Barbelith Underground > Head Shop > two words that bug me...

I think there's an interesting parallel between these two terms--"oriental" and "white trash". I'm trying to put this together from my reading of the Said link, and a review (by one Paul Kennedy) in the current NYTimes Book Review of Bernard Lewis's WHAT WENT WRONG? Western impact and Middle East Response--which is premised on the following "grand narrative" (i'd link, but it's only avail to suscribers, so apologies for the long quote):
quote:
Sometime around 1760, Britain, then France and America took off to another world, one that was increasingly secular, democratic, industrial and tolerant in ways that left many of the other regions gasping at the combined implications of such changes. Certain societies in parts of Latin America or India or Russia felt they had little choice but to follow suit, although hoping to brake the impacts of Western man. The Middle East, powerful a half-millennium earlier, when Europe was a bundle of inchoate, backward states and unworthy of attention, did not. Yet Europe rose while the Muslim world rested on its laurels -- until it was besieged by Western ships, armaments, iron goods and cheap textiles, to all of which it became harder and harder to respond.

The West's cultural messages, especially about democracy, made things even more difficult. Those with power in Muslim societies found it impossible to contemplate the separation of religion and state, or admit to a changed place in society for women or permit the free exchange of ideas, particularly unpleasant ideas, on the lines argued by John Stuart Mill and others. But there is even more to it than that. As Lewis shrewdly points out, the works of Mozart and Shakespeare and Voltaire have traveled around the globe, as for that matter have Stravinsky, jazz and George Orwell. But they all pretty much stop at the frontiers of the Arab world, which has shown little interest in how others think, write, compose; there are few translations of these writers and few performances of these musicians, nor are there great libraries and museums of Western art to match the impressive collections of Muslim culture in the West. (There is no presumption by Lewis here that Western or Slavic or Japanese culture is inherently superior, only that it is disturbing that this troubled part of our planet has never really cared.)

It is not that the Muslim world was totally without attempts at reform and renewal in the face of global trends, or that there was no appreciation that its own earlier superiority had vanished. In fact, Lewis is extremely good in detailing Ottoman and Arab and Iranian scholars who, from the 18th century onward, called with growing alarm for change. The sad fact is that for the most part their calls went unheeded.

This narrative--while sounding all very reasonable--smacks of a kind of smugness to me, anyone else? And the whole issue bothers me because of the implication that people designated as "orientals" (or "The Arab World") or "white trash" are, with few exceptions, devoid of some basic humanizing characteristic: call it "curiosity." Call it "class."

For "Muslims" call it the lack of a kind of "cool" regard to religion--"midlevel dominance strategy" anyone?--i.e., religion as something ALL (well, all the ones that count) us westerners have grown beyond. (I recently read somewhere: every vice that can be ascribed to religious thought has an exact parallel in secular thought.)

For "white trash" call it a lack of a kind of "cool" as regard the rearing of children, the appropriate ironic stance towards cultural production . . . or the taste that discerns "kitsch" from "art" . . .

Does this ring anyone's bells?
[edited for clarity. alas.]

[ 30-01-2002: Message edited by: alas ]