There is a tremendous amount of critical euphoria over the movie Borat, and rather obviously so – nothing works its magic on critics than a movie about how ordinary people are stupid cattle and media people are on the cocaine of their own confidence. Throw in stupid gross out humor and racially charged jokes, and you have the recipe for an Andy Kaufmanesque critical success combined with box office bonanza. But one of the most startling points of both the criticism and the movie itself is that neither "get" what they are really about, and that "it" is the real ur-topic of our moment.

The power of sadism and the necessity of torture.

One thing that has stopped surprising me is how supposedly liberal critics fall all over reactionary stories. The new Battlestar Galactica is a case in point: Salon magazine's television critic, and several other people, react as if the point would be to "put the shoe on the other foot", and get people to face how we would behave if the tables of the war on terrorism were turned. The gag is that the right wing world already believes this. The story isn't a transposition of a narrative, instead, it is a very ploddingly told version of the narrative itself – from ineffectual political leaders, to the French looking liberal in bed with the terrorists, to the ability of goooood old fashioned hetero-sexual repro-fucking to purify the worst sinner. Even the shift from the exotic, and hebraic, original mythology, to the classicized new version is part of the change of an original which was Manifest Destiny in Space, to the present which is, without apology, the right wing mythology of the war on terror and the clash of civilizations.

But Battlestar Galactica only touches on the deeper question of our age – is it moral and necessary to torture for the sake of civilization. With one rousing chorus, the film critics have cheered "Yes! You must torture to get the truth." Pain purifies, and the New York Times, Salon and Slate all agree – it is the deception and torture which make Borat able to elicit the truth.

The question of torture, or rather, frame for the sake of setting up an excuse to torture, is at the heart of two shows, both of them hits. Combined with the Borat movie, far more so than the television show, they make a persuasive case that the reactionaries have won the cultural question of sadism.

Sadism saves. Consider Stephanie Zacharek:

But that, I'm afraid, is the way the knish crumbles. If the public needs to be protected from humor, then there's no way humor can do its job -- particularly if that job is sometimes a dirty one. In "Borat," Cohen plays Borat Sagdiyev, a joyously anti-Semitic, bigoted, sex-obsessed, disco-dancing, English-mangling Kazakh TV journalist who comes to America to report on the customs and mores of the American people. This is one of the funniest and most pointed satires in years, but it's also one of the most complex, not so much because of the way it so outrageously exaggerates Borat's anti-Semitism, but because Cohen's methods -- which depend on bamboozling ordinary citizens -- are sometimes morally suspect. I've seen "Borat" twice, and I laughed almost as hard the second time as I did the first. But both times I left the movie feeling a little shaky, as if I'd just taken part in an amusement achieved by questionable means. Everyone who sees and enjoys "Borat" will walk away with a favorite line from it. (I'm somewhat partial to the way he approaches a pleasant Midwestern woman running a yard sale and, believing she's a gypsy, shakes an old Barbie at her accusingly: "Who is this lady you have shrunk?") But the true brilliance of "Borat" may lie deeply buried between the almost infinite number of quotable lines: Sometimes we can't face up to our own capacity for cruelty -- but at least we can get a gag out of it.

and in the end admitting –

But "Borat" is not a guilt-free pleasure. We can laugh at Cohen's unwitting marks, because they're not us. But really, we're just lucky that we weren't in his line of fire.

And isn't that exactly the distinction that pushed through the MCA – distinguishing from legitimate "enemy combatants" from the rest of us? To keep us out of the line of fire. The moral queasiness that Salon's television critic feels should have been followed down the rabbit hole – because at the bottom of she would have found us.

That is, indeed, the way the constitution crumbles in Abu Ghraib, in order to protect society from one evil, we must use cruelty and deception. Zacharek admits this is "morally questionable". But so does Dick Cheney in his more contemplative moments. The argument then isn't over the use of torture to get at the truth, merely who needs to be tortured how to defend against which evil.

Ron Rosenbaum gets that a problem with the film is its smugness:

hey get a car dealer to speak casually about running over Gypsies, a rodeo crowd member to speak approvingly of lynching gays, and a drunken frat boy to start a riff that leads from "whites are a minority" to "Jews are in control." The portrait of America doesn't seem representative but selective, designed with disdain.
But then, everything in this film is dumbed down—both Borat and the ordinary people ridiculed in the movie. Maybe it had to be done to blow up the sketch to feature length, but maybe sometimes not everything needs to be blown up.

