Trashing the Republic: an overdone pastime

From the Department of things are not as bad as we write they are. A number of American leftists are expecially prone to this. As for Pakistani journalists, for most of them the less said the better. One thing which is especially true of Pakistani society is that when faced with a problem they will analyze it all the way back to colonialisation.

bq.. …When we criticize some aspect of a particular, we tend to criticize not just the particular but the general scheme of things. It’s like pointing to someone’s long nose and saying not merely that the nose is disproportionate but that the person in question was born the wrong way. Pakistanis tend to go back to the beginning. Which is a good thing but not very helpful if you remain stuck at the beginning.

…Reading some of the opinion pieces in the Pakistani press, one would think this was a country where every second village damsel is condemned to gang rape by a village council and where slaughtering women in the name of honour is a routine happening in much of the countryside.

To be sure, such tragedies do occur but they do everywhere. Haven’t schoolboys been known to whip out guns and go on a slaughtering rampage in the United States? What’s so good about the American prison system? If I had to make the choice, I’d choose a Pakistani prison over an American one any time. If nothing else, I’d be saving myself from homosexual rape.

The only difference is that when something particularly bizarre or cruel occurs in a rich country, it counts as a sociological aberration worthy of close observation and analysis. In a country like Pakistan it is taken as representative of the societal norm.

>> “Dawn: Ayaz Amir”:http://www.dawn.com/weekly/ayaz/20030613.htm

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