Cultural confusion

There is a fellow on Twitter this afternoon who is doing a lot of talking about 'tribes' in the United States, and how he thinks everyone's obsession with trying to lift one tribe up higher has actually now resulted in the other tribes that they're fighting against going ...where else... but lower. One would think this would be obvious but, as with so much in the States, there are so many things, I think, that you only end up realizing years after the daily ingestion of the "everyone in america gets along" diet has been revealed as a lie.  Because of course the fact is that no one in the United States has really ever gotten along, and this isn't just limited to blacks and whites, but also to the various whites thrmselves. And it is mostly as a result of the fact that we have no (and I tried to explain this to the fella in a tweet) unifying figures here , that we can really ALL collectively unite around.

I know, I know, you'll yhink what I'm saying is crazy...there are tons of famous Americans that everyone & their mother loves you'll tell me ...but the truth is that all those famous Americans - 9 times out of 10-- only experience their "real deep legacy" in one specific tribe or the other, and it's very rare - if not altogether often never happening at all-- that an historical figure will suddenly find itself accepted into another tribes deeper story, as a real authentic hero.

One good example to use is someone like, say, John F. Kennedy. On the surface, at first glance, Kennedy seems , to many Americans, as though he might be some sort of all around American figure that, once he was assassinated perhaps, quickly entered into the cultural DNA of the whole nation, regardless of the politics he had while he was alive. If you just left off with Kennedy in freshman year US history, you may really have this idea of him, I don't know. The reality of course is much different, and the reality is really only a solidified hero for one community - or should I say tribe - and one tribe alone, that being the Irish community. And even with the Irish community, in fact, there may be some lack of love , since , again, Kennedy was a politician, and that's naturally divisive. We therefore see that someone who is often assumed, in many circles, to be a total American hero, is actually standing on a wildly weak foundation literally the moment he steps out of Irish town. I , for one, coming from the Italian tribe of the New World, could frankly careless about Kennedy. If anything , when I read my tribal history, he is a sort of enemy, and I look at him and I think : if his name was John Antonetti instead of John Kennedy, I might have a picture of him in my kitchen right now. Alas, my connection with him simply cannot be that intimate. He's not in my tribe.

Well, you'll say, what about someone whose a little further back than Kennedy, and someone who wasn't directly involved with politics? What about someone who you might think is easy to like...perhaps like Mark Twain the 19th century writer ? Well, yet again, at first glance, Twain seems to be someone who has perhaps conquered every realm of modern US tribal politics, and it seems like he's just gotta be beloved in every room. After all, is he not a figure that both the south and the north enjoy together? And is he not also a white figure who seems, to some extent, to have caught on even in the black community? Surely this guy is old enough now, everyone says, to have passed every wall and made it. Surely we can unite around Mark Twain.

Take a second look at him though, and you see that Twain is fractured just like everyone else here is fractured. Yes, I personally love him because he's from my secondary, and chosen, tribe of writers, but as an Italian whose family only docked here in 1906, 3 years before Twain died in 1909? As a New York Italian , I could almost careless about Mark Twain. This isn't to say his story isn't interesting - I love his stories of 19th century america-- but the big difference is that, when I read them, I'm consciously aware of the fact that I'm not reading *my* ancestors, but rather the work of another tribal chief. In addition to this, Twain *also* even falls out of favor , somewhat, in places where you'd think he had a total stronghold. Like, for instance, the South, since it turns out that Mark Twain was a "deserter" when it came to the Confederacy, and he actually at times mocked them quite comically. So now- just like Kennedy - we wind up seeing that even the guy many think is America's grandfather....winds up standing on quicksand, and he slips right under the second you really try to evenly distribute him to each tribe. He's flimsy. Even he does not Ultimately stand.

And of course when it comes to this we can essentislly say the same thing about literally almost *every* famous American figure you can think of from literally 1777 straight to today. Or even, for that matter, straight back to 1492---when that old murderer and genocidal maniac Christopher Colombus sailed the ocean blue. Colombus is to this very day beloved in many Italian communities to the point where he stil has a parade, but go to the Black Hills of South Dakota, or maybe just read some of the Indian magazines you can find online, and you'll come to see that Colombus is completely despised. Even , what, 525 years after 1492. Hence I again tell you: there is literally no figure here whom everyone can unite around. Everyone is still for someone in particular: Sitting Bull is for the Indians, Sylvester Stallone the Italians, Martin Luther King the blacks, Britney Spears the white girls. There's next to no figure that all of us here , at once, can feel totally at home with. There is forever the air of someone or something foreign. The air of "this isn't for me".

Now , I know, many Americans- just like I thought years ago- might just think that this is the case eveeywher on earth, right? Except that, when you go and dig into another country and culture , a truly  old one, you start to find that , what do you know, it actually isn't the case. There are cultural figures in Italy that almost literally every Italian can unite around, whether you are talking about someone like Dante from the 1300s, or someone recent, like Fabrizio DeAndre, the Italian "Bob Dylan" whom I am forever referencing.

Bob Dylan, stateside , is sold to us as a figure much like Mark Twain. We are told repeatedly in publication after publication that Dylan is some sort of all American troubadour that spans the aisle and has hung out in every room. In reality though, Dylan's legacy is much different, and for the most part he really only seems to have survived in a specific pocket of academia. Even the legacy of rock and roll has largely abandoned Bob Dylan. He isn't a real wide spanning figure- and it isn't his fault- it's just because no such thing exists here! Look back at Fabrizio DeAndre, however, and you'll find that from north to south in Italy, and more importantly, from top to bottom in terms of social class, he's absolutely beloved , by all sorts of people.

