Bill Maher, Fareed Zakaria and The Politics of Pronunciation

Is it really fair to torment liberals over their…admittedly sometimes clumsy… attempts at cultural respect? Or perhaps more to the point, is it really productive? Since the first Bush administration, mispronunciation has been willfully employed to assert rhetorical superiority over Arab and Muslim subjects. Am I the only one who remembers that George H.W. Bush—-in a move that made more than one gay friend of mine arch an eyebrow– renamed Saddam Hussein “Sodom”? And is it possible to hear the default American mispronunciations “EYE-rack” and “EYE-ran” without hearing George W. Bush’s folksy/wounded/proud voice in your head? Is it really so ridiculous to ask that if we are sending young American men and women to fight and die in a foreign country that we learn to say its name correctly? Is “EAR-ock” really such a devastating compromise for American tongues and ears? Or even, when anglicized as Zakaria suggests, “EAR-ack”? I don’t think so.

So I wonder: what is gained by mocking well-intentioned liberals when they make an effort?

By positioning himself as a native informant Zakaria whipped out his authenticity card and slapped it down on the table. I like Zakaria for lots of reasons–many of which can be observed in the video above– but that is as much of a bullshit move as willfully mispronouncing “foreign” names as a way of asserting cultural authority. In fact, of these strategies the one that bothers me least is an earnest attempt to connect.

Thoughts?

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