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Foreigners might not get this post’s reason for existing, but with some people it really does feel like we’re supposed to rebuke everything we see on a day to day basis and sometimes everyone we see, or else we’re no better than Maga MacDougall who actively donates to AIPAC over here. Sometimes an exception is made for Black culture, but it’s usually a shallow one that unravels the minute they have to elaborate on their dislike for American culture. “Americans should be more cultured” is an okay criticism but a lot of people who say that aren’t satisfied unless we come to the conclusion that everything about our home is bad.
And I have never found an elaboration on “America has no culture” that wasn’t steeped in some combination of appeals to a pure and ideal past, ignorance of how migration shapes every culture, classism, and sometimes even racism. As far as I’m concerned, you’re a statue PFP if you say this.
To me, pointing out, “America has culture too!” Feels dismissive of how the most brilliant “American” cultures developed specifically in spite of being segregated from and exploited by the dominant American culture. It’s not called the bureau of native american affairs for a reason.
I guess I’m not ready to reclaim an American identity before all others.
I think most USA hate comes from the US government’s history of global political interference. It’s understandable. For the same reason that Britain is still viewed negatively in many parts of the world.
Personally, I don’t hate the US or Americans generally. Things exported from the US whether physically, technologically, or culturally have played a major part of my life. It would be dumb to have a blanket hatred of anything American.
Most Americans I’ve met have been very friendly and cheerful.
Personally, I don’t hate the US or Americans generally.
~ Vietnamese Guy circa October, 1955
~ Chilean Guy circa September 10th, 1979
~ Iraqi Guy circa July, 1990
~ Palestinian Guy circa October 6th, 2023
Most Americans I’ve met have been very friendly and cheerful.
Most people I’ve met have been very friendly and cheerful. But that goes afield from “culture”. When you start digging into what constitutes a US cultural export - plastic Coca Cola bottles, Ford F-350s and Chevy Suburbans, whitewashed jazz music, 6-year-olds doing beauty pageants, CIA blacksites, Ads on top of Ads on top of Ads on top of Ads, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - you lose a lot of the characteristic friendliness and start feeling a bit creeped out.
The young, curious, carefree American traveler is a delight. The old, cynical, covetous American businessman is less so.
You’re ignoring a lot of the cool stuff that America has put out:
- Broadway musicals
- alligator wrestling
- Cajun food (basically French, African, and Spanish fusion food) and American Pizza
- a wide variety of music genres (grunge, big band/swing, etc)
The best thing about America is the fusion of different cultures. It started as a refuse for the oppressed, and its culture reflects that. Unfortunately, it has itself become an oppressor in many ways, but that shouldn’t detract from its unique, blended culture.
The best thing about America is the fusion of different cultures.
Absolutely. But as you get closer to the heart of American mass media and corporate commercialism, I tend to see a flattening and homogenizing of those cultures until it comes out as a bland inoffensive gruel. American music is a great example of this phenomenon. The really gripping and transformative musical movements start on the periphery, often in migrant or other minority communities, and are treated with a range of indifference to outright hostility by the current central figures in the industry and in society as a whole.
The stark unabashed hatred of rap music, during the 80s and 90s comes to mind. Or the Boomer cultural response to GenX/Millennial grunge and metal. In more modern music, you see a strong influence among gender queer and Middle Eastern / East Asian artists, which has provoked a string of vitriolic social and political responses (Don’t Say Gay laws, mosque burnings, social media censorship of East Asian media, etc).
The fusion happens regardless, and eventually this stuff is normalized and digested by the central cultural institutions. Pop music transforms the more queer and colorful presentations of culture into something for rich white kids. Hong Kong and Bollywood hits get rewritten as mediocre midwestern knock-offs. Transgressive Rap and Heavy Metal and Punk music become anthems for the US military and patriotic pro-sports franchises and even ultra-orthodox political campaigns. Revolutionary ideas in comic books and pulp fiction get transmuted into mass marketed white nationalism and reactionary conservatism.
The media is diluted, thinned, and flattened until it is inoffensive and trite. That’s the end result of mainstream American incorporation of peripheral arts. Its the Chicken McNugget of culture. Ground up, overly processed, and stripped of flavor so as to be safe to distribute to the widest possible audience.
Lemmy Challenge: accept that there are good things among the 300 million people and 3.8 million square miles of the US
Difficulty: impossible