Quote:
Originally Posted by Acajack
And yet, Americans are some of the biggest cultural navel-gazers out there. That their gaze casts out over a larger territory than Quebec or Newfoundland or Slovenia doesn't change this fact.
I know that some will respond that they take in the best from around the world regardless of origin, but we should look at how these grafts take place: they generally take the talent or the concept and morph it into something that fits nicely into mainstream American and its world-view.
If they were really interested in the wider world the way it is, Shakira wouldn't have to sing in English to get them to take notice, they would have imported the British version of The Office, and 99 weeks out of 100 the New York Times best-seller list wouldn't have exactly ZERO books on it that were not originally written in English.
This may sound harsh and you might now be surprised to hear me conclude by saying that I really do like Americans a lot. I do. Honestly.
But I don't mistake them for something that they are not.
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I'm not sure the Office is a great example of culture in any country. Nor is Survivor etc. but American culture is so much more than that. I have this debate with my spouse all the time but what has happened in the last 40 years is a total shift in what and how America is defined. To me, the real representation of America are the New Yorkers and the the people of the original 13, not the mittle American values that politics plays to. Sometimes Americans are their own worst enemies in promoting this Rockwell version of a country that never really existed.
Taking the worst of American export culture and applying that broad stroke to the entire country is a mistake. Without the USA there would be no jazz or blues, there would be no rock n roll, there would be much less musical theatre, film would probably be a lot more dour. Television would never have risen to become an art form.
I think people tend to cast an unfavorably critical eye on American culture while ignoring the heaps of crap their own culture produces or fails to produce. It's easy to, they dominate like no other nation has in the history of this planet.