But fails to see that the reason for the dumbing down isn't the loss of an essential element of the original, but an unleashing of it. Borat's creator is beyond reach of the wit. Voltaire knew better – he skewered himself, as a way of keeping the game honest.

But the New York Times' Manohla Dargis falls for it completely, enthusing:

That scene may inspire accusations that Mr. Baron Cohen is simply trading on cultural and regional stereotypes, and he is, just not simply. The brilliance of “Borat” is that its comedy is as pitiless as its social satire, and as brainy.

And so does the Washington Post's Ann Hornaday:

In addition to the hopelessly un-cool "Not!," "Jew" is a favorite Borat punch line, but Gypsies and Uzbeks aren't much luckier, as he haplessly makes a hash of American notions of patriotism, pluralism and political correctness. In the comedic tradition of Larry David, "Punk'd," "South Park," the late Andy Kaufman and Stephen Colbert, Borat pushes humor to its most discomfiting edges, eliciting howls and winces in equal measure. The result is a perfect combination of slapstick and satire, a Platonic ideal of high- and lowbrow that manages to appeal to our basest common denominators while brilliantly skewering racism, anti-Semitism, sexism and that peculiarly American affliction: we're-number-one-ism.

While catering to the cultural sense of "we are number oneism".

24 is the most naked set up – where people engage in emotional sadism at "the Counter Terrorism Unit" upon each other as the way of moving the organization along – emotional torture is their human resources program – but more importantly, sequential torturing their way along the terrorist chain. The "ticking bomb" pressure point is nakedly displayed, and by itself, is of little interest. However, what hooked many, liberal, viewers was the use of very 1960's esque techniques of avant-garde cinema. This is a general pattern of reactionary narrative having learned how to handle the pop techne, and part of how the 1960's generation is pulled in to reactionary narrative: the surface was the heuristic – or "the medium is the message".

House is a more interesting object, because torturing for truth is now at one step removed. In essence, Dr. House tortures people and breaks the rules. His method of diagnosis is to do painful and dangerous things to people until the truth leaps out at him. Sometimes he is wrong, but usually he ends up right. Between "aha!" moments of logical brilliance, to conniving illegalities, the set up in the first season was House always being right, and some "poor dullard" standing in his way. The second season has become more complex, with House's style, and limitations, setting into play more and more violent pain on his patients, and more and more repercussions for himself. But the set up remains – the way House finds the truth is by inflicting systematic pain, engaging in logical detection, in order to stop "the ticking bomb" which is a medical program.

House is morally perverse - by making House the doctor who directly saves lives, it creates an argument that is formally the same as George Bush's on terrorism, but with different content so that people do not notice.

Borat, the movie, is a movie in celebration of sadism. It makes fun of everyone, except the sadist himself: Sacha Baron Cohen divorces himself from the Borat persona, and attacks from behind the conceit that criticism of him is anti-semitic. The sadism is implicit in the results – from people lied to, to jobs lost, to an open admission that satire must be sadistic. Borat is the Patriot Act brought to the screen. And not as a comedy.

Borat the, on television, could be chillingly amusing, but it still hid behind the fundamental sadism of the media age – you have to go along with the guy with the camera. Critics mistake "get along" behavior to do anti-social things, with media behavior to do anti-social things. No one who sees Borat will doubt that anyone dealing with him knows that there is something media happening here, even if they don't see the camera.

Borat the movie takes Andy Kaufman's counter humor – and his sadistic impulses – out through the other end of the media age. Kaufman understood that the humiliation he inflicted on people was because of the power of show business and media – using the conventions of the video age against the conventions of the stage age. Kaufman's target, was the dying stylization of vaudeville and the theatrical fake – wrestling, mediums, song and dance numbers – as well as the emerging stylizations of the pop age. He clearly loved and understood the theatre world. It was not the pain he inflicted, but his understanding of timing, gags and misdirection, which made his satire work. He could satirize gently as well as crassly.

Borat does not have a theatre world to properly satrize. He is not sticking a knife into a still warm corpse, but coldly using the parody of the Romantic age that the modern age lives on. This is why the movie is tiresome, because it isn't just Borat who is smug, it is Sacha Baron Cohen. He's smug for a reason – namely, he is far smarter than the people who write about him, and he knows exactly how to push their buttons.

