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The Winter of American Culture
The state of American culture in the 21st Century is that there really is no unifying “mainstream” American culture. I put this down, of course, as if there ever really was a coherent and cohesive mainstream culture in America — or anywhere else, for that matter.
Any amount of study should reveal that there are usually recognizable cultural attributes to peoples and nations of the size and scope of the United States, promoted by the accepted civil institutions, with much more creativity going on beneath the accepted cultural surface in the form of an underground or alternative or folk culture. In the America that I am growing old in, however, it often appears as if there is hardly any cultural attributes that are shared by enough of us to pass for any kind of mainstream. The lesson being that Americans’ tendency toward conformity while striving for individuality leads to rampant judgementalism and some brutally warped judgement. There may be some crossover between lucrative and uniquely American cultural touchstones, like WWE, The Voice and various megachurch ministries, but have little desire to seek nor find the American that embodies their confluence — not deliberately, anyway.
There are essentially two things with which individual Americans express their values and principles: what we spend our money on and how we exercise our electoral franchise. As soon as…