conanberlin The Good Example of Conan Without Borders

The Good Example of Conan Without Borders

For a change, I’d like to start off with a quote.  “Culture makes people understand each other better. And if they understand each other better in their soul, it is easier to overcome the economic and political barriers. But first they have to understand that their neighbour is, in the end, just like them, with the same problems, the same questions.” – Paulo Coelho

Recently I’ve been watching a segment that Conan O’Brien has been doing on his show called Conan Without Borders.  The basic premise is that Conan gets himself an ambassador, essentially, to a culture, and travels to a location to do his show abroad.  He had Steven Yeun from The Walking Dead show him around South Korea, went with his Armenian assistant Sona to Armenia, and went to several other locations.  At first, I was just enjoying the segment, until I saw the episode where he visited Mexico with Jorge Ramos.

There’s a particular scene that struck a chord with me, and I’d like to share it here.  “I’ve been to Cuba, I’ve been to South Korea, I’ve been to Armernia. The solution to a lot of our problems is to go and meet people and to talk to them.  And the type of comedy I do, I like to be the joke.  I don’t go to a country to laugh at them, I want them to laugh at me.”

Jorge Ramos asked him a leading question about Donald Trump, and Conan continued, “There are many people who voted for [Trump] for economic reasons.  To me, it’s sad that I can’t travel from Los Angeles to Mexico City and talk to people and not have it be overtly political.  Yes, Trump comes up.  But I’m also trying to do a lot of comedy that has nothing to do with politics, that’s just about the people and the culture.  And I do not want it to be if you love Trump, then you’re going to hate this show, because I’m tired of that.  I’m tired of the dichotomy in the United States that two ideas can’t coexist at the same time.”

I’m tired of it, too, Conan.  The reason I bring this up, is that this segment, and now, I’ve discovered, the whole philosophical motivation behind the segment, resonates with something I’ve thought about for a long, long time.

One, that culture is the catalyst for a lot of how people treat each other, and that many of the cultural problems both in the United States and the world at large, which people demand to have governments solve, start at home, at the individual level, due to creating isolated, comfortable echo chambers of thought.  It’s a lot harder to hate someone who disagrees with you politically, to demagogue them, when you’ve had a beer with them and shared some good times.  We live in a society where bomb-throwers a uniquely empowered to have their views shared, and, my opinion is that it shouldn’t be like that. 

Clearly, what the country needs now are healers and ambassadors — people who can go meet people who aren’t like them and inspire good feelings, because a lot of the time people don’t remember what you said exactly, or what your reasoning or logic was, but how you made them feel.  The fact that Conan is going out there and representing exactly this kind of behavior, I think sets an example that we should all try to follow in our day to day lives.

A great example of this, is the way that Steven Yeun handled the fact that Conan O’Brien had been mispronouncing his name for years.  He told him, as a friend, and they laughed about it.  Had he not forged that relationship, based on positive, shared emotional experiences, the typical manifestation of such a fopah may occur — Steven may have seethed privately until he expressed it to others who shared the same experience, they rallied around the issue and formed a political group denouncing Conan for his racial insensitivity.  By making friends, you open special doors to these kinds of healthy conflict resolutions.

Secondly, it gives me some hope for an element of civility when Conan can, in the heart of LA where mentioning Donald Trump or Republicans, without following it up with a sharp enough diatribe, let alone defending them, offer Jorge Ramos — a person who has been very vocal about his dislike of Donald Trump — a statement that tacitly embraces the idea that Trump supporters are welcome as viewers of his show.  Again, this is because the inhospitable nature of political discourse in the United States is at an all-time high to the point where people are disowning their own family members for not belonging to the same political ideology as them.  The only way to step back from this brink is to follow the example Conan sets here.

Thirdly, I think the concept of traveling around the world, just like when done by Anthony Bourdain, and being an ambassador for American culture is an imminently important thing to do.  At a time in history where globalization is rapidly expanding, making positive inroads into other cultures and giving a good impression of Americans pays dividends in invaluable goodwill.  In Anthony Bourdain’s case, he was an ambassador for food — a key component of any nation’s culture.  In Conan O’Brien’s, for comedy. 

For a long time now, America has left culture to be mostly an afterthought, something without practical, financial rewards.  But it’s not true — the material rewards that come from cultural industries like food, tourism, music, literature, film, history, language translation, comedy and other sources reveal themselves over time in people’s personal pride, unity and reputation around the world. If you want to see the evidence of this, look no further than how factitious American society has become after years of neglecting these areas and, instead, focusing on STEM.

This is the kind of thing that has a ripple effect.  You can see it here, where South Koreans watching Conan’s special on visiting a Korean Spa opens, little by little, people’s hearts and brings everyone a little closer together.  With comedy. Who would have thought? And, additionally, he’s sharing foreign cultures with American citizens, making them more comfortable, and perhaps, one can hope, preempting conflict.

If you want to check out Conan’s Conan Without Border special, you can check it out on his youtube channel here.

The statement I’d like to leave you with for this post is this: Conan is a Harvard educated man with a large following, but the example here is something that can be practiced by individuals without the immense resources he has.  All you have to do is try things you don’ t normally try, talk to people you wouldn’t normally talk to, and visit places you wouldn’t normally go.  There, make friends and have positive experiences.  That’s all it takes — 330 million people in the US, if everyone did that, we’d find a lot of our problems would be solved more quickly, more satisfactorily, and with less acrimony.

Author

  • Ryan Night

    Ryan Night is an ex-game industry producer with over a decade of experience writing guides for RPGs. Previously an early contributor at gamefaqs.com, Ryan has been serving the RPG community with video game guides since 2001. As the owner of Bright Rock Media, Ryan has written over 600 guides for RPGs of all kinds, from Final Fantasy Tactics to Tales of Arise.

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