In case you were wondering if we've totally left the Afghanis to the warlords and the Taliban, America has succeeded in planting roots of Western-style insanity in the war-torn society, in the form of television. According to a 8/1/07 story in the NY Times, by Barry Bearak, titled, "Amid War, Passion for TV Chefs, Soaps and Idols":
"Since the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, Afghanistan has been developing in fits and starts. Among the unchanging circumstances that still leave people fitful: continuing war, inept leaders, corrupt police officers and woeful living conditions. According to the government’s latest surveys, only 43 percent of all households have nonleaking windows and roofs, 31 percent have safe drinking water and 7 percent have sanitary toilets.
But television is off to a phenomenal start, with Afghans now engrossed, for better or worse, in much of the same escapist fare that seduces the rest of the world: soap operas that pit the unbearably conniving against the implausibly virtuous, chefs preparing meals that most people would never eat in kitchens they could never afford, talk show hosts wheedling secrets from those too shameless to keep their troubles to themselves.
The latest national survey, which dates from 2005, shows that 19 percent of Afghan households own a television, a remarkable total considering not only that owning a TV was a crime under the Taliban but that a mere 14 percent of the population has access to public electricity. In a study this year of Afghanistan’s five most urban provinces, two-thirds of all people said they watched TV every day or almost every day."
There are many ironies about the proliferation of television in Afghanistan, not the least of which is its literacy rate of 28%, nearly the lowest in the world. More ironic to me, however, is what may be the oddest items traded between two nations. Consider this news, reported this week by the Associated Press, "Afghanistan will produce another record poppy harvest this year that cements its status as the world's near-sole supplier of the heroin source, yet a furious debate over how to reverse the trend is stalling proposals to cut the crop, U.S. officials say". In other words, we gave them TV, they send us heroin. Now that's a drug trade!
Like you, I'm sure, it warms my heart to know that Afghanistan's main network, Tolo TV, was seeded through a grant from the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). I know what you're thinking. What does setting up a commercial television network, one that leads with a program called, "Afghan Star", have to do with social development? Why are we dumbing them down, when we should be smarting them up? Do you think it's because that same program has been working so well over here?
As Al Gore points out in The Assault on Reason, "Consider the rules by which our present public forum now operates and how different they are from the norms our Founders knew during the age of print. Today's massive flows of information are largely in one direction. The world of television makes it virtually impossible for individuals to take part in what passes for a national conversation".
Hence, the television question is not one of content – if the Discovery Channel is better for the viewer than American Idol – rather it's a question of the technology of television itself, and its effect on the human being and the society. It's not what's on that matters, as much is it is, when it's on, you're off.
Conversely, reading, particularly literature, wakes up, engages and inspires the mind. It's through reading that one can best develop an imagination. The vision of America itself would not have been possible without the developed imagination of our Founders. I'm certain that Jefferson's inspiration for the Constitution was not a program on democracy on the History Channel. In fact, The Age of Reason, itself, and the Enlightenment, were a direct result of the proliferation of the written word.
Sadly, however, reading of literature is on the decline in America. According to a 2004 study by the National Endowment for the Arts highlighting the decline, "Literary reading is in dramatic decline with fewer than half of American adults now reading literature...[the study] reports drops in all groups studied, with the steepest rate of decline - 28 percent - occurring in the youngest age groups."
How does all this tie in to the Afghanis? Here's how. According to the National Drug Intelligence Center (a division of the US Department of Justice), there are roughly 800,000 hardcore heroin addicts in America, with nearly all of the drug coming from Afghanistan. It's no question that there's no happy ending to heroin addiction, aside from rehabilitation and recovery. But compare that to the amount of Americans addicted to television. While the effects of television addiction may be less obvious and less glaring than heroin addiction, on the macro level they are certainly more devastating. If we look back at the past fifty years, the destruction to our society by television dwarfs that of heroin, or any other consumable drug, even alcohol. I don't have numbers to back this up. It's just a hunch.
So, when we say we "brought democracy to Afghanistan", we see what that means. In the end, there's little difference between us and Afghanis. They can't read, and we don't read. Something from the Times article summed all this up perfectly, "Maybe Afghanistan is not so different from other places,” said Muhammad Qaseem Akhgar, a prominent social analyst and newspaper editor. “People watch television because there is nothing else to do". I have nothing else to say.
Craig Gordon
Carmelita hold me tighter
I think I'm sinking down
And I'm all strung out on heroin
On the outskirts of town
-Warren Zevon
