The irony of America, in my opinion, is that the country, as a direct result of being a 'melting pot', is actually , in truth,
all the worse for conformity, for this exact reason. In my opinion, anyone who has lived in the country for long enough, and actually seen both its cities, its small towns, and its rural areas (as well as its education culture) should see this fact plain as day.
Anyone who does not see it is, as far as I am concerned, a bit in denial about the truth of not just the United States, but actually about great masses of poor, struggling people as a whole.
The somewhat relieving truth about the United States and its conformist culture is that it actually isn't really, in some sense, America's fault. It is instead a very odd combination of all the many different cultures coming together and trying to exist, peacefully, as one. I think the best way that I can describe it is to say that, yes, it's true, in the USA, behind closed doors, there is, at times, a lot of difference to occasionally be found. But in the actual majority culture itself, out on the streets, in the arts, and so on, there seems to be (and has always been, in fact) a distinct and very pronounced love for conformity, that one actually won't be able to find in cultures that are not melting pots. It is well known overseas that Americans -- on the ground level -- are particularly ferocious about pledges of "allegiance", flag waving, patriotism, the whole nine yards. They do not like difference nearly as much as other western countries do. They often love uniforms. They love....conformity. The Americans love all of it far more, it seems, than people in many other industrialized and developed "free" countries around the world today.
Yes, it is true: the USA is not a China, nor is it, so far as I know, on the same level as a North Korea. It is not that uniform, and hopefully never will be. However, there is still the fact that, in comparison to all the rest of the Western world, the USA sticks out like a sore thumb. In truth, in comparison to most, if not all, western countries, the USA actually does look sort of like North Korea to many people, especially now that Trump has been elected.
Why?
The reason for this to me should be obvious to most readers: In other western democracies, often where everyone is the same ethnicity and the same religion, it is, in fact,
ironically easier to be different--- and perhaps even more valuable and desired - than it is in a country like the USA, where everyone is different
from the get go. This key difference has made absolutely all the change in the culture of the USA, and in my opinion, after analyzing it for years now, and unfortunately living with it daily, most of that change has actually not been for the better.
In fact, I would even argue that the very phrase the Americans value and have on the back of their dollar bills --- "E. Pluribus Unum (from many, one) -- is, at heart, a sort of conformist phrase. The whole US game has always been about severe conformity deep down. The melting pot phrase in itself is even somewhat threatening from acertain angle: Your culture is supposed to
melt in order to make it in. Hmm, I am not so sure I like that. I don't like the idea of my culture melting. I'd rather keep it whole, myself.
But what about the others? How do they feel? Well, after years of living with them, my basic premise on it is....they really don't like it when they spot something that isn't or does not want to melt into their little pot. They flip out about it. They get very angry about it. They take serious, serious notice of it. ....
Essentially in the States, you see, as I said before, it is almost as though, since everyone has
already been born different, as a result of being from some unique culture, trying to then be even
more different , to me, seems to actually get one pegged as though they are "going too far".
All of this isn't necessarily happening in the front of the American brain, of course: it is mostly something, I believe, that happens deep in the back room of the American psyche. People who play the difference game in America, in other words, are sort of playing in a world where they are constantly 'walking on eggshells'. Each little difference in this culture is extremely noticeable. People do not miss a thing -- and this is whether they are celebrating your difference or harassing it to no end. If the difference gets noticed and celebrated, it grows; if it gets noticed and harassed, it also might grow.
One way I often like to put it is by saying that, instead of being a family based on blood, America is instead like a rather awkward step family, or perhaps -- even worse-- an adopted family. It should be obvious to most readers that it is probably a little easier to get away with being a bit different, or even being an outright jerk, in a blood family, rather than it is in a step family or an adopted family. It isn't to say that love does not exist in those types of families, but it is to say that there is (at least in modern times) definitely something different about them. If you're eating dinner with step parents, you're probably a little less likely to insult the step mothers cooking, etc , than you would be with your own blood mother. For the most part, this is exactly how the culture is in the USA. There are blatantly bad and horrific parts about the United States culture, parts of it that are absolutely terrible and need desperate changing, but many Americans will not ever say anything , becuase....well... it feels kind of awkward for them. Because they are either out and out immigrants or, if they are not, then they probably come from a family that still remembers immigration rather well. And this memory, I again must stress severely, is very integral to the American psyche. It causes people to feel as though, if they dare speak out against the negative part of it, then they won't ever one day be able to be a part of the positive part of it.
