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

[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!)