Intimate Strangers

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And Babel trots out favorite lefty stereotypes, from Third World victims to ugly Americans (and, to be fair, other ugly Westerners). The Moroccan kid who uses a bus for target practice comes off as a poor naïf--if he were American, Hollywood would probably treat him as an example of our sick, gun-crazy society. The American couple are the kind of self-absorbed Yanks who jet off to a poor country to be "alone" among thousands of peasants, guarded and distanced from their surroundings, taking their Cokes without ice so as not to drink the water.

Whatever sententious hoo-ha Babel is freighted with, however, there is a larger point in it and its butterfly-fiction cohort that cuts across political boundaries: that in the globalization, global-warming, global-terror era, other people's problems are our own, and class privilege and a U.S. passport are no force field. (Indeed, Babel's story of Americans in mortal peril among foreigners even echoes, if inadvertently, a Bush Administration refrain: that we are no longer protected by two big oceans.) You can argue the politics and the art of Babel and company. It is harder to argue their premise: in a troubled, interdependent world, we all have to drink the water.