It was Foucault who told us that each age needs an opposite – an unreason to match reason, a stupid to match smart. Laurel and Hardy were stupid about the coming mechanical age – they were stupid about how to make their way in a changing world. Smart was knowing how things were in a more fast paced time. Laurel and Hardy were always one step behind, trial and error, much of both. Peter Sellars' inspector Clousseau, by contrast, is inept at dealing with the kalaedascopic interactions of people. He is not a modern, but a post-modern. He's a modern, he knows how the system works, which is how he manages to stay in place, but the web of reference and connection is beyond him.

Borat recreates stupid for the court age. It is the faux pas which is funny, the shit that shits from all the shit around us. We are aware of how thin the veneer is, in part because it has been made thinner over time – look at how little make up women wear compared to the 1950's – another sign of the death of theatricality. But also because we are constantly obsessed with it. Shit, is big business, and people spend a great deal of time, and make a great deal of money, handling it, wiping it, perfuming it and regularizing it. We have more in common with the ancien regime, because we wander about with our shitloads full to the gills, waiting for the chance to literally, or metaphorically, drop them.

Which is why we are entertained by this carnival of pain.

The other component, however, is the self-congratulatory nature of the modern over the romantic. This component, present in Titanic at a scale large than the ship itself – is what is different from greater comedies of the past and present, and even from Borat the television show.

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Let's unwind this. Borat's homeland is a place where the folk-romantic ideology is still in place. The folk-romantic was a construction, largely of the 1750-1850 era. Things such as Scots Tartans were systematized, folk songs written down, "native" languages reinvented and folk epics written in them. This nationalized folk ethos is both positive and negative. From it comes the popular republican mythology, the egalitarianism – foreign to the Enlightenment which was aristocratic and elitist to the core – as well as the heroic and inventive spirit. What we think of as romantic love in marriage is a gift of this age. It is also the age which created racism as we understand it. Particularly as Europeans came into colonial power over other people different from themselves. Previously the European exceptionalism had been Christianity, or some specific franchise of it, over "heathens". This does not work as a colonial ethos for long, for the simple reason that colonials must convert their slaves and servants. But once converted, the exceptionalism is gone. A new basis for exceptionalism was required.

The age of absolutism dealt with this by brute force – since the society of the Absolute monarch was strictly hierarchical, filled with arbitrary chains of command – Austrian houses ruling from Spain over Dutch possessions, for example – there was no reason to worry about viceroys ruling over converted subject peoples, or even interbreeding with them. During the British East India Company's charter power over British possessions it was not unusual for men there to have native wives. This all changed with the Raj.

What changed was the sense of division, no longer was it acceptable to have an arbitrary lord/serf relationship – Europeans from the medieval through the age of reason had no qualms about these relationships – but there had to be something intrinsic that made the separation. The Romantic, which laid the ground work for the idea of evolution and genetics, based on the idea that there had to be intrinsic differences that manifested themselves by extrinsic characteristics – also had a need to harp upon bigotry and marry it to the concept of "race". The concept was suspect even then. There is no German Race by 1700, with migration, war, uprooting, mercenary movement, mercantile opportunism – nor much of any other unique line of descent other than a few populations. But visual identification was the best they had, and the need to draw a distinction based on it was a social, economic and cultural need.

The romantic nationalist state as the carrier of bigotry culminated by being mixed with the modern – in the Nazi state, which took modern geometric order, industrialized expansion, itself a product of the 19th century's system of thought – and warped them together with the power of both broadcast media, and nihilistic racism. Borat bounces in as the comic incarnation of the Romantic national –even the title of the movie states clearly that the ur-target is the Romantic national state.

And from there headlong into being dishonest with itself and with us.

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Borat is witty - taking cold eye to pieties. The Defamation League should not bother criticizing the ersatz racism – since anyone who can't get the intent never will anyway. But it lacks humor, and it lacks self reflection. This, of course, is why it is so popular with the chattering classes, since not dealing with their own assumptions is a need they have. It satirizes the surface of media, and the surface of the age, while smugly congratulating itself for not being romantic nationalist racist.

But what it is, is Bushite. On one layer it attacks Bushism – Borat is a Bush League Bush – with a complete incomprehension of the world beyond his narrow borders, a head filled with fixed notions about the world, and unlimited ability to believe that, to riff off of Douglas Adams, he is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate. But even as it attacks Bushism, it embraces it. That is because it is the product of a mind as certain as Bush, and it accepts the fundamental assertion that the truth is gained through deception and pain.

