American Culture

This has always seemed to me somewhat of an oxymoron. 'America doesn't have a culture,' I think to myself. 'America is a patchwork of little bits of everyone else's culture.'

The little bits are what makes up the larger culture, like the little colored rocks in a mosaic make a picture. It's a process called synergy, where the whole is greater than the parts...

Do we here in America really have a culture?

I'm not sure about you, but I do...

We who have been here for longer than one or two generations, that is. We who don't live in culturally similar neighborhoods from where our ancestors called home but instead have neighbors we've never met and holidays we observe because we got to get out of school when we were kids... do we really have a culture of our own?

We have neighbors with whom we have shared beliefs and aspirations. The culture, even though it's shifting constantly, shares experiences going back to 1607. The fact that it's continuously shifting means it's alive, not pickled or preserved in amber...

My ancestors came from Northern Europe; Sweden, Scotland, and if I trace back far enough, Flanders in modern Belgium. I don't speak Swedish, Gaelic or Flemmish. I know some Scottish country dances that I learned in classes rather than in communities. I don't know what holidays my ancestors observed or even what religion they were. So, do I really have a culture?

You have an American culture. My ancestors came from England and Scotland on one hand, Italy on another, and someplace in Siberia on yet another. I know how to foxtrot and waltz and when I was a tad I knew how to dance a tarantella. I'm agnostic but I observe Christmas with my family and I give cards on Valentine's Day. I know, and I'm comfortable with, people whose ancestors came from Africa, from Spain, from other parts of Europe, and from various parts of Asia. I eat American food: roast beef, pork chops, spaghetti and meatballs, General Tso's chicken, tacos, enchiladas, and hamburgers.

When peoples of old immigrated, they would travel in large groups often of multiple families. They would settle together and raise their children together and speak their native languages, even if they learned the language and customs of the land they settled in. But when I was born, my aunts and uncles weren't next door or often even in the same towns. My grandparents came from other states. My great-grandparents came from I do not know where.

When I was a little fellow, we lived back in the hills, in Hatfield and McCoy country. Everyone had come from the same area, everyone was related, and the culture was homogenous. We moved to Pennsylvania, where people were for the most part either Italians or Pennsylvania Dutchmen, with the occasional Croation or Hungarian thrown in for flavor. We played baseball and football and bocce, even the Hungarians.

I speak English because I was raised in a nation where the native language is English. I have a religion that I feel is right, but do I only have it because my mother taught it to me? I watch old documentaries of World War II and learn about the military units from Hawaii where the men all had the same culture, shared the same songs and dances and same native language.

My Dad was drafted in 1942. He was 32 years old at the time, and it was the first time he'd been out of the hills. He was thrown in with thousands of other men, from all over the eastern seaboard. They all spoke the same language and the time they spent fighting Hitler and his superior German culture knocked the edges off their own cultural differences.

I could not go next door and find someone who knows the dances I know, or sings the folk songs of ages past.

But you could find lots of other things you have in common, starting with a common history, through the books you read, the movies you see, the teevee you watch.

I could find someone who has heard about the latest movie that has been released, rave about their favorite singer and find those who dress in Levi jeans and Kalvin Klein, but how does that bind us as a community into a culture?

Those are the things you share. Back in Flanders your ancestors wore wooden shoes and loose trousers. They spoke Flemish and sang Flemish songs. Now you wear jeans and a tee shirt and sneakers, speak English, and you probably know most of the words to "Yellow Rose of Texas."

Looking around at the nation I live in, I see a culture of superficiality.

I see a varied, colorful culture, that's growing in six different directions at once...

We may speak English, but we don't speak the same language. We may both buy our clothes from Wal*Mart but we don't share the same fashion. We both have expectations, but we do not necessarily share the same ones. There is nothing that binds me to my neighbors more than the location we live in.

Sounds like the only thing that keeps you apart from your neighbors is your own self-absorption. Careful you don't fall into your navel.

There is no depth to American 'culture'. No history.

Virginia Dare. John Smith. Powhattan. John Winthrop. Roger Smith. Peter Stuyvesant. George Washington. None of them count? The Whisky Rebellion? Ben Franklin? Big and Little Harp? Simon Girty? Not even whisps of memory. James Monroe. Tippecanoe and Tyler, too. Davy Crockett, Sam Houston, the 49ers, the Sydney Ducks. Jenny Lind. P.T. Barnum. I'd put our history up against that of most European countries just as a matter of what's interesting.

No reality. It is like smoke, swirling about and always changing, never to be grasped. American Culture is about fitting in rather than carrying on. It is about looks rather than substance. It is about now rather than history.

History's the handle that sets the direction of "now." If you're not aware of it, it's for the same reason a fish isn't aware of the water around it.

I lament; for in America, I have no culture.

Maybe you don't, but the rest of us do.