Patriotism and Pure Cultures
So, two ideas have been swirling around in my mind of late; they are vaguely related, so I think I shall attempt to combine the two.
As this essay has gotten a bit "out of hand" in length, I shall conceal behind a cut, strictly to allow others clutter-free pages. ;-)
When I was a child, I was raised to be terribly patriotic, more or less in a Kiplingesque sense -- undifferentiated, complete, seeing minor faults only as minor, achievements as major, with a strong swirl of militarism into the mix. My father taught me with terrific thoroughness how to care for a flag (which tends to cheese me off to this day when people display torn flags and when they refuse to take them down after sunset). The point was that America was, for me, a history of going from strength to strength, that its few faults in a strange way led to greater strengths, with an emphasis on Washington, Lincoln, and FDR, with a severe glossing over of such presidents as Grant, Harrison, and Harding.
The odd thing was the mental juggling this engendered between my childhood in the 1960s and 70s, listening to my parents complain about the current government, the war in Southeast Asia, the "damn Hippies", and other less than savoury matters with the rarefied vision of my nation's history that I was being fed both by me parents and by my school. Then again, Santa Rosa, although in northern California, was very conservative and rather backwards, not at all the vision of the "Summer of Love" Haight-Ashbury San Francisco; by way of example, my high school Government textbook listed "Our President, Dwight D. Eisenhower" ... in 1976.
The big break for me and pure, all-accepting patriotism was, as might be expected by these dates, Watergate. The president, a man my mother voted for in 1968 and my father voted for both times, left office in disgrace; this ultimately cracked the facade of the presidency being the office held by the wisest and best heads in the land. Indeed, it is now difficult to not find blemishes in the factsheets of pretty much any of the men who have held this office.
From the presidency I moved to misrepresented points of history -- my ignorance of the treatment of Native Americans was pretty broad until high school; my knowledge of the American Civil War was far less so, thanks to my brother's obsession with it, thus I was never gulled into the "it's all about slavery" line; the double-dealings America had had with Canada soon came high up on my list, as did our shameful treatment of Royalists after the Revolutionary War. In point of fact, it became difficult for me to find any pure and selfless acts anywhere in U.S. history ... but to be fair, the same could be said of any nation. In many ways I think this is what led me to study Medieval history -- it was distant enough that few people had a dog in the fight anymore, so to speak.
It took me some time to shift back, to see that good in America. I had followed the standard form of reaction -- from blind love to extreme loathing. Yet with my study of the histories of other lands, I began to see what was special, even a times quite noble, in my own. The United States of America is one large experiment, and probably an imperfect one, yet it has achieved much. For every flaw I have found, and there are many, I can find just as many virtues. One of the greatest of these is the right to actively bitch about the country in public without fear of being carted off in the night. If I want to say, "(ex-)President Bush was a lying bastard!", I can do so. Hell, I did on more than a few occasions. ;-) So I have come, not full circle, but to a point where I can see my country more clearly, where I can, in the main, accept and admire it, while fully acknowledging that it has some horrendous flaws ... and that many points that I considered terrible others will see in a more positive light. Such is this nation.
But this also makes me think of that incredibly malleable, confusing concept of "culture".
The USA is in a strange and unique position in that most of its inhabitants, still, think of themselves, in some sense, as foreigners. If you ask them, "Where are you from?" you might well receive answers like England, France, Greece, Russia ... even if the family has been on the North American continent since the seventeenth century. Sometimes we revel in these differentiations, while other times we shun them. Look at the reactions to the various French/Greek/Italian/Scottish/Fill-in-the-Blank Festivals across the country and you will see near simultaneous acceptance and rejection of these cultural identities.
Now what brought the concept of "culture" into my mind of late was a visit to YouTube where it was suggested I listen to a band out of Scandinavia (mixed group). Cool by me -- I am often up for new styles of music and this one proved quite interesting as it was a combination of rock sensibilities, traditional Finnish poetry, and a didgeridoo. For me, that smacks of extreme coolness, a blending of various vibes into a graceful whole. But the comments confused the fuck out of me -- there was a long-running diatribe (with many counters and additions) primarily from a practitioner of Asatru defending the notion of "pure culture".
My friends, there ain't no such thing.
In the USA it is easy to see that cultures rarely remain pure; we are a mongrel nation and, as Bill Murray would say, we are proud of our wet noses. We are all about getting away from another culture and creating our own. Even my beloved Scottish ancestors, at least one of whom entered this nation in an altogether involuntary manner, learned to roll with the punches, to keep Bobby Burns in the heart, but to accept bratwurst, mayonnaise, and rice pilaf on the table. But realistically even the "old country" (whatever that is for whichever of you might be reading this) has nothing like a "pure culture". Culture, by its very definition, is something that alters over time, usually in reaction to outside influences. That Asatruan might have been looking to utterly mythical "pure" viking ancestors, but their culture was an alteration from previous cultures in Scandinavia ... and very few people living in Norway, Sweden, Denmark or Finland nowadays would be overly excited about returning to it. Or, go give a counter-example, I have a friend who lives in Cork, RoI. She went to a Clancy Brothers concert one time. Her reaction was, "Oh Angus, they actually sang a song where the chorus was 'fiddle-dee-diddle-dee-dee' -- I was so embarrassed for them!"