The original Americans who actually sailed the seas and braved the storms to come here, as well as abandoned other countries an threw patriotism to the wind, were absolutely pretty strong people who seem to of, at least in some regard, definitely thought for themselves. If they saw a country that was no good, it seems to me that they said "this country is no good".
The people who followed in their wake however were the ones who had to put up with the majority of the harassment for being "different". These people are the ones who wound up the ultra big conformists. They are also the ones who wound up, from time to distant time, the biggest and absolute weirdest freaks of all.....
This , of course, is the next ironic (and, I suppose, somewhat confsing) thing about the States: Due to the fact that difference has become so extreme here, from the point of view of someone typical, what has wound up happening is that the people in America who do become, or decide to be, different, oftentimes wind up becoming
extremely different. Again, the reason why this happens should be pretty self-explanatory but for some reason often is not: Since
literally everyone in the States is coming from some version of an immigrant culture that is trying to assimilate in some way, the people who then try to leap from the assimilation plan even slightly tend to get sort of marked, and once they are marked, they then just decide to go 'all out' with whatever they believe their specific difference to be.
If you have ever sat and wondered why the United States seems to create so many strange Hollywood celebrities and music celebrities, whilst at once maintaining this extremely cookie cutter suburban culture on the ground level and the political level, then , in my opinion, this is basically why. America's gift is also, more or less, the exact thing that is its curse, as well. In this country, you are literally either extremely different, or totally the same.
The same bizarre lightning storm that has created a very magnificent and extremely unique artist like Marilyn Manson or Johnny Depp is, in truth, almost the exact same lightning storm that has also created the extremists on the opposite end of the spectrum as well. The truth about looking at many other cultures that are not melting pots like America, and are instead just made up of people who all come from the same cultural background and oftentimes all practice the same religion et cetera, is that many of these cultures do not seem to
authentically create characters of extreme difference in the same manner that America does.
For example, in a country like Italy, where there is no real deep diversity like there is in America, even in the biggest of the Italian cities, there are famous artists who are "different", but , strangely enough, the ones who seem to be the most different of all are .... often just copying the American stars who created the difference in the first place. There is no Marilyn Manson in the Italian music scene. These sorts of figures simply do not exist in that scene. There's also the case that there is basically no Italian writer that I know of who could even begin to compare to the absolute utter strangeness that was someone like one of my all time favorites - straight outta the boring, plain dry as dry could ever be Mid- West - William Burroughs.
These figures of extreme difference are, currently, basically completely unique to the United States at least so far as the western world is concerned. No other artistic phenomenon exists quite like either of them. Whether or not you personally think they are good or bad or worthless or extraordinary, there is still the undeniable fact that these two men were/ are extremely unique artists. And both of them, I am beyond convinced, could not have possibly been born anywhere else on Earth, besides the good old USA.
Had they been born in a homogeneous culture, I am convinced that nothing would have happened to them....mostly because their initial differences (whatever those differences were) would have been far more accepted, and seen as far more innocent, when they were initially revealed. Instead, they were in the States, a country of immigrants, melting pots, and assimilation, and so their initial little differences were seen as threatening, and instead of backing away from being different, these artists instead, as I am saying, embraced it
completely.
What I personally think is so fascinating about all of this, of course, is that, from the outside of the States, all of this basically looks very obvious, the second you glance even slightly from the perspective of an homogeneous culture (like Sweden, Spain, Greece, etc ) but - from within the USA - it is , as I said previously, almost impossible for most people, even the ones who are themselves different, to see clearly. They perhaps do not realize just how profound it really is to be living in a country like France where not everyone you know is, somewhere in the back of their heads, wondering whether or not they are, deep down, "
real Frenchmen". In the US of course, this is almost always the case: Everyone in the country is not often solely chasing wealth, they're also chasing this idea of a real "American" identity. And the craziest part about this identity, in my experience, is that the endless obsessing over it seems to extend even to the people who are already "safely" consumed by it, i.e. the people who are interpreted to be 'real Americans' by the immigrants and so forth. In my opinion, the "real American" identity is so fragile - as a result that it is not at all based on blood, even if your family has been here for 300 years -- that the people who do have it wind up becoming even 'crazier' about it than the people who are out there still trying to fight to win it. They are vicious about it because they know it can be lost, and the reason it can be lost is because it is not based on blood.....
