Just finished Bad or the Dumbing of America by Paul Fussell. Whew, is he scathing. He says:
Actual American life as experienced by most people is so boring, uniform or devoid of significant soul, so isolated from traditions of the past and the resonances of European culture, that it demands to be raised and misinterpreted as something wonderful. For example, if a town has no restaurant worth entering, it is some comfort to cooperate with the restauranter in the game -- taking seriously the pompous illiterate menu, the fraudulent French, the balletic wine service, all the clumsy imitations of the real thing.
If a town has no beauty, distinction or charm, and is really popluated only by money-grubbers, philistines and self-satisfied provincials, it is a comfort to cooperate with the pretensions of the local 'art gallery'-cum-gift shop and to acquire its hidous mass-produced sub-sculptures as if they were 'works of art.'
10 comments:
Sounds just like Bracknell!
In the past forty years, the United States has experienced a massive transformation from a grouping of distinctive regional cultures and styles even dialect of speech into a thoroughly homogenised society.
One can help but notice now that every solitary American town or city has a uniform sameness to it. For example: The ubiquitous American Shopping Malls both large and small filled with the same "Big-Box" retailers, the apparently mandatory Wal-Mart store, and there's American cuisine which is best described "super-sized" as one is hard-put to be able to escape the presence of the fast food industry which includes the chains of franchised & corporate eateries that American adverts deem as more upscale from their fast food cousins.
Once upon time dear Elizabeth, do you remember when you could only get excellent Cajun cooking and jambalaya in the parishes of Louisiana or New Orleans itself?
Coors beer was only to be found in the Western States? Utz potato chips on in the mid-Atlantic states? Vernor's Ale was only a Michigan and upper Great Lakes soda pop? For authentic NY "pie" the best place was Brooklyn? (That's pizza to the rest of you.)
The list goes on. Even the dialects are slowly fading away although I've noticed that the southern speech patterns haven't been totally eradicated just yet. "Country" still sounds "Country."
Sadly, the Americans seem to love to be in a "One-Size-Fits-All" (mostly super-sized, read: obese)society these days.
I love unique, but you really have to dig for it now. Even the small town American environs, which are the bedrock of this nation have become homogenised to the sorry point that its not uncommon to find a bloody Starbucks with its nasty burned smelling/tasting what passes for some corporate wienie's idea of a cup of coffee, in a town that may only have a couple more retailers (ie; Wally-Mart)and the U. S. Post Office which is getting crowded out by FedEx or UPS.
Hell, I can remember when it was a big deal to travel to NYc just to be able to say that we've shopped at Macy's. Now the bloody things are everywhere....
Nope.........precious little charm these days Elizabeth, more like pretentious charm.
Ah, Brody, that, too, sounds like Bracknell.
Ha ha, Tim Trent, I love that guide to Bracknell. And anything slammed by the newspaper there has to be good.
Brody, thanks for your post -- sad but true. It's the same in England too. Chains taking over everywhere.
Why is it that old people always think that things were better in the past? ;-)
Ah, Richard, nostalgia is just not what it used to be.
That's because in the past there is no uncertainty.
Our current lives are a jumble of random currents, complete with fears about the way things might turn out.
Once the present becomes the past, we have a chance to put it into some kind of order (which we like) and there's no uncerainty any more.
If life really was better for us back then, we're nostalgic. If life is better now, the fact that it wasn't so got in the past is minimised, because everything turned out ok in the end.
Instant nostalgia.
Well, for most women, the past was terrific because we had no wrinkles, buns of steel, and could get away with mini-skirts! Oh---I guess y'all are talking about more profound issues, but...yeah, I wouldn't mind being 25-35 again. Even 45 is beginning to look good to me! Oh, well, give me a few years and I'll wax nostalgic about 52!
But what's the old expression---my college German professor used it all the time, auf Deutsch of course, but it went something like, "Oh, to be OLD again," sighed the fresh corpse!
Here, here! It could not be more succintly put. The soul has been successfuly sucked right out of America.
You never fail to make me laugh Miss Brenda. Yes, to be a corpse again! We can all dream...of course, in my philosophy the corpse is the youngest stage of life.
Death rides a hale horse.
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