Column:

Is democracy still attractive?

By Charles Austin

Published Feb. 23, 2009

Life kind of sucked for people in Afghanistan between 1996 and 2001. Under Taliban rule, music, dancing and TV were banned, women were disallowed from going to school and stealing was punishable by amputation of a hand or foot. So when the United States military came to Afghanistan in 2001 following the Sept. 11 attacks, it would be hard for the Afghans not to be intrigued, if not elated, by democracy. Although a new constitution was ratified in 2004, it wasn't until Fall 2005 that democracy seeped into the nation's pop cultural bloodstream in earnest. Fall 2005 marked the debut of "Afghan Star," the nation's first democratically run reality TV show.

This weekend, the True/False Film Fest will be presenting a documentary (also titled "Afghan Star") that follows a handful of contestants for the duration of the show's third season.

The documentary chronicles the fervent public sentiment surrounding the show. Understandably, some people are ecstatic and others infuriated. "Afghan Star" works the same way as "American Idol" does, except it takes place in a culture where dancing is not only shameful but dangerous. One of the main contestants covered in the documentary dances during her final performance and receives death threats and universal scorn for her actions. It's kind of like Footloose, if Kevin Bacon had Islamic fundamentalists threatening to murder him for going to prom.

Strangely enough, despite the cultural taboo on dancing, most people shown in the documentary are aware of Western culture and the comparatively lewd music and dancing of Western pop singers like Shakira and Britney Spears. They aren't really bothered by it, though. They're driven by a nationalism and religious pride that holds their own people to a higher standard than those from other cultures and religions.

And all this makes me thankful to live in the society that produced Britney Spears and Lindsay Lohan.

Living in the U.S., it's too easy to forget that democracy is actually pretty invigorating. We've been married to her for more than two centuries, and she's grown fat, boring and routine. We see democracy every single goddamn time we come home from work, eat breakfast or drive down the street.

But Afghanistan is still in the early stages of dating democracy, when she still seems attractive, exciting and fun, and when a simple TV series still has the ability to feel gripping and revolutionary, rather than trite and habitual.

Sometimes when I think about U.S. intervention in the Middle East, it feels forceful, gratuitous and wrong. This has generally the public sentiment for the past few years, anyway, mostly because of the war in Iraq.

But "Afghan Star" paints a picture of a people who are far less jaded and cynical about democracy than we are. It's easy to forget just how great democracy is when it becomes a chore. I mean, it's tough to go to Wal-Mart and see hundreds of people working for sub-par wages with no benefits and to peruse isles full of 15,000 variations on the same fucking superfluous product and not feel a bit disheartened. But it's also easy to overlook how it's pretty spectacular that we just got to elect a president of our own choosing, and that there was -- and always is -- a peaceful transition of power from one party to another.

"Afghan Star" portrays a nation that actually seems excited about democratic elections, to the point that even pop culture elections feel really important.

For us, reality TV is just another fucking cog in the mundane machine that is democracy, but for the Afghans -- at least the less militant ones -- it's something transformative and transcendent. And that's pretty cool.