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Latino Skepticism
"American media consumers should learn to be more skeptical of the stories being forced fed to them."
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By Enrique Rivera
Ese Bush, hijo de la gran… Chucha, chill Abuela, before you have another heart attack. That’s my grandmother and I, when she gets heated talking about President Bush.
In contrast, when I was speaking to a coworker, I offended her by comparing the president to Saddam Hussein. I argued that Hussein is a greedy dictator whose army killed many innocent people for unjustifiable reasons – but that Bush’s army did the same thing! of course, Hussein has committed many more atrocities, but you can draw comparisons between the two men, I said, based on their policies of invading another nation. I watched my co-workers’ jaw drop slowly, inch by inch, closer to the ground, and realized that I had just discovered another major difference between north American and Latino cultures.
I think Latinos are more open to accusing the leaders of our countries of being crooked. It could be because our families aren’t from the US, or because we’re used to seeing our politicians being dirty. I also have another theory. I think a lot of “gringos,” how my grandmother refers to Americans, tend to believe everything they see, read, or hear on the news, in the newspaper or on radio. Like when the president said Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, and ties to Al Qaeda, and the media reported it word for word. As soon as that news broke my grandmother was the first to say “Ese Bush, feo, cara de mono, va matar esa pobre gente para sacar petrolio.”
I realized a couple of things after my grandmother said that. One was, wow, that’s messed up, he’s going to invade another country for oil; and two, wow, Bush really does look like a monkey.
I’m inclined to think tv news audiences would eat up a report that president Bush wants to invade Australia, because its prime minister is an evil terminator from the future who has been sent back in time by Martians to prevent the people of earth from invading their planet. The media in this country seem to always look at things from the perspective that the U.S. government is the good guy and whoever its against is the bad guy but American media consumers should learn to be more skeptical of the stories being forced fed to them, and do their own research. While they’re busy doing that, I’ll take a gringo, cultural sensitivity workshop.
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