Australians can watch Rodney King get beaten up on TV just like Americans can view killing in Bosnia. Worldwide, people listen to Madonna, eat at McDonald’s, play poker on the Internet, fly anywhere, emigrate anywhere, and discuss the “L.A. Law” episode they love.
The world is getting smaller and, as it does, we benefit from heightened sensitivity to the “family of man” and various global ills, be they poverty, overpopulation or war. Don’t we?
The September Harper’s Magazine provides a cautionary service, raising doubts about the global village, as it reprints parts of “The Stranger at the Door,” a provocative speech given by writer-essayist Pico Iyer to the Institute of World Culture in Santa Barbara.
Beware, writes Iyer, of buying too quickly into the notion of all as one, the United Colors of Benetton ads aside. Indeed, Iyer sees dangers inspired precisely by proximity, starting with our increased mobility.
Our vices and diseases, too, are now so easily transported. For example, as Germans trek to Sri Lanka for underage sex partners, Nigerians zip through Bangkok carrying heroin, Russian women become hookers in the Middle East, AIDS and drug trafficking expand through the village.
Iyer’s is a call to beware of the illusions of smallness. We hear that people everywhere watch our TV and we “feel that this establishes their humanity, or at least a common link between us.” Not so fast.
“But what they are learning about us from `Santa Barbara’ is doubtless as limited as what we learn about them from the (already Western-filtered) movie `The Killing Fields.’ . . . The problem is not one of complete misunderstanding but rather-and more dangerously-of a partial understanding, or the illusion of understanding.”
The “ultimate threat,” he believes, is disguised heterogeneity, “a world of differences that is veiled by surfaced similarities.” He doesn’t come out for accentuating our differences, or staying away from one another, but for not falling prey to thinking that, even as technology eliminates certain divisions, that we’re one, even when places like Borneo, Bolivia and Benin seem so newly close.
“Insofar as we try to love our neighbors as ourselves,” he concludes, “we have to admit that our neighbors are people with whom we share no common language, or past, or value. And the smaller the distance between people, Freud reminded us, the greater, often, the dispute.”
Quickly: Will Sept. 12 Newsweek’s cover, namely excerpts of a new book by seemingly less-than-forthcoming Washington celebrity consultants James Carville and Mary Matalin, be of any interest outside the capital? . . . Bigtime journalists, notably ABC’s Sam Donaldson, strain to justify paid speeches to special interest groups in Sept. 12 New Yorker. . . . Sept. 9 Entertainment Weekly and Sept. 12 People have curiously similar Oprah Winfrey cover stories of a supposedly softer and gentler Oprah. . . . The Fall Invention & Technology, via the publishers of Forbes and American Heritage, is worth the wonderful “The Race to Video” about the fierce competition in the early 1950s to invent the videotape recorder, culminating in giant RCA being beaten to the punch by tiny Ampex, which unveiled its initial, $80,000 gizmo to CBS executives gathered in Chicago in 1956. There’s a related look at the seminal role played in the invention of audiotape by a performer who wanted to prerecord his smash-hit weekly radio show: Bing Crosby. ($4, 60 Fifth Ave., N.Y., N.Y., 10011). . . . Meanwhile, back in the present, September American Demographics informs that camcorders, unlike other high-tech toys, have quickly moved from use in trend-setting cities to the heartland, and are biggest in small, Mountain and Pacific states, with highest per-capita ownership in places such as Bend, Ore. Still, just 4 percent of U.S. homes have a video camera or camcorder.
