SLATE and whiners

So I'm over at Slate reading @ a Cynthia Barnes in Tunisia and also reading the comments that her article has drawn. And the comments are predictable. Anyone who writes a diary-type piece for Slate must know going in that they will get comments from few besides bitter shut-ins who, unable to travel and write themselves, will question the motives and skills of the person who actually had the nerve to do it. A typical plaint might be Why did Slate send such a whiney bitch? by someone who reveals themselves as just as whiney a bitch, but clearly of the local variety.

One of the most common complaints that comes up with respect to this is the "the writer writes about what he/she knows and does not adequately understand the local people." A wonderfully representative quote here

The problem is that she went to Africa, complained about the conditions and missed the REAL story, which is the African people themselves. This story was all about HER, HER, HER

Which is, of course, idiotic. The story is the African people as Barnes sees them. If Slate wanted a story on the African people it would have asked an African person to write it - or an expert on African people. The story is titled, after all, Timbuktu for the Timid which should be a hint to even the densest reader about the subject matter. Some readers, I guess, are denser than others.

The other point here is of course the author complains, compares, and in fact appreciates from her own point of view. This is somewhere completely normal on the scale of possible reactions to foreign culture. It is a more benign version of what some Muslims are doing in London - moving in and hating the culture they have moved to (in that case, to the point of terrorism). This scale of reactions ranges from the "exterminate the brutes" approach of the right wingnuts ("bring them democracy" is nothing more than a barely disguised call to erase their existing culture) to the "going native" approach of stinking hippies and the insane. Cynthia Barnes is towards the middle of this continuum and not at all that excited by the whole problem (unlike, say, the London terrorists who are closer to the right on the continuum and extrermely pissed about the problem). So she writes what she was commissioned to do.

And the real whiners whine.