Intriguing essay. I wonder as a child of immigrants, I have a bit more affection for America as an idea than folks who have lived here longer. American means something different from a real alternative. For example I enjoyed saying the pledge of allegiance when my daughter was doing online pandemic school.
But I'm a bit of a weirdo. Our ridiculous responses by our universities to the recent eruptions in the middle east has shown a critical bankruptcy in post colonial theory, however it was reading these texts that showed me that my critical hangup as a youngster was conflating Whiteness with Americanness.
This understanding seems to have the left to disparage both concepts, but divorcing those two ideas allowed me to embrace both. Let white people do their thing, just as they put up with my chinese-ness, and I've become much more patriotic when I realized that the dominant culture is not the same as our national idea.
And yes, we enjoy PB&J's as my family has developed a whiter diet at home now that we never eat out...but on homemade sourdough bread with only organic spreads cause we're also bougie libs.
Very thought-provoking. I'm a pessimist when it comes to a shared American culture; I don't see enough commonality to ensure the continuing of the American experiment, and my gut tells me we will have more civil wars in the near future. But, as you say in your last paragraph, America is "still a very new culture." These things take time; a place like England, for instance, has a culture which goes back a thousand years (even more, in the case of the shreds of English culture which predate the Norman invasion). Perhaps a period of armed strife, as terrifying and deplorable as it will certainly be, will eventually usher in a new, sorted-out sense of what American culture truly is—and if so, it might be very, very different from anything we would ever want to see.
All that being said, the core of American culture is probably somewhere in its national myths of growth, progress, the frontier, and, as Huck Finn said, "the territory." In this regard I find Joel Garreau's books of immense value. His "Edge City", while ostensibly about the suburbs, is very instructive in understanding what makes up the American worldview. (He also published a theory of multiple, antagonistic Americas, similar to Woodard's view but with nine nations instead of eleven.)
I think the “not having a single culture” is American culture. It’s our strength and our weakness. It’s an amorphous, constantly evolving thing and everyone gets a say.
Having a foot in two countries at least, feeling a dislocation from grandparents and the present moment is integral to being an American. The right reacts to this feeling with anxiety and fear, the left with self-righteousness indignation. But it’s what we all share. American culture belongs to everyone and nobody.
I didn’t realize how American I am until I lived in Japan for a few years. I think if we could all embrace the uneasiness and discomfort and allow ourselves and each other to constantly evolve we will find more peacefulness.
American culture is Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and Fuck You in equal measure. It’s Thanksgiving and Genocide and Freedom and Slavery. But I still fell us lumbering forward in fits and starts. That is our culture, for better and for worse. I hate it. I love it. I’m hopeful and filled with fear. That’s what makes me an American.
I like Woodward's late date for the consolidation of some kind of civic narrative. I personally think that in the US, mass media has promoted a modern sense of shared culture. Television certainly accelerated the process of sharing, but simultaneously the mass experience of exclusion. Now, I feel like what we share most is a sort of sense of collective hallucination--the circulation of images, catchphrases, memes, slogans, etc. that get bent and filtered through our individual political polarities. If we share something now, it is our binding to a screen culture and divisive polarization by larger and individual agents. As we look through the mirror, through these surfaces, we see things like the Constitution, the 13th and 15th amendment, but we are not accessing these things directly. Always through layers of processing, filtering, and experiencing. We are at once sharing in a past, and yet excluded from it and isolated in our experience of it. I guess one can say this has always been the case... but the dynamics of contemporary mass media are accelerating and intensifying the process. Just my two cents though.
It’s interesting that you evoke the idea of capitalism as the possible shared signifier for an American shared identity but didn’t explore that concept. You’re probably correct but it would be nice to see that idea explored more in terms of class as well. Where capitalism occupies the positive space in American identity the idea of class occupies the negative space in a symbiosis that is also quite atrophied in terms of the relationship between these two identities. It’s almost like nobody is really allowed to talk about class nor even wants to at a societal level in the US. Class has been rendered a useless concept in wider America society and yet it remains a pivotal construct within a clearly failing democracy.
I think I recognize the country you're in. Won't say which, in case you're traveling incognito. :) But I hear it's beautiful there. And yeah, trashy American pop music is everywhere now; where I am as well. A cultural hegemony does exist nowadays across the world, and one gets a very different perspective of contemporary American culture and cultural production over here.
Not to forget that M Thatcher gave voice to the voting consensus behind Reagan that there is no leviathan, but only nuclear families. Played out in my own life, at 5 i learned to accept that flowchart about where to hide, mostly. Until in the nick of time i shipped myself out to a foster home for my senior year of highschool because home life was more destructive than creative. Mild depression at next to 18 is our common culture. It takes a natural lust to finish your socialization if like me you havenot by then. Disney properties surely are held in common. Strangerdanger is another one. The tens of thousands of bindlestiffs during the depression stopped asking for work their first months on the road because then and now is a waste of time.
I fully agree and relate to your feelings. I think we need to look outside of America and North America for cultural depth and forces that bind people together at an elemental level, I don't see it happening here. Noam Chomsky has also written essentially that, to paraphrase, "Any aspects of community in America are incidental rather than intended, and mostly due to pre-capitalist institutions that survived."