Therefore we see, again,that from the perspective of an homo-genus country like the ones previously listed, all of this sounds absolutely absurd. In France or Italy or Spain, it does not matter how bad, strange, different, no good, lazy, or poor a person is, at least in terms of identity, because the truth about being apart of those cultures, is that
you can never suddenly get stripped out of them . A French kid born with a name like Jean Claude Bovary who speaks French and who grew up with a family that has lived in France since "time immemorial" cannot suddenly start listening exclusively to English music or wearing strange clothes and, as a result, get himself called out for being "not a real Frenchmen", in the same way that an American can, and will, for doing the same things.
The French identity is so deep , you see, and so old by this point ,that it's basically something you cannot really gain .....and that you also cannot really lose. Monica Bellucci, for instance, is a famous modern actress from Italy who speaks fluent French and for many years was married to a Frenchman. I think she perhaps even live exclusively in France to this day. In the USA, doing all of those things like Monica has done, would mean, automatically to most people, that she was trying to eventually be identified as an American...and after a few years, she would probably be seen as one, as well, if she played her cards right. If she got her citizenship for instance and spoke fluent English, she would be an American in most peoples eyes.
In France, of course, all of it actually seems to mean...well,
nothing. Monica Bellucci can speak French all she wants and maybe she will even live there in the country until she's 100 years old and none of it will make much of a difference, to eithr the French or the Italians. This is because to both of them...she will always be nothing more and nothing less than an Italian, who just so happens to live in France. From an American angle of course, this being locked out of "becoming" French perhaps sounds terrible and terrifying. It is, after all, the bread and butter that America has, for so long, been built on. There is, however, a sort of positive to every situation, and in my opinion the positive for someone like Belluci is this:
For the most part, as far as I can tell, since everyone knows that her ever becoming "truly French" is impossible, she is also not chastised by Italians for speaking French, she is not degraded, she is not seen as someone who has "abandoned" being Italian, she is not seen as a "French wannabe", she is not seen as any of this. All she is seen as, more or less, is someone who has added something to herself, that being the French language and culture. None of it, in other words, has been interpreted as being even the slightest bit threatening. This is the most important part, you see : No one is interpreting it as threatening. They almost don't even really think about it , tell you the truth....
In the States, again, it cannot be stressed enough: What Monica Bellucci has done would absolutely, I am sure of it, be judged - and
is regularly being judged for anyone who does it - in the most horrific of ways. A lot of people for instance wonder why next to no Americans speak foreign languages , or even seem slightly interested in speaking one. Well,
this is the exact reason why: the American identity is so fragile that, if one were to do what Bellucci has done in this situation here, especially someone who was very famous, it's very possible that one would perhaps lose their American "identity" card - in the eyes of many Americans --
forever. The American identity is currently still so fragile that it literally almost cannot abide by someone who tries to grow outward in this manner. There is an incredibly small and constrained box the "real American" must stuff him or herself into, and if they try to pop out of it, they get attacked, judged, etc......
This is because everything is interpreted as a threat, in the same manner that Marilyn Mansons first little 'differences' were also, I can guarantee you, interpreted as a threat,whenever he first started to display them. In some sense, we could perhaps say that the USA is sort of like an extremely insecure lover: You go to hang out with even just one other person, and they are terrified that you are cheating on them, or interested in cheating on them, abandoning them forever, so on and so forth.
The old world cultures are instead more like lovers who know you couldn't escape even if you tried: "Go on ahead and do whatever you want, go wherever you want, be whoever you want...you think I care? You'll always be trapped with me, at the end of the day, and you know it. When you look in the mirror, you'll always see me. You know I'm you. You know you are me. There is no escape. "
In truth, if there was one thing I learned whilst talking to many Europeans from all the Euro countries, I think that frightening little tidbit was probably one of the biggest things of all: They seem to feel rather bogged down by just how deep their identity as a Frenchman or an Italian goes. They feel, perhaps, a little overwhelmed by it. Some of them perhaps wish they could throw it off of them forever, but they know they never can. They know it's impossible, that being French is perhaps written into their very bones....
