Borat's Experiment with Country Music

I'm probably in the vast minority of all college students in that I've never seen Borat the movie, so when we watched the experiment with country music on Thursday, it was the first time I had ever seen it. I found myself unsure of how to react to the clip. Because I know that Cohen is Jewish and because we had discussed his strategy of creating absurd situations to see how his targets react, I was less offended by the song than by the crowd's reaction to it.

I agree that part of the explanation for the audience's enthusiasm is undoubtedly that they are fans of country music and they never thought that they would be shown in the American mainstream media. I don't think, however, that this excuses their behavior. Even if the audience wasn't made up of raging anti-Semites and they were all just singing along because it was a catchy tune, everyone in this day and age should know that it's never OK to mock other racial or ethnic groups the way Borat's song does. As someone mentioned in class, the song probably would have been popular with the audience no matter which minority group was being thrown down the well. I think that this speaks volumes about the crowd's mentality of following along and passively accepting whatever bigotry they were being asked to agree with. The fact that not a single person in the bar felt uncomfortable or embarrassed by "Throw the Jew Down the Well" is extremely disconcerting and makes me realize that even though America has come far in the past few decades in terms of racism and prejudice, we as a country still have a long way to go.