Market Joy and a Nod to David Sedaris

Summer is in full swing here in Azerbaijan. Perhaps it is just residual gratitude for the end of winter, but I do not recall last summer being this hot. Bereft of air conditioning at work and home, I spend most of my free time watching Al Jazeera English in front of the fan. Still, there are some great benefits to living in Azerbaijan during the summer—namely, the availability of fresh fruit and vegetables for very cheap prices. As veggie-lovers, George and I are quite happy about this new development. Sure, Minnesota, you condone shorts for men and air conditioning in public places but in Ganja there are fresh tomatoes for 38 cents a kilo! In Azerbaijan, it is widely-known that if you want to pay more but have air conditioning, go to the grocery store. If you want to bargain in the heat for cheaper, go to the bazaar. Sometimes I wonder what I will do when I return to the States, go to the farmer’s market and wonder why people don’t want to bargain...AND things are cheaper at the grocery stores.

The other benefit of summertime is that I have had a chance to catch up a little on my news. I am not sure if this opinion is true of me or people abroad in general but I do get the impression that I am returning to a rather broken country. It is an odd thing, watching the news from the outside and wondering what my impressions might be if I were at home. In some ways, living in a society where xenophobia is a more openly accepted form of social behavior has refocused how I understand the same sort of tendencies we have in the United States. The minute I want to get on my soap box about civic engagement and the resilience of democracy, I turn on the news see the leaders of my country—and their supporters, I might add—squabble like name-calling grease ball children with little to no informed reasoning for why they believe what they do…again. I had thought that the majority of the hypocritical and short-sighted “Obama,suck on this machine gun” and birth certificate / bad country music enthusiast movements were fading when I left. I believed that “there is no red America or blue America [but] a United States of America” idea was starting to take hold on both sides of the aisle. Apparently not. Perhaps it was always like this and all you need to understand is to leave and observe from the outside, thinking “thank G-D that I am in a country where no one knows the name Michelle Bachmann." 

Of course, because I am not State-side, the majority of my information comes from those also on the outside. Aside from the Turkish version of CNN and the less-than-objective state-controlled channels, I do have my friends in Doha/London at Al Jazeera. This situation brings to light the difficult issues of interpretation when watching international news coverage of one’s country. As a student abroad in places like Mubarak’s Eygpt I became well-aware of the fact that much of the world believes Americans to be--in the words of David Sedaris--“the trumpeting elephants of the human race.” In some ways, I can sympathize with this perception—we are a loud and often ostentatious people. However, I am lead to question the depth of this perception when I watch Al Jazeera’s coverage of Independence Day celebrations in which the ridiculously drunken co-eds can’t identify who we fought during the Revolutionary War or the name of the first President. Coverage of our politicians is even less forgiving. The message seems to be: “they may be stupid, obnoxious, and horribly self-involved…but man, can Americans eat those hot dogs!” I find myself indignantly throwing popcorn at the TV shouting, “we aren’t all like that! I don’t even like hot dogs!” On some level, I feel a new affinity with people in more than a few groups who watch Fox News and MSNBC with the same response to significantly more offensive and direct statements. I like to think the fact that for two years of my life, I have been in Azerbaijan and stuffing dolma into my vegetarian mouth is a clear sign that not all people from the States are intellectually insular, anti-everything-that-isn’t-Irving Berlin-McCarthian-trigger-happy “ugly Americans.” But is it really?

I like to think so. I recently gave a lesson at my organization about the 4^th of July and its significance for Americans. At the beginning, students stared blankly at me, expecting a uniformly positive and slightly militaristic diatribe about my country’s superiority to others. Instead, I showed clips from the film “Born on the Fourth of July”—a movie with little to do with Independence Day itself but containing a story demonstrative of somethings that I have come to appreciate about the United States: the general sense of possibility and collective recognition of political, social, and cultural freedom as a means to improve upon a less-than-perfect history. My students seemed slightly disappointed—I think they wanted fireworks or a parade.  Afterwards, I went to the internet clubg to watch Jon Stewart. His collective-self-deprecating humor always makes me feel better for some reason.