Exoticism and the cult of blandness

[wombat1138]

In an earlier comment, bellatrys wrote, "[T]here's a sort of imaginary whitebread spiritual north pole in the imaginary Peoria of the mind from which one is separated in varying degrees of authentic Americanness as one is turned off by the artificially bland/generic pseudo-WASP uberculture and turned on by spiced food, syncopated music, and other peoples' stories..."

I think I have almost nearly had an insight. On the other hand, it may just be gas. But at least it feels as if I've got a neural impulse tickling around somewhere about the self-appointed guardians of the monoculture fighting off any threat of diversity because as artificial as it is, that monochromatic (allegedly-)crustless Wonder-Breadness is the only thing they feel it's safe to belong to. Oh, there are tempting metaphors about hybrid vigor nibbling away at the edges of their gene pool, but I think those don't quite really apply.

One of my favorite lil' proto-Goth[*] anthologies had a vampire story written in the 1920s or so, whose diction startled me rather a lot the first time I read it-- the "Native American" cop was a proper respectable WASP, in contrast to the superstitious and emotional (but nevertheless mystically attuned) emigrant peasants from Poland, Italy, and Ireland, i.e. Catholics. IIRC the KKK started admitting Catholics within the past few decades to widen their recruiting pool and now hardly makes a fuss about them n'more, as long as they're reasonably Caucasian. (I almost think I also remember a minor newsthing about some local chapters also accepting Hispanics, whatever definition they've decided on for that-- even the Census may've given up on that one and made it a matter of self-labelling.)

[*: When I was a disaffected teen, we didn't even *have* a Goth subculture. The best we could do was dress in black and maybe listen to heavy metal if we could stand it. Since I didn't like most of that music and wasn't allowed to own much black clothing, that just left shoplifting a lot of morbid books. Also, I had to walk to the bookstore uphill both ways. If it's any consolation to punkwalrus, I don't remember frequenting "his" bookstore during the time he actually worked there.]

Gah. I think my neural impulse got grounded. This may have something to do with the cat who is now asleep on my foot.

Comments

[punkwalrus.livejournal.com]

During my final store audit, my shrink was abour $24,000... about 4%, which was far LESS than the company average (I was told they don't start getting worried until it goes over 10%). Shrink is not only shoplifting; the majority of it was warehouse orders that shorted you on deliveries. Believe it or not, they actually delivered your books in huge yellow laundry carts off the back of a semi.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

But there are no (effective) guardians of the monoculture. Sure, advertising and marketing strive to offend the fewest number and thus sell more, and that limits the imagery they'll use; but there's no group of five old white guys meeting in a room under the North Pole and deciding that necklines will be up this year. There's no they there.

(From your description of the 20s vampire story, it sounds as though those emotional/superstitious immigrants are right. No?)

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

The immigrants were right, yes-- also, interestingly enough, one of the major reasons they were able to sneak up on the (English-speaking, American-born) vampire at the end was that his telepathy couldn't translate their language. (Oh, so that's what "whomp-year" meant, he thought as the stake whacked into him.)

WRT defense of the monoculture, I wasn't thinking effectiveness so much as vehemence. But while I don't know about necklines, there *is* a sort of five old white guys (http://www.pantone.com/products/products.asp?idSubArea=0&idArea=4&showNav=10&idArticle=834) who control the fashion palettes. Not that there are literally (http://www.pantone.com/aboutus/aboutus.asp?idArticle=50) five of them, nor are all of them old, white, or guys. But hey.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

Y'know, this doesn't sound like a half-bad story: a horror story with the twist that it's a vampire terrified as the mortals come to kill him. (Kinda parallelling an idea of mine that had the last few vampires in the world, who never needed more than a little non-fatally-induced hemoglobin to survive, being hunted down by a now-cannibalistic humanity; bits of that have been ported into my non-fantasy, non-vampire-centered, perhaps-never-to-be-finished WIP.)

WRT defense of the monoculture, I wasn't thinking effectiveness so much as vehemence.

Well, yeah, but those guys you'll always find, no matter what the position in question. (Hence the Internet.) Demamgogues are always underfoot, and they're symptoms of Bad Stuff, but they only really matter when the largest part of a population decides to agree with them. Which happens, obviously.

But while I don't know about necklines, there *is* a sort of five old white guys who control the fashion palettes.

Bah. Sitting here in my red-with thin-horizontal-white-stripes Old Navy shirt over a dark blue "flaming d20" t-shirt, olive khakis and dirty tan boots whose laces seem to be loosening, I am assured that I am under the sartorial thrall of no one!

