If for no reason beyond the simple fact that he struck me as being utterly incorrect, I was pretty well convinced that it was in the anonymous poster’s best interest that he remain unidentified. At the end of a foreignpolicy.com article chronicling last week’s Gadhafi incident at the United Nations, a commenter explained that “OECD (highly developed, largely “Western”) countries heard the speech as a “rant,” but to the developing world, [Gadhafi] spoke the truth.” The poster’s analysis, however, quite simply failed to mesh with the pieces of Moammar Gadhafi’s charade that had been aired in both pictures and print. Gadhafi had, among other things, questioned the veracity of the Kennedy assassination, implied that swine flu may be a piece of American chemical weaponry and, most notably, likened the United Nations to al-Qaida, dubbing the Security Council the “terror council.” All the pieces of a classical rant were present, and yet, the anonymous poster was unconvinced. “Qaddafi,” the commenter claimed, “spoke the truth,” and the more I considered it, the more it appeared the anonymous poster did as well.

My—and I’m tempted to generalize to the point of using the term “our”—understanding of the world is predicated almost, if not entirely, on a set of subjective realities construed by and largely contained within a culture-specific understanding of how the world works. According to this understanding, Gadhafi’s performance last week fell nowhere shy of unfiltered lunacy. But the point made by the anonymous poster in no way refutes or denies this. It’s not that Gadhafi’s U.N. performance didn’t seem ridiculous: Having watched and read bits and pieces of his charade, I would be rather hard-pressed to maintain that it didn’t. On some levels, however, this is precisely the point. My—and again “our” may be an equally apropos choice of pronoun—perception of what is or is not “ridiculous” is in no normative sense correct. Nor is it incorrect. The only potential critical failing is to keep from acknowledging how passing judgment is, in itself, problematic.

To maintain that our understanding of world affairs is distorted by “the media” is to be cliché but in no way unfair. Yet while simply acknowledging the extent to which the media has an effect on our understanding of affairs that are not our own is necessary, it is by no means sufficient. Our appreciation of anything—whether it be politics, the arts or rhetoric alone—is baseless without a repertoire of cultural understandings by which it can be assigned meaning. Thus, insomuch as Gadhafi is very decidedly a product of a set of cultural dynamics irrefutably different from those at work in the “West,” it would be senseless to deem his rhetoric last week one of “the top 10 craziest things ever said during a U.N. speech” as foreignpolicy.com did in a later article. While Gadhafi’s approach and content both seemed irrepressibly alien, without a firm grasp of Gadhafi’s perspective and those things upon which it is reliant, neither his demeanor nor his argument can be said to be wrong.

It’s interesting—and perhaps telling—to note that none of the diplomats Foreign Policy picked out as worthy for its list of U.N. faux pas hailed from countries we might consider like our own. Conspicuously absent were leaders from the United States, Western Europe or any other geographical entity potentially construable as existing in the culturally defined “West.” It would be equally interesting—and quite possibly more telling—to read a compendium of political faux pas according to the some outlet of the non-“Western” world. It seems difficult to imagine that one or two of our own wouldn’t make the list.