The urge of people in the developing world to heap scorn and spleen upon those in the developed is a curious one. In fact, to come across a young man living in a house made of goat dysentery, who spends his days in quivering prayer to a vengeful god (whose divine bipolar disorder ordains everything from thunderstorms to sexually transmitted diseases) and his nights in athletic and arbitrary fornication with any carbon-based, land-dwelling creature he can get his tattooed little hands on, one might be tempted to suggest that the developing world’s insistence that the developed is preoccupied with power, sex and righteousness is a case of the pot calling the kettle black.
Of course, one wouldn’t want to say this within earshot, since, given his vibrant and earthy connection with his native spirituality, he’d almost certainly assume that you’d heard the pot speaking, perhaps in a clear if brassy voice, and developing-world jurisprudence would be enlisted along with a good length of strong rope and a heap of kindling. It can never be a good thing when one’s trial on charges of witchcraft is halted briefly as the judge recounts with glee how he was winged just the week before by spiteful djinn disguised as an AK-47. And besides, one doesn’t want to be responsible for the inevitable pre-emptive burning of the neighbour’s pretty daughter, who is too pretty for her own good and who has been, you know, looking at decent citizens with those filthy pretty dark eyes of hers. Goddamn witch. Light-of-my-eye, put Junior on your shoulders so he can watch her sizzle.
The developing world shows its contempt for the West in many ways, whether by allowing hundreds of thousands of bags of donated maize to rot in ports, or by shoe-horning its buttocks into bootleg Levi’s; but where these — like buying an R&B album by a recently paroled racist-rapist crackhead called something monosyllabic — are brave acts of cultural defiance, the phenomenon of geographical snobbery remains a mystery.
And yet it persists. Every few years the media of the oppressed and the trampled report, in tones lush with velvety condescension, that a new study has revealed that American youths can’t point to this Marxist dictatorship and that feudal monarchy on a map of the world, that only 500 out of 30-million Japanese know where Pearl Harbour is, that 90% of European schoolchildren failed to identify China on a globe. Pounding our millet and throwing salt over our left shoulders to keep us safe from soul-snatching frogs, we roll our eyes and have a good chuckle about Anglo-Saxon imbecility.
Of course, it does explain a lot about the current United States search of Lebensraum to discover that a 2002 National Geographic survey found that a third of young Americans think their country has a population of more than a billion. But the condescension of the poor and far-flung is less justified that revealing: only those who have never travelled could ever believe that money and privilege translate into general knowledge. In any case, at five men per aircraft, 500 Japanese is more than enough to find Pearl Harbour, and in a decade or two China will be wherever one’s finger lands on the globe.
And if Geographyolympics.com is any measure, we had best hold our peace: this week the leaderboard of the online “name that blob on the map” quiz revealed South Africa comfortably placed in 73rd spot, just ahead of Belgium and the Marshall Islands. The US was fifth. This means that the good people of Liberia, Qatar and Kyrgyzstan have proved better at pointing out France and the Pacific and Australia than we have. Of more concern, it also means that the good citizens of Liberia, Qatar and Kyrgyzstan are much more likely to know where we live than we are to know where they live. Given that the national exports of those countries are rusty machetes, severed ears, hallucinogenic plants and nuclear bombs slightly past their sell-by dates, this is not a happy state of affairs.
Then again, perhaps the website shouldn’t be taken as gospel: listing the scores of participants in American states, it reveals that Missouri is keeping just ahead of … New Hampshire? Clever states like Vermont and Maine? No. Guam and the Virgin Islands. Puerto Rico follows.
What a state we’re in.
Twelve Rows Back, a collection of Tom Eaton’s Pitch & Mutter columns for the Mail & Guardian, is now available at all good bookshops