threat of White supremacy, the same mindset cowered by insecurity that thinks the word “civilization” is triggering because it implies that West Africa had none to speak of. I’m really not sure, and given how needlessly intrusive the modern antiracism movement has been, I’m not inclined at this point to look up what motivates specific Black fictionalizations, other than James Baldwin’s late-life, outrageously racist statements about Whites.
One of the many double standards of Wokeism is this notion of “cultural appropriation,” another threat-elevation device aimed primarily at rich White kids who attend Burning Man, it seems. I’m not quite sure what other existential threat to Blackness there is that Whites are seen to appropriate other than dreadlocks, which aren’t Black American, Jamaican or even African; the Rastafarians themselves appropriated them from Hindu ascetics living on the island, a.k.a. yogis, whose physical meditation practice, yoga, the West has also appropriated with much relish, and we’re all the healthier for it.
Like Rastas, yogis in India and in Britain’s former colonies — South Asians are the second-largest ethnic group in Jamaica — are massive wake-and-bake stoners. The word ganja is Hindi for weed, the Indika variety, of course, because India is where that comes from. The conical chillum pipe is Indian, too.
In general, desi South Asians, like White Americans and Europeans, as well as every other world race and ethnicity I can think of outside of some Nonwhite American socio-cultural groups, are more than happy to share their culture with anyone who wants it. There’s also the fact that there is no art, culture or even language without appropriation. But all of Wokeism is pretentious make-believe full of doublespeak and double standards; you can’t object because you can’t speak for Woke experience, even if it is your experience that is being spoken about, not theirs. Capisci?
This isn’t the first time that Black appropriation of Egyptian history and culture has caused an uproar in Egypt itself: Beyoncé was called out for impersonating Nefertiti in her 2018 tour. But there is a larger problem with this misidentification with Ancient Egypt than a pop star posing as another people’s royalty, which is the legitimizing of Black antisemitism — blessed by Baldwin’s essay ‘Negroes Are Anti-Semitic Because They’re Anti-White’ — through identification with pharaonic culture.
Kanye’s antisemitic ramblings about Blacks being real Jews and White Jews being racist pretenders are only echoing radical Afrocentric crackpots activists like Dr. Ben, considered the father of African Studies, and the sort of revisionist historian whose intellectual heirs we see stirring up needless trouble with CRT.
Given that there is no historical or genetic basis for casting Queen Cleopatra with a Black woman, you would think that Netflix, reflecting Hollywood’s purported cultural sensitivity and mindfulness of appropriation, would make sure to cast at the very least an Arab actress; Middle Easterners are far less represented in filmed content than performers of Sub-Saharan descent throughout the Anglosphere.
But historical accuracy isn’t the point. The point is to advance the notion that history has been written by Whites to oppress Blacks, under the widespread assumption that Whites are as obsessed with race, skin color, and historical injustices — which the ancestors of most Americans of all races experienced, or they wouldn’t have come here — as Blacks are. Except it isn’t human nature to be preoccupied with what you don’t perceive as a threat, and perception of threat is all this is.
The director of Queen Cleopatra, Tina Gharavi, is Persian. One would think she’d want her own ethnicity represented, seeing as Cleopatra might have been part Persian, but at a stretch. Then again, Gharavi is working for Jada Pinkett-Smith, a woman whose husband outed himself to the world as the violent sadist that Hollywood Black and Latino gays have always known him to be, and whose teenage son sued her for emancipation.
Remember that Queen Cleopatra is a docu-drama, or dramatized nonfiction that purports to be real history. Had it been fiction, where diversity casting of a classic role — in say, Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra — would give the text new meaning, it might meet my criteria for proper diversity casting.
Egyptian historians and cultural pundits have been unequivocal in their pushback to the willfully inaccurate representation of their history on a prestigious premium channel with global reach. It’s not just thumb-your-nose disrespectful, it’s a form of defamation. Countries like Egypt feel even more powerless than Black Americans do, except they truly are powerless, not brainwashed from childhood by repeated fictions about White oppression until that forms their unshakeable worldview.
The “real truth” is that Black Americans influence global culture in ways they are too blinded by communal narratives of victimhood to appreciate fully, a dismaying thing to watch. Egyptians are barely represented on the global stage, not to mention impoverished and under the authoritarian rule of a dictatorship.
