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?)

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!