Amid all the tsunami aid coverage, I went to see a local documentary about the "Lost Boys" of Sudan. Very well done film, and the panel afterwards was fairly decent.
One of the people profiled in the movie mentioned that Americans love to hear their story (NBC did some huge special on the "Lost Boys"), but that nobody cares about stopping the civil war in Sudan. Unfortunately, it's true. Because the Lost Boys' stories fit so perfectly into the American myth of rags-to-riches. Audiences soak up the scenes of the third world kids staring in wonder at a telephone, a milk carton, a shopping mall. These images reinforce notions of national superiority by underscoring the terrible conditions of an underdeveloped country, conditions that drove them from the longest-running civil war in modern history. The Lost Boys' mass exodus evokes overtly biblical imagery: wandering the wilderness from Ethiopia to Kenya until finally coming to the promised land of tennis shoes, education, fast food.
Of course Americans don't care about the war. (How many even know that a peace deal was even reached?) The war was about, in part, access to the oil fields in southern Sudan. The Muslim/Christian and Arab/black differences that are thrown in are all too familiar, though equally as epic. Interest in the stories from Sudan are more about the American ego, of reassurance that the "wretched refuse" and "homeless, tempest-tossed" from others' teeming shores can only find peace in the U.S. The stories speak to historic feelings involving third world/first world, black/nonblack, and dominant culture/immigrant dynamics.
Americans continue to be mentally isolationist, while believing themselves to be wonderfully enlightened and international.
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