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

Y'know, this doesn't sound like a half-bad story: a horror story with the twist that it's a vampire terrified as the mortals come to kill him.

Hmm. You should give that a try, actually. IIRC, the story I recall was mostly through the vamp's POV with some possible bits of third-person omniscient, though it can be tricky to tell the difference when there's telepathy involved, but he was pretty much arrogant and self-assured until the last paragraph. (I think he was on vacation from the Big City, slumming around for exotic ethnic cuisine out in the sticks. Don't remember anything about him being on the run, but then it's been years since I read it. I really ought to scoop up that antho the next time I go home, if it's still there, but then I've had an entire bookcase in that category for years now, getting slowly whittled away as even so often, my mother decides that she needs more room for her sewing notions, causing my entire set of Elfquest graphic novels (the Starblaze set based on the hand-colored masters, not the later Marvel reprints) to disappear argh.

[qadgop.livejournal.com]

Not that I'm much of an Elfquest fan, having found the only issues I read (1990ish) kinda on the warmed-over-Nortony side, but yowchie. Would getting any of that stuff moved out to storage be a possibility?

Almost everything Starblaze put out was, at least, pretty. I miss that whole 1980s comics-and-sf press explosion, to say nothing of the speciality shops that supported them. Never mind used bookshops; late-80s New York had a slew of tiny-but-good sf-and-related specialty shops, all now long gone. This was the era when the NY Forbidden Planet was something of a mecca, instead of a crappy comic shop. (And there were two of them!)

i think there's also room for a cross-cultural comparison

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

of the immigrant-diaspora-dislocation experience - since it's only dealt with from outside, by western authors, and tangentially, it's only with the internet that you really get the opportunity to compare/contrast the whole we-moved-and-left-most-of-our-culture-behind, BUT we don't belong to this one either, (partly b/c we're building this one out from scratch of bits and pieces all jumbled together from a whole bunch of others as a Group Project) mess that seems to both be innately part of the American Identity and also parts of the Southeast Asian one, or those segments of it which heretofore only show up as bit parts in Joseph Conrad novels...

It goes kind of like this, on my side of the IE divide:
We don't know who we are, really, b/c unlike the Romany, we didn't have a strong enough group-self-identity to withstand being displaced from our chosen homelands and stay together. So we can either:

a) pretend it doesn't matter and that we belong to this new place we find ourselves in, which is complicated by the fact that the people who precede us and claim greater rights don't always want to let us into the club;

b) while doing so, create a sort of generic monoculture-by-default which doesn't stand up to scrutiny, but is sort of a flavorless goo (like unflavored cornstarch sauce) made of everything left of human society when you take away the unique and weird bits that come from the originating cultures that make up a "pooled" culture such as found in ports or trade cities.

c) create a new, synthetic Ethnic Identity which may or may not bear much resemblance to your old original ones, and which may or may not be much fun depending on how seriously you take it (ie this can run the gamut from the Embracing Teh Bland above, to the Stormfront/Wotanist "Aryans" or the various Hindu Identity political parties in India, to the Pioneer Myth and Western Culture™ conservatives here, to their polar opposites despite surface resemblance, the SCA and black powder reenactors, or the vast range across the Celtophile spectrum.

d) pretend that We Don't Need Any History/Myth/Colour, Thank You, all we need is Teh Bland Bourgeois Life - until your kids rebel in violent reaction and join communes or become Goths or train under Hopi shamans or go to India or a Buddhist monastery or run away to Tahiti like Gaugin or grad school...

At least, that's the experience of my own acquaintances and relatives, explaining a lot from the Arts & Crafts movement of the turn of the last century, and the Golden Dawn to the Beatniks and New Age and all of it - dude, this is *boring*, let's turn off "Leave it To Beaver" and go look in the attic of our collective selves and find some stuff to play dress-up with...ooh, hey, look, Alexei's got his dyedushka's sword, and Tania's got a crystal ball, and Miguel's got a guitar made from an armadillo, and Eileen's got a harp, and what do you *mean* Robin Hood and Marian can't help Rama and Hanuman rescue Sita? Says who!

It works both ways, I think....

[wombat1138.livejournal.com]

...in that for many people, regardless of majority /minority demographics, a significant part of whatever group (ethnic, gender, fandom, whatever) identity they have is simply that they're Not Those Other People. (Heaven forfend, for gosh, those Others are Icky. Or sometimes woe and misery, considering how Vastly Superior they are to us unenlightened types, like wow man.)

Take away the ick/wow scale, and all you have is a value-undifferentiated pool of Otherness in which everyone is somebody else's version of Other. This is anathema for people with a pathological need to feel superior to everyone else at all times.