Pre-Departure: Buenos Aires (YO)

Solar Flower, The Giant Robot of Buenos Aires

As a child, I was taught to value diversity and the different attributes that each person has to offer. Learning this helped me to have greater appreciation for the world around me and not just the neighborhood, city, state, or even country that I was born into. Through this appreciation traveling has become a staple of the individual I have become. Ironically, this individual perspective ties into the belief that it is important to understand how other people view life and their interpretations of what it means to be a part of a global community.This is certainly a part of the reason that I enjoyed the works of Trevor Noah and  Karl Ove Knausgaard. 

I believe Mr. Noah is a comedian like any other. He discusses topics in a way that can make any number of people uncomfortable. However, since most people do not like to feel uncomfortable or have their perspectives challenged the tweets of Mr. Noah on Twitter are seen as insensitive or inappropriate. It is important to remember that the job of a comedian is to be an intellectual critic of society that always stays current. Albeit, instead of approaching the issues of everyday society from a traditional standpoint, comedians take the route of “offensive”, easy to understand dialogue in order for everyday people to consider these issues and discuss them on a much deeper level. It is not easy to make light of serious situations but if you get your audience talking about these situations, then I believe comedians like Mr. Noah have done their job right.

As most people across the world, many American commenters took offense to what they saw as Knausgaard’s scrutinizing their country. They interpreted his essay as having a perspective of the U.S. as being uncultured, contradictory, and overall uneventful. However, some Americans that are more familiar with the author’s writing (or literature such as this in general) understood what Knausgaard was actually telling his audience. His brief journey was not at all about critiquing the U.S. but in fact, critiquing himself as an individual during the varying situations he found himself in while in a foreign land.

New York Times, Language Map