The Glade 4.0

Is your argument, then, that Peggy Noonan, I, and others like us do not really feel what we think we feel? Our feelings about this subject do not exist, because you pronounce that some great American culture does not exist?

The culture, Khross, is the amalgam of all those various elements you speak of. As there are shifts in certain elements of that amalgam, so the entire culture shifts. On a balance scale, you don't have to move a thousand marbles to shift the balance, you only have to move a few. All the other marbles can stay where they were, but moving a few will have an effect on the entire balance.

The culture is shifting in a way that makes some of us feel pessimistic. I tell you the pessimism exists. I feel it. Peggy Noonan has articulated it in the opinion piece she wrote. Denying that the pessimism exists in some parts of the public is not really a good option.

Who's Adam Lambert, and why does he matter?

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Holy shitsnacks!

1) A gay Jew.

2) Because he's a gay Jew.

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Buckle your pants or they might fall down.

So was Harvey Fierstein. :p

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Holy shitsnacks!

That's almost an appropriate analogy, except for one thing: there is no the culture.And you keep repeating that singular definite article. It's not going to work. There's no unified American Culture; of course, had you read my earlier posts and grokked them, you wouldn't be implicitly agreeing here and sandbagging your own argument. I get that you're pessimistic and that Noonan's pessimistic, but all the sour grapes over an aggregate identity that never existed except in the delusions of the selfrighteous isn't going to work or convince me otherwise. Were the things you're grousing about a problem, the world would have ended with Zelda Fitzgerald and Djuna Barnes.

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In small-town Iowa, there are, within a 30-mile radius of where I live, there are what I would consider roughly 5 different cultures, with different dynamics and different attitudes and population for every one of them, and that isn't even factoring in subgroups.

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Grenade 3 Sports Drink. It's fire in the hole.. Your hole!

Regardless of the "culture" aspect, I wonder how many people thought the same thing when Elvis made his appreance? People said his hip gyrating was obscene.

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"...the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?" -Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

The likelyhood that any rogue state will acquire weapons of sufficient number, accuracy, and power to threaten us with annhilation is exceedingly low. The Soviet Union would have been hard-pressed to annhilate us at the height of the cold war, and we them, although damage would have been severe to say the least.

And Bery - I've used the word "tautology" a lot more than twice. Evidently you've been paying little attention to what I ahve to say although I notice no dearth of responses.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

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Holy shitsnacks!

*shrug* I recall seeing it twice. As much as ego might argue otherwise, I have not read every post you have made, for a variety of reasons.

'

The difference is that Harvey Fierstein is talented and Adam Lambert is a little ***** who needs to be punched in his little ***** mouth.

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Darksiege
Traveller, Calé, Whisperer
Lead me not into temptation; for I know a shortcut

Then why the hell did we go to war in Iraq?

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It feels like all the people who want limited government really just want government limited to Republicans.
---The Daily Show

If you'll allow me to play the devil's advocate and try and keep Iraq out of this (gah!), this is all semantic and undemocratic. If you insist on using your definition of culture fine, I'll be more ambiguous and say whatever content that is aired that people find objectionable, they have a right to say something about it. If I turn on my hard rock station and get musically assaulted by the Jonas brothers or Adam Lambert, am I wrong to say WTF?

Take it to the absurd and toss in some Norwegian midget fisting scat video in the middle of a Wiggles marathon. Oh well? I mean hey dont get me wrong, there is a time and place for NMFS videos, but it aint on primetime with the kiddies watching. Or hell even me watching. I need some time to mentally prepare for that. Give me a heads up so I know to tune out or in and dont bill it as "sports" because that's deceiving.

I'll grant he may getting more **** for being a homosexual but I'm even hesitant to go there since we see this argument with madonna, various hip-hop/rap stars, and other, non-gay, pop culture icons so it's not like it's all of a sudden "gay alert!"

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

Yeah, I agree. I mean maybe they'd be able to destroy Tel Aviv, Kuwait, maybe even New York or Washington. But they wouldn't have been able to annhilate the U.S. if they'd got nuclear weapons, so why'd we bother? I don't live in any of those cities.

It is nothing of the sort. Undemocratic would be insisting that there are only the cultures of the Social Conservative and the Liberal, as Noonan and Beryllin persist. Supremely undemocratic would be insisting that there is, in fact, a standardized American Culture, when this is absolutely not the case. Culture is vastly more complex and nuanced than can be used to support or legitimate the bi-factional position that Noonan posits and Beryllin defends.