Borat the television snippet does, from time to time, get this smug self-congratulatory aura, but it undermines it just as quickly. More over, it has other jokes in its arsenal. Borat the movie has no other theme except a simultaneous puffery about how much better than the Victorians its makers are, and at the same time, a complete lack of comprehension of its own sadism. Other people are bad, but not the people who can laugh at this film.

Ultimately Borat would have been better off without the conceit and serious purpose – it could have been one of a number of stupid comedies – Harold and Kumar, Wayne's World, South Park – which gored every sacred cow available. But by creating a sacred cow, the movie, like "The Passion of the Christ", it reveals more about its makers than it intended. The Passion of the Christ was "Road Warrior" in slow motion – masochism raised to religion. Borat is the reverse, it shows how much we, in our time, have the desire to inflict pain, to make other people wince as a reprisal against the daily humiliations that we suffer through.

The internet and talk radio have risen on this wave, and Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh are filled with the power of media to make masochists perform. Blogging, with its hard rips and knocks is likewise, the celebration of this pre-revolutionary rebellion against the neo-victorianism of false civility. Borat, as House and 24 show, is hardly alone in celebrating Sadism, or even the idea that it takes pain to produce the truth. Increasingly this is how groups communicate with each other in the media age – by inflicting pain on those who transgress.

Borat, by saying that there are privileged people who can inflict pain – and Cohen does this by making his person sacred and separate from the character, and thus the mastermind – has embraced the central idea of Abu Ghraib, Gitmo and the MCA. No matter how liberal or socially anti-racist it appears, it is embracing the new exceptionalism, one which, as Bush tells us, is not really racial or religious, but based on some other quality. Bush calls it "Democracy" and the personal quality "Freedom", but what he is really saying is that there is an inner quality.

In the 19th century Napoleon provide the matrix of those who believed themselves superior in having what Nietzsche would call "the will to power". In this moment Churchill has often been used in the same way – as the great spirit that people like Bush channel. In that time the ability to kill, see Crime and Punishment for examples, was the ability to kill. Perhaps we need an update, where it is the police officer who tortures his way to a complete disaster, and is pursued by the victim.

There's no arguing with a sense of humor, if you laugh at it, it is funny to you. And no one can really tell someone not to find something funny. However, one can point out when humor is more than simply mean spirit, and when it becomes a wall for self-deception. Borat the movie is a cultural learnings that would only really be funny to two countries famous for not speaking other languages, whose basic gag is the bad English of someone from a country whose language isn't even closely related to English. I doubt most people laughing at Borat could do as well in Central Asia as Borat does here. And more over, I would be willing to bet that they would, in real life, say and do things that are as stupid as Borat, the character, does here. In fact, I am sure of it, because the evidence of Iraq and Afghanistan is precisely that – a bungling trail of stupidities committed by people who do not know the language, culture, or even the place to put their shit.

Borat's maker would probably agree with this sentiment. But why then does he, and his ardent admirers who would also probably agree with it, embrace, explicitly, the ethos created those mistakes – namely the cleansing power of pain? That is why we went into Iraq, nominally at least according to the Congressional Authorization, under the assertion that the only way to get at "real weapons inspections" was to conduct what "Get Your War On" called "Operation Bomb The Living Fuck Out of You". And the way we got to war was a deception under false pretenses, for a false reward. Again, why does Borat the film embrace this, in the most operative way?

Because it isn't guerilla film making, but, well, not all they way up to another "G" word, but certainly the product of power, and not of powerlessness.

The desire to embrace this idea is understandable. We live in an age of people concocting plausible lies – called "opinions" now – and then repeating them with complete confidence, daring someone to find the inconsistency. No amount of logic or discourse seems to be able to shake people now, or perhaps we have selected our public people for the ability to be pathologically compartmentalized from the truth – and hence there is a desire for something else. We have flocked to CSI and Law and Order, which for a while seemed to offer the justice system as the means to truth, but have also seen "Justice" which says the opposite – perhaps it might hit the truth, sort of, sometimes. But there is no connection.

As someone who uses this ethos of pain as a generator of truth, the real lack in the film, from here, is that it fails to satirize the one thing that is most in need of it – that is, like anti-semitism once was, the thing that almost everyone accepts, even though the more perceptive are aware that there is something deeply wrong with it.

See it? If you like the vein of humor it mines, by all means. But don't fall for the attempts to make the film profound. It isn't, but instead is another race around a track that was laid down decades ago, and a celebration of the rut we are in as a culture and a polity.