The Sadness of America

[Dave Monroe]

--- Bekah <bekah0176 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> 
> The US doesn't have any kind of authentic culture to
> preserve or export (unless you count TV and rock
> and roll and movies and plastic things and blue
> jeans)....

Huh?  Wha?  Not only is this most all of my favorite
things, not to mention the most exportable stuff on
the planet save weapons and pollution, but ... well,
the deep, deep problematics of "authenticity" aside,
one might also mention jazz, C&W, R&B, soul, hip hop,
folk art and/or "Americana," the musical ... maybe the
complaint is that our culture tends towards the mass
repoducible?  So what?  So ...

The REALLY interesting point to be made, perhaps, is
that so much of what's really interesting about
American culture is at root inseaprable from its
importation of African slaves, but ... but that makes
any/all of it no less "authentically" American that
anything anywhere else is "authentically" of that
time/place/et al.  The Romans/Mongols/Moors/whoever
left their traces all over Europe, for example, and
most of the "traditions," not to mention nations, that
perhaps might be appealed to here are or relatively
recent invention ...

http://www.cambridge.org/uk/catalogue/catalogue.asp?isbn=0521437733

http://www.chass.utoronto.ca/history/material_culture/rmclean/html/trad.htm

http://www.versobooks.com/books/ab/a-titles/anderson_b_communities.shtml

http://www.nationalismproject.org/what/anderson.htm

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~mescha/bookrev/Anderson,Benedict.html

http://waste.org/mail/?list=pynchon-l&month=0209&msg=70567

> Only San Francisco, Boston and New York have their
> own urban ambiance.  

I love SF and NYC.  Haven't been to Boston, but I also
love Chicago, and I'm sure others here might have a
little something to say from experience ...

> There are some historical sites and the rest is 
> commercialized hype.  Why do the foreign tourists
> want to come to see the US?   Las Vegas?  (yes,
> sad to say, imo.)   Why do I go to Helsinki or
> Paris?

How are the Eiffel Tower, The Louvre, et al., not then
"commercialized hype" in their own ways?  LV I've been
to, and can likely do without, but ...


	
		
__________________________________ 
Yahoo! Mail - PC Magazine Editors' Choice 2005 
http://mail.yahoo.com