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A few days ago I watched the Nicaragua episode of Anthony Bourdain. What a remarkable document of imperialist propaganda.
Bourdain's use for US imperialism lay in his skilled performance of an honest everyman, so he could reach audiences no Fox News demonization of socialism in Central America ever could.
In the Nicaragua episode, he went a step further and burnished his anti-FSLN credentials by constantly referencing the disdain he had for Reagan in the 80s.
Even if he weren't aggressively ideological (he was very much in the mold of old liberal Cold Warriors), the whole Bourdain enterprise would've still been ideologically shaped by his dependence on native informants, language barriers, and people's healthy distrust of US tourists.
His contacts in Nicaragua naturally included the owner of an opposition media company, an owner of a coffee plantation, and a Nicaraguan-American man who, bearing a vague back story, apparently decided he'd rather become an owner of a big farm estate in Nicaragua than live in LA.
By far the most disgusting segment of the episode was when he went to ogle at poor children searching trash heaps, commenting in their presence on their misery while never speaking with them, just using the image of them to blurt anti-Ortega remarks into the camera.
Much like the US university system's army of Fulbright diplomats, Bourdain never found the time in his ponderous voiceovers to wonder whether the very system that appointed him as a flyby overnight critic of entire nations has anything to do with producing poverty in Nicaragua.
