Some time ago, I was in an Asian country where the official language is not English. Airports, cafés, and museums displayed a model of the president's childhood bicycle and allowed spectators to sit down and take photos against an artificial backdrop.
I ignored the hubbub until one day curiosity got the best of me. After examining the bike, I noticed the brand name was in English. As this was was the second time I'd seen an antique bike in Asia with a small metal crest displaying an English name, I decided to give the matter further thought. How could it be profitable for the British Empire to manufacture then transport bikes across Asia?
Was Hong Kong involved? Did a company in what is now English-speaking Singapore have a license of some kind? It turns out the bicycles--expensive yet popular--were originally made in Tianjin, China after the Communist Party defeated British and Japanese colonialists. So why, after expelling the British, would the Chinese use their colonizer's language on their best-selling bicycle, a symbol of Communist manufacturing prowess?
I have no idea. My failure to speak or read Mandarin Chinese probably means I will never know the answer to my Flying Pigeon questions. I'm sure, however, a tourism marketing firm will invent a pleasing response, sending us farther away from historical understanding and thus any reasonable chance of connecting our human hands across the borders of time. This generic response--and others like it--will be copied by others in the tourism business until one day children will repeat the Flying Pigeon's English origin story as if it had been handed down by the Chinese Premier himself.
Mass tourism is intolerable to the extent it allows such falsehoods to multiply, truth defenseless in the face of poor translators (both financially and unrenowned) and historians more worried about "Publish or perish" than their own country's political miasma. How has the translation business not taken off at the same time as increasing globalization? What are all the foreign language professors and graduate students doing in their research time, if not translating the great works of their native tongues? And why in Allah's or Yahweh's name must readers choose between one, or at most two, translations of popular books?
The truth is, I know the answer to why I don't have my answer. Entire economies have been built on the assumption the best of all realistic worlds is a world where weapons purchases and security/technology cooperation form the hard underbelly of the civilian economy. Rising from this foundation are the industries of advertising, soft censorship, and political chicanery, all of which must be adept enough to convince American citizens to view Vietnam and Iraq as two discrete moral instances, and to persuade British voters to spurn their neighbors in favor of a distant former colony.
So what happens when truth isn't necessary to sustain economies and globalization? I suspect it will involve more of the kinds of videos I've seen online, including one where a British tourist--who has presumably studied the Ottoman Empire at some point in his life--proudly proclaims he is drinking "Bosnian coffee" while drinking Turkish coffee in Sarajevo. The more such unintentional comedy multiplies, the more globalization seems destined to a great unwinding. And so it goes?
© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020)
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| Flying Pigeon |
I have no idea. My failure to speak or read Mandarin Chinese probably means I will never know the answer to my Flying Pigeon questions. I'm sure, however, a tourism marketing firm will invent a pleasing response, sending us farther away from historical understanding and thus any reasonable chance of connecting our human hands across the borders of time. This generic response--and others like it--will be copied by others in the tourism business until one day children will repeat the Flying Pigeon's English origin story as if it had been handed down by the Chinese Premier himself.
Mass tourism is intolerable to the extent it allows such falsehoods to multiply, truth defenseless in the face of poor translators (both financially and unrenowned) and historians more worried about "Publish or perish" than their own country's political miasma. How has the translation business not taken off at the same time as increasing globalization? What are all the foreign language professors and graduate students doing in their research time, if not translating the great works of their native tongues? And why in Allah's or Yahweh's name must readers choose between one, or at most two, translations of popular books?
The truth is, I know the answer to why I don't have my answer. Entire economies have been built on the assumption the best of all realistic worlds is a world where weapons purchases and security/technology cooperation form the hard underbelly of the civilian economy. Rising from this foundation are the industries of advertising, soft censorship, and political chicanery, all of which must be adept enough to convince American citizens to view Vietnam and Iraq as two discrete moral instances, and to persuade British voters to spurn their neighbors in favor of a distant former colony.
So what happens when truth isn't necessary to sustain economies and globalization? I suspect it will involve more of the kinds of videos I've seen online, including one where a British tourist--who has presumably studied the Ottoman Empire at some point in his life--proudly proclaims he is drinking "Bosnian coffee" while drinking Turkish coffee in Sarajevo. The more such unintentional comedy multiplies, the more globalization seems destined to a great unwinding. And so it goes?
© Matthew Mehdi Rafat (2020)
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