Entry 4:
Is irony dead? That's a question that's supposed to be bothering the experts in Burbank these days. In Pakistan, of course, culture-watchers are ordinarily bothered by heavier issues: Is secularism dead? Is democracy dead? Is the Taliban dead? Against such a backdrop, it's pretty hard to engage someone in a heady discussion about whether the sarcastic use of humor in American popular culture in order to subvert dominant political, cultural, or aesthetic conventions is still in vogue among younger residents of our cosmopolitan coastal cities.
Yet even here, just a handful of miles from the front, at a time when Very Important Things are happening, I can't escape the irony question. It pops up, specifically, every time I walk through Islamabad's Jinnah Super Market, as I did last night when I went to buy a sweater on the chance I'll be heading to Afghanistan. I walked away with a nice warm sweater, brown with a red stripe and a roll-neck collar. Something that would make generations of Schaffer grandparental holiday sweater-givers happy.
And that's just the point: I'm not necessarily proud of this, but I'm a guy whose favorite purchase from a trip to Indonesia five years ago is an oversized Van Halen belt buckle. And who once made a three-wheel cab stop on a street in Sri Lanka so I could take a picture of the children's clothes store whose window sign advertised "Free Booty with Purchase."
But since I've been in Pakistan, my camera's stayed in my bag at nearly every moment of would-be cross-cultural hilarity. No photos of Rawalpindi's Decent Hotel nor of Peshawar's Sham Hotel. No pictures of the billboard pictures of Metallica's James Hetfield above the inexplicable words "Rock Group Josh." Sure, I've giggled secretly over the acronymic sign that I've been told once adorned the gate of the think-tank then known as the Pakistan Institute of Strategic Studies. But I've not once bothered the proprietors of the Butt Saree shop, the Butt Hotel, or Dr. Butt's office for a snapshot.
Likewise, I managed to take my stroll through the stores last night without shelling out the $1.50 it would have taken to get the belt with the giant Playboy Bunny buckle or dropping the four bucks for the windbreaker embossed with the slogan our government has spent millions trying to get people in these parts to believe: USA Rocks. And I've not spent a single rupee on Bin Ladeniana, the posters and postcards and wallets and medallions and T-shirts that seem available at every market in this country. (Including, by the way, the souvenir shops at the higher-end hotels.)
What's going on here? Have I grown up? Am I one of those dullards who only takes pictures of officially designated local culture? Have I taken my reportorial mission in Pakistan so seriously that I'll not dare mar it with the goofy purchase of one of the mosque-shaped alarm clocks I keep seeing for sale around town? Or is it the more obvious answer, that no matter what I'm doing here, in the age after Sept. 11, and while we're bombing a bunch of people not far from here back to the stone age, local misunderstandings of culture in the MTV era don't seem quite so funny? The North Korea-published Kim Il Sung biography I once bought from a bookseller on Broadway was a laugh riot. The Osama hagiographies on sale here aren't. And it's not because the writing is any different.
In fact, conversations I've had here with friends and sources and others all seem incredibly earnest. Even when—as with the ongoing procession of educated adults who tell me the World Trade Center attacks were a Jewish conspiracy—they're incredibly disturbing. People want to talk to me about religion, or about love, or about family, or even goofily about sex. And I answer without wisecracks, a defense mechanism that's hard enough for me to avoid when I'm with friends whose intimacy I'm comfortable with, and which was once nearly impossible to avoid among strangers.
My friend Arif, a Pashtun whose family has a long history on both sides of Pakistan's Afghan border, particularly delights in telling me about his culture's traditions of hospitality. And they're true! I've never been so well fed and fussed over and cared about by people with no incentive to be nice to me as when I've visited the Pashtun belt of this country. I'd like to say something wacky about the hospitality, but I can't. It's just really sweet.
Which isn't to say my friend isn't cynical about aspects of Pakistani life. He constantly carps about the ways I'm being cheated by locals of all stripes, from fixers to drivers to rug merchants. We went once with another journalist friend to a rug store and watched him bargain a couple of carpets down to a decent price. Days later, I told Arif that I was curious about one of the Afghan rugs, but I didn't think I'd buy it: This particular piece of oriental handicraft featured a not-very-attractive portrait of Karl Marx. And, I told him, I didn't feel like spending that kind of money on a joke. "Let me go in and look at it," Arif said. "But don't come with me." That night, he presented me with the carpet, which in the absence of a foreigner sold for a little less than 15 bucks. Had irony reared its ugly head or had friendship? You be the judge.