They thus tend to go to great lengths, I believe, especially in the modern day, to distance themselves as much as they possibly can from said identity, and to have as much fun as they do the distancing . Many Italians, for instance, cannot wait to explain to you how they "never listen to any Italian music at all!" Or of course take some friends I know in Denmark, who live their entire "real" outside lives in Danish, but then log online and live their Internet gaming lives, completely in English......
For an American, this sort of comment, at first, especially the one about the Italian, almost seems like the Italian is perhaps deeply "ashamed" of being Italian , and that, deep down, they wish, constnatly, that they were English or American; but the truth, to me at least (once I finally glimpsed it) is that the individual essentially
already has all the Italian identity baskets filled up, and so they feel
free to listen to whatever music they want, in whatever language they want. Again, they do not feel constrained. They don't feel like they have to prove, to either themselves or any others, that they are Italian....
An Italian, after all, lives their whole life speaking in the
Ital. language, eating Ital. food, living in Ital. style houses, watching Ital. soccer teams, driving Ital. cars, wearing Ital. gold, forever wandering around and seeing old Ital. monuments, and even, for that matter,
having a face and a nose and a look that people might describe as being....Italian. Having that one little box of music checked English therefore does not seem so threatening to them. It seems relieving. Unusually relieving, in fact. They don't put on English music and start to fret that they are,somehow going to no longer be Italian and morph into something else. The Danish guy who plays the video games in English around the clock feels the same way: He doesn't think of himself as someone whose trying to be English. This is all a totally separate psychological box for these people.
The common American, of course, does have all these absurd worries in my opinion , since the common American has very few things that they can confidently and positively claim are "absolutely American" in this same sense . There is no "face" that could be described as looking ' particularly American. There is no true diet. There are no truly deep historical monuments. There is not even, in fact, an American language. We thus see , what else, but the fact that the few things which
are undoubtedly thought to be of the country are endlessly obsessed over, defended rather aggressively, and cherished.
American cars and trucks like Dodges and Fords, for instance, or the specific style of football played in the NFL... the specific music that is native to the 'country western' region, the blue jeans and tshirt outfit, the suburban lifestyle with the driveway, the garage, and the backyard swimming pool ---- all of this stuff is seen by many to be sitting in the domain of "real" Americana, and all of it is rather ferociously desired by everyone who wants to be seen as a 'real American'.
The big problem of course with this is that...well, none of it is really all that solidified, or deep, or, ironically, "real". It is all sort of .... cheap and a little too easy, I suppose, to really mean anything. It's like plastic: it's weak. It's simply too concerned with an outward expression of identity rather than something inward which, you might notice, is one major part of the reason that it often seems so toxic to so many people who exist outside of its borders and do not want to participate in it, or perhaps who cannot participate in it. This is also why the people who are currently standing upon this exact cultural foundation are getting so very angry in this modern time period: They can see now that their phony and plastic idea of what constitutes real American culture is fading off into the distance and, apparently, they're absolutely bewildered by how, or why. They seem , to me, to be of the mind that their culture was just as deep and just as profound as the culture of the Brit or Frenchman or the Italian et cetera, even though, as you can see now,
it never was , and never will be, either .... at least until a couple of hundred years have passed.
What are we supposed to do until then, of course, the reader might be asking, with these strange people who rally obsessively around this idea of "real American" ideals and culture that does not, in fact, even exist? My opinion is pretty simple: We should start seeing them for how diseased and sickly they really actually are and have been for quite some time now. We should avoid them like the plague. We should understand that, in a country as massive as this and especially as new as this , nobody gets to suddenly choose, at an hour this early in the game what the culture is, or isn't. More importantly, we should also let them know that, since there is, in fact, no real American culture to hold onto , there is also no real culture to lose, or accidentally abandon, either, just by doing simple things like learning other languages , listening to other music,etc.....
--draft
