I like racial and cultural clichés. I like them a lot. Clichés make the world an easier place to live in and a more funny one as well. Clichés find simple words for simple souls and that's why we use them. Clichés allow us to travel without leaving our beds and living-rooms and that's why we love them. Clichés claim to be partly true and that's why they're so hard to break.
Now here is a list of common and less-common clichés I thought about this morning while drinking my 11 AM coffee. For clarity's sake, I ranked them in descending order on a scale ranging from definitely true to grossly false.
1. Chinese people are fluorescent. Yes they are. Their body temperature is higher than everyone else and that makes them shine in the dark. That's why Shanghaï at night looks like a firefly city which would be so easy to bomb in the event of World War 3.
2. Black men have a HUGE cock. Possibly. At least, that's what a couple of girls I used to hang around with told me. But is it that their dick is truly bigger or is it a matter of quality of erection? Do black people get stimulated more easily than their white counterparts? Nothing really serious has ever been said or written on the subject, so it's still an open case.
3. Muslim women fake orgasm. Probably, but one can never be sure with women. Has it anything to do with Allah or the patriarchal society they live in? The famous Muslim World expert Nouredine Al Kajil, when asked on Al Jazeera, said he'll need to have a few words with his wife before answering. He did, and then he declared: نجاح المبادرة العربية مرهون بالاعتراف بإسرائيل. محللون هنود: الاعتقالات الباكستان
4. English people drink too much beer. Debatable. They do absorb in large amounts a liquid called beer, but do they really drink it? I would rather suggest they swallow it or soak it up, engulf it maybe, but I'm pretty sure they don't drink it, since drinking presupposes the existence of taste buds in the mouth, which they got deprived of due to evolution.
5. French people are filthy, like French streets and French dogs. Honestly that's a myth. I don't know about dogs, but when it comes to people I would bet that the Gypsies, Irakis and Rumanians I see day after day begging or playing music on the tube stink more than I do. And poverty can't always explain everything, can it?
6. The Germans are perfectionnist. That's rubbish. They can't finish what they start. Schubert left lieder and symphonies in the lurch, Sebastian Stelzer always gives up writing after two pages, Europe is free, the Jews are safe and die soziale Marktwirtschaft hasn't made it to the 21th century.
PS: if you are to leave a comment, please don't go for the pathetic trendy self-righteous statement like "Clichés are stupid and blind, we must learn about other cultures by leaving our prejudices behind and really dig deep into eachother's ground to see the beauty of diversity". Anything else than that will be fine, including verbal abuse and death threats.
Wednesday, December 10, 2008
Are the Chinese fluorescent?
Wednesday, November 5, 2008
The losing side
In normal democracies, main elections are won - or lost - on an average 53/47 % balance. Barack Obama hasn't exactly edged Mc Cain out of the presidency. He secured a pretty comfortable victory. Still, the figures show that the gap between the two candidates isn't wider than in previous elections: 62,443,218 votes for Obama (52%) and 55,386,310 for Mc Cain (48%).
In France, however, 80% of the people surveyed by French medias declared themselves Obama supporters, and would have voted for him if they were American citizens. I would probably have voted for Obama myself. But are these figures not a bit too extravagant not to deserve some form of cross-examination?
Today on TV news, female newscaster Elise Lucet couldn't hide her joy. One may have thought she was still under the spell of an intense love-making night with whoever bangs her at the moment. But she wasn't. She was genuinely pleased with Obama's victory and didn't need to hide it since her state of mind is (apparently) shared by 80% of the French population.
The answer of this enigma is to be found on the losing side. Whenever images were shown of John Mc Cain and his supporters, you couldn't see anything but white dickheads reading out the bible and listening to country music. Every middle-aged guy looked like the bearded white-hair pervert of Oliver Stone's U-Turn. No black people, no children. There must have been some in the crowd, but the cameraman ignored them. They didn't fit the cast.
Then we had a short coverage about Alabama, where Mc Cain got 60% on his name. It wasn't to praise the beauty of the place, but just to remind us that Alabama was once the cradle of the Ku-Klux-Klan.
This is just like what French medias did all over the US campaign and before that. Showing the republicans as unevolved, racist, war-hungry sons of bitches. American people obviously know better than that. For if they didn't, the country would be shifting to civil war. But they already had one and moved on from that point. By voting Obama, they maybe showed they didn't want another good vs evil four-year soap-opera. French medias would love it.
