Was there ever a common culture here? There was a post WWII culture when popular music, bestseller books, national magazines, movies, radio and TV, only a few brands of similar school textbooks, and a new world of interstates and other good roads, with chain hotels, restaurants, and gas stations on them. We see our world as fragmented in comparison, and ourselves worse off. That's what we say, at least. Did that last from 1950-1995 with soft boundaries?
That was the exception, though. American culture was far more regional before then, all the way back to colonial times, when everyone came from the British Isles and lived near the Atlantic but nonetheless, South Carolina was very different from Maine. Different Christianities, different crops, different economies. Different ways of building houses, preparing food, saying goodbye to the departed. As we went west each successive move was a greater cultural distance from Boston, New York, Williamsburg, Charleston.
National elections were shifting alliances of the four main British regions, with different foreign immigrants in each one. Some of that persists to this day. Minnesota is not Louisiana; Seattle is not San Diego. Yet we somehow believe that we were all one until quite recently.
Are entertainment and national politics the main shared culture now? Nine rings of entertainment, seven rings of sports, with the Presidency as the one ring to rule them all in our cultural attention?
6 comments:
Good points, and a nice analogy--though I think the President is downstream of the culture. Maybe Facebook is the One.
I suspect that the common culture you are thinking of was a reality only in advertising.
I could be talked into that.
Feelings of national commonality will wax and wane but I'm not entirely sympathetic to the idea they are that ephemeral. Noting regional differences is like saying because you can pick out the different flavors or ingredients in some food, or different voices in a harmony, or different instruments in a symphony that you aren't also experiencing something that is more than the individual components in isolation. Shelby Foote made a comment in Ken Burn's Civil War history about how the experience of just moving through the country changed the soldier's view of it, and I can't help but connect that with how my father, a young man from an Iowa farm, went literally from sea (Camp Lee near Washington DC) to sea (Fort Lewis Washington) before he was 25 years old.
I'll note that the BBC and CBC/Radio-Canada long had remits that implicitly included fostering a common culture. Rather weirdly in Canada because the content in French is different and disconnected from the content in English, but remember that Newfoundland and Labrador didn't join Canada until almost 1950.
In contrast the US: In spite of the 'networks' supplying common programming, the broadcaster ownership was nearly all local and independent until the most recent decades. Local affiliates could and did pick and choose what network content they wanted to air based upon their own sense of what was proper or what was profitable in their market.
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