Yes of course, some people personally have no taste for him; but it doesn't change the fact that they still *must* see him as an integral part of their cultural DNA as Italians. Bob Dylan for us is not like this. Go ask a Puerto Rican in the Bronx what they think of Dylan, go ask some white kid in Los Angeles who loves Black Sabbath,  go ask someone in Nashville even , go ask a black fellow, and each person will have a wildly different interpretation of the guy. They will also definitely probably not think he is representative of what they think is their American history. He's instesd a cultural hero for a specific set of tribes. Yea, it's true, Dylan permeated a number of tribes, just like Twain, but he didn't get all of them. When I listen to Dylan, I'm listening to someone who is, believe it or not, somewhat foreign to me- and it's not just because of the passage of time that he's foreign. It's because he came from a place my family has never seen, and perhaps never will see, and that place is called the American mid west, in specific Minnesota.

Some people will tell you that it's not possible for him to be foreign for me, of course, because he's singing in English (this is supposed to be our great unification ticket) but the fact that he's singing in English, just like the fact that black rappers are rapping in English, doesn't mean anything. He is still clearly from another tribe to me. If anything, i personally liked him all the more directly because of his foreignness -- but it still doesn't mean that he's apart of my "ancient cultural DNA". And in fact, when I'm talking to a lot of Americans, I have to be sort of careful sometimes where and when I can drop that Dylan card, if I want friends in certain places. If I start going on about Dylan's Nashville days, I might have enemies not just in the Bronx but also even just in Nashville! Since he was widely rejected there when he tried to go in the early 1970s and somewhat still is. Just last week for example, I saw an article proclaiming that his song "Subterraean Homesick Blues" was a clear example of why he , an old white man from the Midwest, was the grandfather of rap music! Come on, you think you're gonna be able to enter into many rooms and say that and be taken seriously? It's preposterous. Dylan is only held up as a grandfather of hip hop when looking through a white version of the story. In a black version, he never even existed.

However, this is not to say that cultural "trades" with specific characters and figures don't sometimes occur here, because they occasionally do, but it can be hard to see how well they stick. I myself have long been fascinated by the trading of characters - and their legacy - between tribes. For instance, though the black hip hop community generally seems to reject any notion of Bob Dylan as a grandfather or even remote influence on hip hop, they do, ironically, accept Italian Mafiosi like John gotti, Carlo Gambino, and the fictional "Luca Brasi" from The Godfather into their story, even though these people had nothing to do with music....

The figures aren't accepted completely of course, many people have a clear problem with it , but just enough to the point where these three characters all enjoy a totally seperate legacy and interpretation of who or what they were, in the black communities. This is of course the issue however: Who John Gotti is for me, is not who he is for the blacks, and is certainly not who he is for the wider white Americans who once called him "Public enemy number one". For me, Gotti is like a tragic cousin from down the road who went off and got wrapped up in something horrific, and proves that the Italians indeed had a hard go of it here; for the black rapper "Yo Gotti" or "Childish Gambino" he is a hero to recall as they now themselves are wrapped up in the 21st century version of a criminal underworld he once ruled with an iron fist; and for the basic Americans, or even for Rudy Giuliani, he is apparently one of the most psychopathic and vile criminals that ever walked Gods green earth. John Gotti changes, in other words, in each play in which he is called upon to perform, even right here in his own country, the United States. In fact, in  in one play in which Johns ghost was called up (not long after his imprisonment and while he was still alive) he had the following lines written for him: "Yeah" he tells us, in his 1996 fictional incarnation, "so you humbled me. So what you got? You got a war. You got a global war. You got your Chinks, Dominicans, Asians, Russians, Colombians, Jamaicans. What they doin'? They desecrate the nation. You got your variable fuckin' snowstorms of cocaine, smack or whatever they shove in their veins. There's no rules. There's no parameters. There's no feelings. There's no feelings for this country. There's no love for this country." In another scene, or perhaps just a real life quote that I'm misremembering, he then explains, when he's feeling particularly angry about the FBI, that this is a "low life country."

Now, one thing I find so fascinating about the lines that his 1996 ghost was fed here, is that, though Gotti refers to a "global war" in the dialogue, he's actually just really referring to the streets of New York City and perhaps the extended tri state area. He's not really referring to anything global because, powerful as he was, he was never a global figure nor even really a national one. He was mostly just a New York Italian figure....and that's it. When his character refers to global war, he's talking about the specific interior of this country itself: there is a global war here, a war amongst tribes, and all of them vying for power in their own way. Just like the dude on Twitter was saying, in regards not to a crimina underworld, but to the actual politics and even then, the innocent culture of the DNA.

The irony of the United States is that, beyond a language and a shared economy, there's next to nothing that the country is united around. And I have actually recently begun to believe that this country never will be united in the way that almost all countries on earth traditionally have been, and I believe that any attempts to try and force a concrete culture to stand here will, inevitably, fail and fail miserably, since a culture cannot come together in a forced manner like that. It has to be naturally and gradually pieced together, or else people hate it, and this is what leads me to my next idea which is that I think America is the first country on earth that "was never meant to be like a country".

What this means of course I have no idea, and I don't suspect anyone will either, until another 500 years have gone by, and by that point , I'll be long since gone......