Borat's boorish

This week we turn to Borat, whose "Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan" is making the rounds in every corner of America. From the very first frames of "Borat," it is apparent that Sacha Baron Cohen, the satirist in question, seeks to shine the mirror on hapless Americans. This has been lauded as a great Swiftian exercise to expose the typical American as a well-meaning fool and a brash knave.\nAt certain moments, he pulls off this task very well, leaving you with the faint wish that what you had just seen didn't occur in daily American life. When Borat tells of his native Kazakhstan, the wordless reaction of many seems to be: "Well, I guess they don't have much huntin' down there." But after a while, this message is shown to be rather hollow because of the very people on whom the joke is supposedly being played.\nIf Cohen's aim is to satirize red-state conservatives as ethnocentric dolts, he fails in this. By the movie's end, they are shown to be admirably open-minded and thoughtful, while it is Cohen who implicitly gives off an aura of chauvinistic elitism. Odi profanum vulgus ("I hate the vulgar crowd") is a fitting slogan for this mindset.\nAs someone who would treat as defamation any characterization of himself as a populist, I nevertheless must borrow here from the conservative intellectual William Buckley, who once said he'd rather be governed by the first 2,000 names in the Boston phone book than by the first 2,000 members of Harvard's faculty.\nThe waters of Borat's snobbery are deep but far from pure. The prankster seems to miss the hilarity of his own routine. The only crass member of the cast is Borat himself, who ranks as a clown but not quite a comedian. The thigh-slapping moments are not few, but for all the caricatures of traditional Americans being narrow-minded rednecks, they in fact seem exceedingly tolerant -- indeed, pedantically and painfully tolerant -- of Borat's antics. \nI always try to be as lenient as I can when dealing with posers because I think it's tough being an original satirist poking fun of unvarnished Americans these days. It is generally a bad rule to take comic shtick and turn it into sociology. Borat's single biggest liability, therefore, is not that he isn't funny. He can be. The problem is that he often doesn't know when to stop, and this makes it hard to take Borat seriously as social commentary and almost as hard to take it lightly as satire.\nAt least for your humble correspondent, traveling the world has always hammered home one of Winston Churchill's marvelous adages: "When I am abroad, I make it a rule never to criticize or attack the government of my own country. I make up for lost time when I come home." The great advantage of this film is that it allows one to defend his fellow countrymen without going abroad. In this case, the joke seems to be on Borat.