In some ways, culture is resultant; it emerges from the sharing of values, beliefs, behaviors, preferences, etc. shared among a group of similar people (generally ethnically, but not always). The problem with asserting some macro-level American Culture is it's a myth. The United States is too disparate geographically, ethnically, demographically, and politically for any such culture to emerge. There are more competing value and normative sets in the United States than anywhere in the world. Thus, the reductive and erroneous position is that there is a single American Culture embattled by the Liberal Agenda (tm). It's simply not true.
I never said Beryllin couldn't be chapped or miffed or otherwise displeased and put out by Adam Lambert. I am, however, willing to bet he didn't watch it on television himself. I am also willing to bet that he didn't the wardrobe malfunction either. He was, in both cases, tangentially affected (if at all). That said, my point still stands: he's grousing about these events as indicative of some broader harm to an American Culture that does not and cannot exist.And there are already laws in place to deal with such things; the Janet Jackson event resulted in sanctions. I'm unsure about the Adam Lambert event. Beryllin's position ignores that there are rules for broadcast content in place. And while rules generally deter something like that from happening, there's no harm until the rules have been broken. And, even then, people still cannot control the action of other individuals. You cannot prepare or forewarn an eventuality that no one knows about. Adam Lambert's choice to do whatever he did was his choice, not the broadcasters or producers. And the idea that just because he did it on TV Adam Lamber is some sort of social marker for a broader social change is ludicrous.I don't think I've mentioned his homosexuality once; I don't even know who the hell Adam Lambert is. I object to the poorly formed arguments and ignorance of what culture actually is. His content didn't affect me and doesn't appear to have broken any laws, which means Beryllin is grousing about content he didn't see, wasn't directly affected by, and which didn't merit censure from the regulatory agencies. What makes it worse, however, is that Beryllin is positioning an individual's behavior against an unsubstantiated majority and singular culture that doesn't exist as some sort of "sign" of the "wrong direction" for this nation.

But, funny how no one considers how undemocratic and semantic it is for Beryllin to decry the fact not everyone thinks or feels exactly like he does. Perhaps we should sticky this thread as a lesson on xenophobia.

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Nah, we've gotten that lesson daily for years from multiple posters, and it hasn't sunk in - a sticky wouldn't help. People seem to need to feel that their view is the right one, and everyone else is too stupid, or too greedy to understand.

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"Dress cops up as soldiers, give them military equipment, train them in military tactics, tell them they’re fighting a ‘war,’ and the consequences are predictable." —Radley Balko

Vindicarre:

That's part of the problem with the notion of "the American Culture". We live in a disparate place with disparate peoples and disparate values. There are many American Cultures, more than I know (or any of us for that matter). Discussions such as this one are easier in places like Japan where you have a generally homogeneous ethnic and moral identity (although even then it's still reductive).

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Is it your contention Khross that to have a culture, the group must be (nearly) homogeneous in belief, attitudes and behavior?

What is the demarcation line between cultures? How large and diverse is too large and diverse to be a culture?

While I fully agree that the United States can be divided into many smaller groups; increasingly these groups are not separated geographically as they were in the past, and we find that attitudes within an individual commuity are so radically different that they indeed could be considered a separate culture.

But I wonder, is there not still a place for examining the zeitgeist of America/"The West" even as diverse and stratified as it can be?

To think that we are all part of the same culture, just because we live on the same land mass divided by imaginary lines, seems a little silly.

It may seem a little silly, but its true. We do have a shared culture. Now there are drastic differences between regions, and ethnicities, etc, but there is a shared culture. It is certainly more true in the U.S. than in some other countries. Iraq for instance, has a completely culturally separate Kurdish population in the north. To a lesser extent the same is true of the Shiite population in the south. On the other hand, other nations have cultures which are even more tightly shared than the U.S. (such as Japan).

TheRiov:

Of course not, but you'd have picked up on that if you'd read what I posted. To talk about any Zeitgeist of the West is merely to talk about the Anglo-Saxon Diaspora and the contingent mythology of Western history that entails. Consequently, it is, in and of itself, a xenophobic exercise in reduction. The West has always had more ethnic groups, more cultures, more value sets, more various normatives than "the West" implies; hence, there is a growing interest in post-colonial studies.

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They unlinked the dollar from oil.

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"...but there exists also in the human heart a depraved taste for equality, which impels the weak to attempt to lower the powerful to their own level and reduces men to prefer equality in slavery to inequality with freedom." - De Tocqueville

And among them some are more dominant, politically speaking, and conflicting at times. Many cultures share similar values and of course you get variations out of all of them. You can broadly group many people into socially conservative or liberal for example.

In various regions of the nation you'll find a different breakdown in reactions to things like sex education and handing out condoms in schools or gay marriage or abortion rights and so on. This is distinct from political affiliation in that you will find minority groups that largely vote democratic will be socially conservative, something more aligned with republican platforms. But again, that's regional as well.

In any case, is Adam Lambert making out with some dude on a TV show a coordinated vast left wing conspiracy, no, but there is no doubt Noonan is tapping into (you can argue exploiting but not creating, in my mind) a fear of many Americans. Lambert is just another example of what they see and dont like.

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“Strong people are harder to kill than weak people, and more useful in general”. - Mark Rippetoe

Just because a country cannot annihilate us does not mean they cannot attack us with them.

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"Hysterical children shrieking about right-wing anything need to go sit in the corner and be quiet while the adults are talking."

There is no point in saying that DE. It is, of course, obvious even to a 10 year old. The fact that it is so obvious, and yet Monty couldn't see it, indicates a willful ignorance. No amount of common sense will penetrate that.

None are as blind, as those who will not see.