Ten years of Homer's kazy

TALAS — Ten years ago, when most Iradis knew it only from news reports and copied tapes brought from the air base, this newspaper called the horsemeat scenes in “The Steppe Family Robinson” “a joke at our expense that we will survive.” Church and clan leaders were less forgiving, and in March 1994 the Territorial Legislature passed a resolution regretting the episode’s “mockery of the Iradi people’s customs”.

We survived it. This week, in the week of the Feast of St. Janyl, IradOne will show the episode again, dubbed into Iradi, as it has every August since 1995. Children who were not born when Homer ate eleven sticks of kazy at a border bazaar can recite the High Commissioner’s lecture. And our language has a new expression: Homerdin kazysy, Homer’s kazy, for a foreigner’s well-meant blunder.

Look again and the episode laughs hardest at Iradimania itself: at Krusty’s charity album, at the “cowboys” of the songs who turn out to live in apartment blocks, at Americans who loved a country they had not visited. The settlement that took it off American screens has, since 2001, sent its Iradi license fees to the St. Luka Community Health Mission. Few jokes have paid for as many clinics.

Lisa tells the crowd that she found “a real country” that is “better than the song”. It is a generous line. Ten years on, it is worth asking whether we have been as generous to ourselves.