Keith Halderman has praised the movie"Borat" as an example of perceptive social commentary. Lester Hunt, by contrast, regards it as soothing tonic for the smug liberal:

In the Borat movie there is nothing, from one end to the other, that is the least bit threatening to the Western liberal point of view. It's all about what what racist, homophobic, antisemitic jerks all the people in the world who are not Western liberals -- from Middle-Eastern Muslims to red state Americans -- are. If you are a Western liberal, this movie is very favorable to your Self and very unfavorable to the Other. How stupid it is, how nasty, how unlike you and me!

Some of the liberal reviewers of Borat said the movie made them think. What it made them think, of course, was that their old opinions are even more true than they always thought they were. What it made me think is how similar Western liberalism can be to the narrow ideologies that it piously denounces.

Jonathan Dresner - 11/28/2006

That was, indeed, what I meant.

Robert L. Campbell - 11/28/2006

David,

If the Borat movie is a Rorschach test for pundits, that presumably means that they will see in it whatever their unconscious hopes and fears prompt them to see.

Robert

David T. Beito - 11/27/2006

What do you mean?

Jonathan Dresner - 11/26/2006

that what it really is, is a rorshach test for pundits.