The web magazine Slate posted a piece, Friends From India which I had initially thought was a parody. Its subtitle is: “I grew up watching the show in Mumbai. I worry about the damage its gender stereotypes still do there.”
It’s really bizarre. The author is Indian, and supposedly is making a comment about India. But the piece isn’t about India at all, but the worries and concerns of a liberal person in the West. Friends isn’t that important in driving social views in India, and gender relations and attitudes toward homosexuality in India have little to do with Friends. But, today Friends seems retrograde to many American liberals, because of its attitude toward gender relations and gayness, which were mainstream in the 1990s.
So it seems here that to get another piece on Friends and social justice into Slate, they just commissioned a piece that was officially about India, but quite obviously wasn’t.
This gets to a major dynamic in American society today which worries me somewhat: foreign affairs being filtered through purely American concerns and perceptions. Americans care so little about the rest of the world that they turn the rest of the world into the United States in substance, if not exterior styles.
The problem is that we are living through a great transition in the world. America is no longer as much the center, and economic, social, and political, power will rebalance toward Asia. In such a multipolar world pandering to purely American preoccupations will lead to gross misunderstandings and likely catastrophe.