Intriguing essay. I wonder as a child of immigrants, I have a bit more affection for America as an idea than folks who have lived here longer. American means something different from a real alternative. For example I enjoyed saying the pledge of allegiance when my daughter was doing online pandemic school.
But I'm a bit of a weirdo. Our ridiculous responses by our universities to the recent eruptions in the middle east has shown a critical bankruptcy in post colonial theory, however it was reading these texts that showed me that my critical hangup as a youngster was conflating Whiteness with Americanness.
This understanding seems to have the left to disparage both concepts, but divorcing those two ideas allowed me to embrace both. Let white people do their thing, just as they put up with my chinese-ness, and I've become much more patriotic when I realized that the dominant culture is not the same as our national idea.
And yes, we enjoy PB&J's as my family has developed a whiter diet at home now that we never eat out...but on homemade sourdough bread with only organic spreads cause we're also bougie libs.
Very thought-provoking. I'm a pessimist when it comes to a shared American culture; I don't see enough commonality to ensure the continuing of the American experiment, and my gut tells me we will have more civil wars in the near future. But, as you say in your last paragraph, America is "still a very new culture." These things take time; a place like England, for instance, has a culture which goes back a thousand years (even more, in the case of the shreds of English culture which predate the Norman invasion). Perhaps a period of armed strife, as terrifying and deplorable as it will certainly be, will eventually usher in a new, sorted-out sense of what American culture truly is—and if so, it might be very, very different from anything we would ever want to see.
All that being said, the core of American culture is probably somewhere in its national myths of growth, progress, the frontier, and, as Huck Finn said, "the territory." In this regard I find Joel Garreau's books of immense value. His "Edge City", while ostensibly about the suburbs, is very instructive in understanding what makes up the American worldview. (He also published a theory of multiple, antagonistic Americas, similar to Woodard's view but with nine nations instead of eleven.)
I think the “not having a single culture” is American culture. It’s our strength and our weakness. It’s an amorphous, constantly evolving thing and everyone gets a say.
Having a foot in two countries at least, feeling a dislocation from grandparents and the present moment is integral to being an American. The right reacts to this feeling with anxiety and fear, the left with self-righteousness indignation. But it’s what we all share. American culture belongs to everyone and nobody.
I didn’t realize how American I am until I lived in Japan for a few years. I think if we could all embrace the uneasiness and discomfort and allow ourselves and each other to constantly evolve we will find more peacefulness.
American culture is Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays and Fuck You in equal measure. It’s Thanksgiving and Genocide and Freedom and Slavery. But I still fell us lumbering forward in fits and starts. That is our culture, for better and for worse. I hate it. I love it. I’m hopeful and filled with fear. That’s what makes me an American.
I like Woodward's late date for the consolidation of some kind of civic narrative. I personally think that in the US, mass media has promoted a modern sense of shared culture. Television certainly accelerated the process of sharing, but simultaneously the mass experience of exclusion. Now, I feel like what we share most is a sort of sense of collective hallucination--the circulation of images, catchphrases, memes, slogans, etc. that get bent and filtered through our individual political polarities. If we share something now, it is our binding to a screen culture and divisive polarization by larger and individual agents. As we look through the mirror, through these surfaces, we see things like the Constitution, the 13th and 15th amendment, but we are not accessing these things directly. Always through layers of processing, filtering, and experiencing. We are at once sharing in a past, and yet excluded from it and isolated in our experience of it. I guess one can say this has always been the case... but the dynamics of contemporary mass media are accelerating and intensifying the process. Just my two cents though.
It’s interesting that you evoke the idea of capitalism as the possible shared signifier for an American shared identity but didn’t explore that concept. You’re probably correct but it would be nice to see that idea explored more in terms of class as well. Where capitalism occupies the positive space in American identity the idea of class occupies the negative space in a symbiosis that is also quite atrophied in terms of the relationship between these two identities. It’s almost like nobody is really allowed to talk about class nor even wants to at a societal level in the US. Class has been rendered a useless concept in wider America society and yet it remains a pivotal construct within a clearly failing democracy.
I think I recognize the country you're in. Won't say which, in case you're traveling incognito. :) But I hear it's beautiful there. And yeah, trashy American pop music is everywhere now; where I am as well. A cultural hegemony does exist nowadays across the world, and one gets a very different perspective of contemporary American culture and cultural production over here.
Not to forget that M Thatcher gave voice to the voting consensus behind Reagan that there is no leviathan, but only nuclear families. Played out in my own life, at 5 i learned to accept that flowchart about where to hide, mostly. Until in the nick of time i shipped myself out to a foster home for my senior year of highschool because home life was more destructive than creative. Mild depression at next to 18 is our common culture. It takes a natural lust to finish your socialization if like me you havenot by then. Disney properties surely are held in common. Strangerdanger is another one. The tens of thousands of bindlestiffs during the depression stopped asking for work their first months on the road because then and now is a waste of time.
Woodard’s thesis is correct. Thoughtful piece, thanks.
I fully agree and relate to your feelings. I think we need to look outside of America and North America for cultural depth and forces that bind people together at an elemental level, I don't see it happening here. Noam Chomsky has also written essentially that, to paraphrase, "Any aspects of community in America are incidental rather than intended, and mostly due to pre-capitalist institutions that survived."