With anti-Semitism reemerging in Europe and rampant in the Islamic world; with Iran acquiring the ultimate weapon of genocide and proclaiming its intention to wipe out the world’s largest Jewish community (Israel); with America and, in particular, its Christian evangelicals the only remaining Gentile constituency anywhere willing to defend that besieged Jewish outpost — is the American heartland really the locus of anti-Semitism? Is this the one place to go to find it? ~Charles Krauthammer

One does get the sense from this column and from the recent column by David Brooks that was filled with his pained agony at Borat’s mocking of evangelical Christians and other would-be “rubes,” whom Brooks has never met in real life, that the professional evangelical and Christian-mockers of the neocon and “moderate Republican” right, such as Krauthammer and Brooks are, are deeply jealous of their territory.  Amid his Sinead O’Connor-like cries of “fight the real enemy!” Krauthammer is really saying, “Sacha, go back to Britain and leave the mocking of American Christians and the imputation of evil anti-Semitic motives to conservative Americans to the experts, namely me.  This is our job, so let us get on with it.  Now you are going to make me write a column where I will have to say nice things about Christians, and this is something I try never to do unless it is absolutely necessary.” 

Sacha Baron Cohen has been caught poaching on their turf.  Just behind Krauthammer’s laboured defense of philo-Semitic America is his open contempt for that notable cultural sensation and focus of so much American Christian enthusiasm and secular American anti-Christian hate, The Passion of the Christ.  If he finds Baron Cohen’s claim about American “indifference” to anti-Semitism ridiculous (and it is fair to say that it is ridiculous), what can one make of his obsessed ranting against The Passion as “Gibson’s blood libel”?  If Krauthammer were right about The Passion–that it recycles all the worst anti-Semitic tropes and and was a “singular act of interreligious aggression,” that would mean that tens of millions of Americans, the overwhelming majority of whom were Christians, were indifferent to what Krauthammer regarded as an undoubtedly anti-Semitic film.  If Krauthammer were right about The Passion and, by extension, the “indifference” to anti-Semitism supposedly reflected in American Christians’ embrace and defense of the film, it would mean that Baron Cohen has something of a point.  In Krauthammer’s eyes, The Passion almost has to be a religious version of “Throw The Jew Down The Well,” but with the added bonus that its creator is not spoofing the anti-Semites but really is one himself.  Those whom Krauthammer called the “local rubes” of Tucson are necessarily multiplied by the millions and make up a large proportion of the country.  He really cannot have it both ways.  It is this kind of damningly faint praise that Krauthammer and Brooks will offer to Christian conservatives to prove that they, the elite coastal pundits, are really on our side in the final analysis, when, of course, they never have been and would never want to be on our side.

Even if there are more promising targets for ridiculing anti-Semitism elsewhere in the world, Americans make for easy targets (and, if reviews are to be believed, easy marks) because, even when their alleged prejudice or “indifference” to prejudice is pointed out to them all that most Americans will do is laugh at the guy with the funny accent and the chicken in his suitcase.  It isn’t that Krauthammer’s “rubes” don’t get that they’re being mocked–they don’t care.  In some ways the mockery is so old that it probably hasn’t got as much punch as it might have had once upon a time; in other ways, it really is so misplaced that it cannot offend and so lacks the power that kernels of truth bring to all good comedy.  There is nothing very offensive about someone mocking Americans for their anti-Semitism or other prejudices, because we have been conditioned with a fear and loathing of these things to such a degree that the accusation is more tiresome than inflammatory.  For a joke to really be over-the-top and full of biting satire, it would have to refer to something that the audience genuinely can recognise in themselves.  There is hardly anyone in America, except those whom I will mention again in a moment, who has seen clips from previous Borat acts and still manages to believe that the scenes are the spontaneous “revelations” Baron Cohen would like to have us believe they are.  

Besides, mocking non-Americans for perceived or real anti-Semitism has its problems.  Some of these other people have an unfortunate habit of attacking and killing their critics, which makes jokes at the expense of Muslim anti-Semitism a bit more risky, and most Europeans are likely to be incandescently angry at anyone who hints that they are anti-Semitic.  Often, when the accusation is delivered in a mocking tone, those who feel burdened by a history of this attitude will respond sharply and those who genuinely possess this attitude will react violently.  Meanwhile, most Americans respond to claims of their “indifference” about anti-Semitism with, well, indifference.  Krauthammer protests on our behalf, but it seems almost as if he protests too much, as if he needs to convince himself of something he doesn’t really believe at the core of his being.  That is, he needs to believe that at least some of us are as philo-Semitic as he says we are.  About American philo-Semitism, Krauthammer actually happens to be right (for once).  That does make the adventures of Borat a bit less amusing, perhaps, but it also makes people who take Borat so seriously appear rather, well, silly. 

But what must be Krauthammer’s own loathing for American Christians cannot but lead him to conclude that Baron Cohen really has revealed something that Krauthammer, through his denunciations of The Passion, has acknowledged without saying as much.  Of course, we can be confident in the knowledge that Krauthammer is not right about The Passion.  We know this partly because he is right, to some degree, about Borat.

What one does get from all of this hand-wringing about Borat is that a whole lot of people, including the creator of the film, are taking the entire thing way too seriously.  My guess is that the people whom Baron Cohen mocks in the film wouldn’t want David Brooks and Charles Krauthammer for their defenders anyway, because these two are in their way no different from the snide elites who look down on most of this country as some benighted, unwashed mass of ignorance and prejudice and who think that Borat is not a comedy but a sociological research project.  For these elites, Borat is funny because they think it is true; for everyone else, it is funny because it is hysterically silly, campy and in extremely poor taste.  If you can think of a better summation of the makings of the modern American comedy, I would like to know what they are. 

These elites, like the Krauthammers of the world, seem to be so unflinchingly humourless that they cannot simply let a very stupid comedy be a very stupid comedy, even when, or perhaps especially when, the comedian wants it to be a Serious Statement About Society.  Even supposing all the worst accusations against Gibson were true, the claims about The Passion‘s anti-Semitism would still ring false.  Even supposing Baron Cohen had deep and serious reasons for making a slapstick comedy film, Borat will never be anything other than a lowbrow collection of over-the-top jokes about the gullible and the trusting. 

A smart film critic called Borat Candid Camera on crack, which is about all that it is from what I understand of it (and, no, I have not yet seen it).  Borat is simply juvenile and entertaining.  Attempts to dig deeper into the “real meaning of Borat“ are the things that deserve the most ridicule of all.