Heavily dependent on tourism dollars, Egyptian identity is wrapped up in their glorious ancient past, which Europeans helped them unearth, decode, restore and preserve, in exchange for pilfering and pillaging here and there.
This is excerpted from the NBC article I linked above:
Dr. Mostafa Waziri, secretary-general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said in the statement that Cleopatra’s appearance in the show was a “falsification of Egyptian history and a blatant historical fallacy.” …
One of Egypt’s most famous archaeologists and twice-serving antiquities minister, Zahi Hawass, was adamant: Cleopatra was not Black.
“If we see statues and forms of her father and brother, we will not find any evidence supporting this claim that she was black,” he said in a statement.
Gharavi acknowledges that casting Adele James was “a political act.” It certainly wasn’t diplomatic, not with Egyptian lawmakers calling for a ban on the program for its flagrant disrespect and insensitivity.
As Gharavi wrote in a rebuttal in Variety,
Why shouldn’t Cleopatra be a melanated sister? And why do some people need Cleopatra to be white? Her proximity to whiteness seems to give her value, and for some Egyptians it seems to really matter.
This is a typical Wokeist flip of the blame back on White supremacy. The fact is that the Egyptians are sick of the American antiracism movement and Black militant groups using their history for fraught “political acts” that have nothing to do with them.
Who doesn’t want their historical characters portrayed accurately? There’s no debate about this: Cleopatra was a fair-skinned Greek. Portraying her otherwise for clickbait outrage masquerading as a “political act” at the expense of the feelings of a proud nation isn’t just disrespectful, isn’t just everyday Hollywood prestige borrowing, it’s theft by a brutal mugging.
Furthermore, as a Persian, Gharavi is only a “melanated sister” herself by virtue of Woke doctrine, not in reality — I know a lot of Persians, and not one would claim kinship with Black Americans. I know she knows better: she’s a Shiite, Egyptians are Sunni, and Persians are blatantly racist about Arabs. This is a deliberate provocation as a publicity stunt, and an appeasement of Black American historical and cultural rewriting, known in critical theory as ‘lensing.’
At some point I’ll clarify this pseudoscientific “melanated” antiracism trope. I’ll let ChatGPT settle the myth about how there are no genetic differences between the races, merely in the melanin content of skin pigmentation. If that were the case, how do DNA tests know how to pinpoint someone’s origins? According to an unscientific Google search, Egyptians have 6% of genetic variations typical to Sub-Saharan Africans; Whites have 2%. Cleopatra was somewhere in between, maybe.
Both the HFPA debacle and arrogant, tone-deaf actions like the casting of Queen Cleopatra are part of what I’m calling the ‘World Series Syndrome,’ so named because no other countries outside North America and our de facto colony, Japan, play baseball, yet the impression from the branding is that they do.
Using ‘world’ when you mean ‘regional’ is something I call ‘auto-antonymic branding,’ a form of semantic inversion that describes willfully misleading American marketing and branding doublespeak.
Wokeism in particular has embraced auto-antonymic branding with gusto and deployed it skillfully, starting with the word ‘woke’ itself, which implies enlightenment when it really means adherence to strict and ever-narrowing Marxist-based doctrine. Professor Glenn Loury, my new hero and one of the few rational Black voices pushing back against Wokiesm, posted about its assault on enlightenment yesterday.
That doctrinal lack of openness and acceptance is anathema to any definition of ‘enlightenment.’ As one of the apotheoses of enlightenment, Buddha wasn’t laying down laws, just trying to ease mankind’s suffering through compassion and respect for all of Existence, which is very much in line with old-school Americanness. Indeed, having only respect for a fictionalized version of the truth that seeks to demonize one group in order to elevate your own, among other corrupt Woke motivations, is the opposite of enlightenment — it’s pure communal narcissism, therefore evil and dangerous.
UPDATE:
The Hollywood Foreign Press Association closed its doors on June 12, 2023, five weeks after this piece was published.
Love Linehan, love Loury, love your funny and ferocious take on "woke" and its ilk, and gurl, you can write. Glad I found your Substack.
That makes me happy! And hearing back helps make my day, too. Thanks and best....