Tag: American Culture

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Culture Reading

Day 1758 and Fluctuation in Society

I was ordered into bed for a couple of days by not one but two doctors. As I mentioned yesterday, a small incision for testosterone pellets must have let in a small amount of bacteria.

Maybe we didn’t pick the correct antibiotics (or maybe it was an inadequate dose) so what looked like healthy healing turned into a subcutaneous infection just as it was all look well which needed managing and cause me a bit of trouble.

So I’ve been catching up on costume dramas like The Gilded Age about the 1880s boom times in America. I’m on the third season of it and while not quite done but I’m enjoying it.

It’s provided me inspiration before as I’m fascinated that corporate charters are what lead to America’s experiment in self governance and each new era of technological and commercial development seems to kick off new organizational opinion of how best to manage society.

No matter the era or the people involved, humans will always find new ways to organize themselves into hierarchies that reflect changes in technology and material conditions.

As eager as we may be to unravel past cultural ways of organizing our status and importance, we always find new ways to set new standards of who matters and why and the same human nature finds a way to creep back in.

Position, birthright, inheritances and other ways of marking nobility and aristocracy manage to find a way to accommodate wealth and power lest they lose all status.

And who has wealth and power in this century whipsaws so fast, it feels like change is as seasonal as the weather. Even if in reality, society changed little if at all. Money and birth still matter quite a bit no matter how many followers someone has on the latest attention gathering platform.

I’ve mentioned my fondness for Paul Faussell’s Class: A Guided Tour Through The American Status System as a good jumping off point for understanding how American has organized its flavors of granting social capital within our supposedly classless society.

The Gilded Age attempts across the seasons to show that our society is always changing with subplots about rising in society through invention, intellect, political organization and sheer force of will.

Gilded Age’s director Julian Fellows also directed Downton Abbey which famously showed a British aristocratic family struggling with money, social change and war.

Both shows may show ways of changing one’s position in society but the skeptics exist at every turn. Even Fussell has Class X in his guide who exit rather than participate in what he calls the charade of meritocracy.

Fussell argues that it is essentially impossible to change one’s social class —up or down — but it is possible to extricate oneself from the class system by existing outside the system as a X person. Wikipedia

I find this particularly funny as we have entire institutions dedicated to deciding how we see and experience class and their luminaries hate how society organizes itself as much as anyone. The New York Times’s infamous columnist David Brooks finds Fussell’s book a “caustic and extravagantly snobby tour through the class markers of its time” which strikes me as especially funny as he once dedicated a column to worrying if he’d put his assistant into an awkward spot by presuming she wouldn’t know how to order in “gourmet” Italian deli.

Bourgeois bohemian that Brooks was, it never occurred to him that an Italian deli might actually be a lower class marker for plenty of people. American Society being filled with semiotic markers in America to ever really manage a static set of signifiers for all that long.

Categories
Politics

Day 1477 And I May Be Right, I May Be Wrong

We are just a few days away from the inauguration of President Donald J Trump for his second term. Celebrity Boss, Interrupted if you will. I’m astonished to find myself optimistic about the possibilities of the next four years. 

I feel like a fool in many ways. I’ve not done a long “what I got wrong” post about the last decade or so, but it seems clear to me that I was naive about too much. My belief in our institutions ran into too many conflicting realities  

I have been a libertarian most of my life. I tended to view myself as a small conservative libertarian but that meant in practice supporting left leaning politicians as they restricted policies that would have given the government power over my body and my rights.

I feared erosion of church and state as I am a Calvinist myself. America is filled with religious refuges fleeing both church and state. 

Like many of the small-l libertarians, I am fearful of all forms of populism overtaking the state. Carefully constraining the Leviathan of the state is required. We citizens have granted it a most singular power: the monopoly on violence. Similarly we know the tyranny of a majority. The less we enable Leviathan the safer we will be.

Yet I was slow to notice that the neoconservatives and theocrats searching to spend and extend the state were not the only evils lurking in the swamp.

The good intentions of liberal and progressive ambition sent the rhetoric of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness into a litany of rights “to” things. I mistook equity for equality in the rhetorical advocacy of progress.

In my own eagerness to welcome more people to the social mobility offered by free enterprise and the American dream, I missed my own freedoms being twisted into facsimiles of justice.

People secured rules and regulations to ensure their own desires and interests were paid for by someone else, while always being sure the rules benefit them. I enjoyed the comfort of many in-group benefits without realizing where it would head.

Regular people and their businesses were strangled by the growing morass of the regulatory burden everywhere. “I can’t breathe” applies everywhere the bureaucratic boot presses down on necks both literal and metaphorical. Americans cannot breathe under anarcho-tyranny.

Palate Cleanse

Ever wonder about the different layers of the ocean’s ecology? Biologist Bethany Kolody found a passion for oceanography circulation and wondered what the genetics of the different microbial biomes might reveal differences in the vast depths. What kind of genomes might we find at different depths?

You can read the preprint if you are interested but the Twitter thread linked above is worth a read for lay readers like myself. She even made a cool Microbial Ocean Atlas for Niche Analysis. It’s fascinating how little we know of our own oceans

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 254 and Cultural Hegemony

I did my best to stay off the news and internet today. I went into the mountains and spent the morning walking. I didn’t want to intake discourse about the anniversary of the September 11th attacks. But it’s hard to avoid all discussions of American influence and it’s place in the world. Even when you are watching a tv show. Perhaps especially if you are watching tv. American cultural hegemony is alive and well, even if our political, military and economic might is waning.

I like science fiction so when Netflix suggested a Norwegian horror show about a small town experiencing an environmental apocalypse I clicked watch. It’s called Ragnarok so I was hoping for claustrophobic terror, glaciers and the end times. But aesthetically it feels like I am watching Riverdale or one of the CW “Arrow-verse” teenage dramas. Which is to say it feels very American. I’ve been watching an American television show in Norwegian.

All the music is American. There is hip hop playing as the background music in a small rural Norwegian town. All the clothing is American from the track suits to the basketball shoes. Even the food is American with teenagers enacting personal dramas over baskets of French fries in a diner. The backdrop is a remote village on a fjord but you could easily mistake it for any town America.

This despite the fact that the plot and the cast of characters are all Nordic elder gods. Presumably inheriting a rich culture that is not straight out of Compton. But such is the reach of American culture that it pervades the imaginations of even the remotest and oldest cultural legacies. America may never have had an empire in the geographic sense, but we’ve had a strong hold in your mind. We live there rent free.

But that power was born out of a dynamism we are losing. America won’t be the center of geopolitical or economic power for much longer. Eventually this will slip our cultural power. As we lose the high ground of the world’s imagination other cultures will be emulated.

I’m actually afraid of the end of the empire. Where will I go to be part of building the future if it’s not here? Will I be allowed in? Will I be able to assimilate into whatever culture is making what comes next? I was born into an era of American dominance so manifest that attacks had to be brought through asymmetrical terror. It was impossible to imagine anyone taking on America any other way.

And while it’s true we still hold sway in the far reaches of global imagination, are we headed the way of the Norse elder gods too? Has it already slipped and we kid ourselves that we could fight back to prominence. Maybe Ragnarok already came for America and no one noticed it.