American Culture – Julie Fredrickson

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

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.