The Globe ran a short plug for Kabul Beauty School, Deborah Rodriguez's book about her experiences running a beauty school in Afghanistan in 2002. I had heard a piece on NPR Friday about the fall-out from its publication.

The Globe piece was too taken by Rodriguez's wacky personality and the quirky concept, apparently, to question the cost to the book's subjects of the careless handling of its publication and promotion. The story, in the end, is more important to us than the real-life people portayed in it.

The NPR story detailed how the women Rodriguez depicts have been put at risk by the publication of her book about them. They are angling for immigration papers, claiming that Rodriguez promised to help get them out of Afghanistan in exchange for their participation.

Rodriguez says they misunderstood, but that she has every intention of helping them. "She says she plans to give the girls a small part of the royalties from the book, along with 5 percent of her earnings from the movie Sony Pictures is planning."

All very imperialistic, if you ask me.

When I went to Eastern Europe shortly after the "regime change" there, every American I met was writing a novel about it. Mine is still in my desk drawer. It's called Tatiana's Box (that's a triple-entendre, in case you're counting), and it is about a bunch of Americans all racing to be the first to write the definitive post-Soviet American-in-Budapest novel.

A short excerpt from my manuscript (you'll forgive me) will suffice to illustrate the trouble with this scenario:

‘Oh Addy, your problem is that you don’t understand anything. Not the world, not anything.’

‘But I’ve lived pretty well in it.’

‘Precisely! Which proves my point - anyone who understands it can’t bear it.’

Addy looked at him.

‘At any rate, it must be borne,’ he said with a shrug. And then: ‘I think you've been here too long, Alexander.’

‘Bah!’ Alexander spat. ‘I got here too late.’

He furrowed his heavy brow, and shoved his hands into his pockets. That’s how he walked, with both hands deep in his pants pockets, his trunk thrust forward, as if bracing against a furious wind.

‘I mean the story was already over, and well over by the time I got here.'

Addy watched him intently. He seemed to be looking deep inside himself for some truth he had lost in there.

‘Bah!’ He spat again. ‘If I had known then what I know now!’

‘What’s that?’ Addy said.

Alexander looked at him distractedly.

‘What’s what?’

‘What do you know now that you didn’t know then?’

He sighed and stared ahead. And, as if it were perfectly obvious:

‘That there was only one story.’

Addy laughed despite himself.

‘It’s not funny!’ Alexander snapped.

‘Well, isn’t that the way it is, more or less, with everything?’ Addy had been emboldened by his success in vexing Alexander.

Alexander stopped abruptly, so that Addy had actually taken two big steps ahead before realizing it. Alexander turned to face him. His eyes were very big.

‘What do you mean?’ Alexander barked.

‘What do you mean what do I mean?’

‘You’re talking nonsense, and you’re wasting my time.’

There was only one story, at least from the American perspective. And the guy who finished it first was Arthur Phillips, smarmy cunt.

The idea that Americans are in a unique position to tell the stories of others strikes me as a symptom of imperialistic hubris. Rodriguez is a good example, but there are plenty more at all points along the intellectual food chain.

Take Dave Eggers' What is the What, the "fictionalized memoir" of the actual Valentino Achak Deng, who is alive and well, and fully capable of telling his own story. In a recent review in The New Republic, Lee Siegal asks whether Eggers is "an advocate for untold stories, or a parasite?" And seems to conclude the latter.

"The worst aspect of What Is the What," Siegal laments, "is that Deng's attitudes are tyrannically refracted through Eggers's reshaping of them."

He concludes (and it's worth quoting at length):

What Is the What's innocent expropriation of another man's identity is a post-colonial arrogance — the most socially acceptable instance of Orientalism you are likely to encounter. Perhaps this is the next stage of American memoir. Perhaps, having run out of marketable stories to tell about ourselves, we will now travel the world in search of desperate people willing to rent out their lives, the way indigent people in some desolate places give up their children. Perhaps we have picked our psyches clean, and now we need other people's stories the way we need other people's oil.

Of course, Rodriguez and Eggers are not on the same level (Sandra Bullock will probably not appear in the Hollywood version of What is the What), but the level of hubris seems more or less proportional with the writer's reputation.

Both books are symptomatic, I think, of a hunger for meaningful real-life stories (itself symptomatic of a hunger for a meaningful real life, period).

It's a hunger that can turn vampiric.

Speaking of Rodriguezes, I saw several photos like this one...


...in The Globe this morning, but could not figure out for the life of me what they had to do with the Sox-Yankees series this weekend. Even after reading that "the fans were jeering Yankees third baseman Alex Rodriguez after the New York Post last week ran a front-page photograph of the Yankees slugger, who is married, in the company of another woman. She was later identified as a stripper."

So what's this got to do with baseball, you ask?

Oh, yeah, it's Sox Nation. That explains it.

With all the talk of baseball being this wholesome all-American game that you want to raise your kids on, and the constant complaining that it's being corrupted—by money, drugs, bad haircuts, and the off-the-field antics of its star players—I'm not sure the fans are any better when it comes to being true to the spirit of the game.

I was raised on baseball. My dad coached me and my brothers and even served as president of the little league. He had his first heart attack during a little league play-off game. Right on the diamond. My brother went to college on a baseball scholarship. That's how serious about baseball we were. At no time were we taught that booing and jeering were acceptable behaviors. Not from the dugout, not from the bleachers.  From little league to the big league, the rules remained the same. 

But apparently Sox Nation has carte blanche to behave like pigs whenever the Yankees are in town. With the local media egging them on. Is there a better way to show the Yankees what losers you are, even when you're winning? Is there a better example for your kids of a poor sport than a Sox fan?

No class.

I was glad to read that "the fake blondes did not appear to distract the A-Rod, who went 1 for 3 and scored twice in the 9-5 Yankees victory."

I was reading elsewhere in the Ideas section how technology may rescue the "Old New England town meeting."

"What if there were a way to preserve the deliberative aspects of the town meeting without requiring busy, work-stressed residents to assemble at the same time and place?"

And I thought, well, that's the perfect solution for modern Massholes, innit? I mean, the old-school method you actually had to look people in the eye and make your case. This way you can gripe and snipe and rage and flame from the comfort of your own home, without ever having to see another human being, without the danger of ever having your noxious assumptions challenged, without the threat of ever becoming a citizen, which is, after all, too inconvenient for today's "busy and work-stressed residents"—mercy, just being a "resident" is hard enough in New England these days, what with the cost of real estate and property taxes!

We like to crow about our great democracy and our high standard of living, but in reality we don't seem to have the education, experience, or inclination to engage in the former, or the time and energy to enjoy the latter.

The internet, like our entertainment and our car cultures, too often frames the world as a kind of video game, where the individual is more or less omnipotent and others are merely objects to be manipulated or obstacles to be eliminated.

As Jane Mansbridge, a professor of government at Harvard quoted in the article, observes: "If one of the things you want to develop in the deliberative process is empathy for people whose perspectives are not your own, actually having them there is very, very helpful."

What happens when people raised in a one-way, constantly mediated, pandering consumer culture like ours actually encounter The Other in the flesh? When having grown accustomed to their omnipotence in their Pod—whether an iPod, a car they spend hours a day in, a cubicle at work, in front of a computer playing video games, or watching other people makes asses of themselves on TV—all without venturing out or risking anything themselves—they are suddenly confronted with their impotence in the world outside of their Pod?

What do they do then? Well, look around.

They rage.