Yeah, tastes (and thus culture) change with time and individuals.
So, I live in the USA. In late 1960s and early 1970s Santa Rosa (a town with a lovely Spanish name) it was common to see or hear, "My Country -- Love It Or Leave It". Not so much anymore up there -- shift in culture, donchaknow. Computers have changed our lives and the ways we interface with others -- again a shift in culture. Hawai'i was more or less forced into statehood, but now is gleefully celebrating its 50th anniversary as a state. Change happens, attitudes shift, cultures vary, what was once important isn't as much...
...but no need to throw away the baby with the bathwater. ;-) I still love my Bobby Burns, my bagpipe music, and my kilt, even though I have never stepped foot on the land of my traditional forebearers. I will celebrate anyone's New Year with great aplomb, revel in eating foods from many lands, give honour at the shrine of your choice, and hopefully open a few eyes. Yeah, there may be warts in a nation, a culture, a stretch of history, but there may also be goodness, wonder, and greatness there. Look for the positives; accept and try to move beyond the negatives. And keep putting one foot in front of another.
So, long thoughts there...
As this essay has gotten a bit "out of hand" in length, I shall conceal behind a cut, strictly to allow others clutter-free pages. ;-)
When I was a child, I was raised to be terribly patriotic, more or less in a Kiplingesque sense -- undifferentiated, complete, seeing minor faults only as minor, achievements as major, with a strong swirl of militarism into the mix. My father taught me with terrific thoroughness how to care for a flag (which tends to cheese me off to this day when people display torn flags and when they refuse to take them down after sunset). The point was that America was, for me, a history of going from strength to strength, that its few faults in a strange way led to greater strengths, with an emphasis on Washington, Lincoln, and FDR, with a severe glossing over of such presidents as Grant, Harrison, and Harding.
The odd thing was the mental juggling this engendered between my childhood in the 1960s and 70s, listening to my parents complain about the current government, the war in Southeast Asia, the "damn Hippies", and other less than savoury matters with the rarefied vision of my nation's history that I was being fed both by me parents and by my school. Then again, Santa Rosa, although in northern California, was very conservative and rather backwards, not at all the vision of the "Summer of Love" Haight-Ashbury San Francisco; by way of example, my high school Government textbook listed "Our President, Dwight D. Eisenhower" ... in 1976.
The big break for me and pure, all-accepting patriotism was, as might be expected by these dates, Watergate. The president, a man my mother voted for in 1968 and my father voted for both times, left office in disgrace; this ultimately cracked the facade of the presidency being the office held by the wisest and best heads in the land. Indeed, it is now difficult to not find blemishes in the factsheets of pretty much any of the men who have held this office.
From the presidency I moved to misrepresented points of history -- my ignorance of the treatment of Native Americans was pretty broad until high school; my knowledge of the American Civil War was far less so, thanks to my brother's obsession with it, thus I was never gulled into the "it's all about slavery" line; the double-dealings America had had with Canada soon came high up on my list, as did our shameful treatment of Royalists after the Revolutionary War. In point of fact, it became difficult for me to find any pure and selfless acts anywhere in U.S. history ... but to be fair, the same could be said of any nation. In many ways I think this is what led me to study Medieval history -- it was distant enough that few people had a dog in the fight anymore, so to speak.
It took me some time to shift back, to see that good in America. I had followed the standard form of reaction -- from blind love to extreme loathing. Yet with my study of the histories of other lands, I began to see what was special, even a times quite noble, in my own. The United States of America is one large experiment, and probably an imperfect one, yet it has achieved much. For every flaw I have found, and there are many, I can find just as many virtues. One of the greatest of these is the right to actively bitch about the country in public without fear of being carted off in the night. If I want to say, "(ex-)President Bush was a lying bastard!", I can do so. Hell, I did on more than a few occasions. ;-) So I have come, not full circle, but to a point where I can see my country more clearly, where I can, in the main, accept and admire it, while fully acknowledging that it has some horrendous flaws ... and that many points that I considered terrible others will see in a more positive light. Such is this nation.
But this also makes me think of that incredibly malleable, confusing concept of "culture".
The USA is in a strange and unique position in that most of its inhabitants, still, think of themselves, in some sense, as foreigners. If you ask them, "Where are you from?" you might well receive answers like England, France, Greece, Russia ... even if the family has been on the North American continent since the seventeenth century. Sometimes we revel in these differentiations, while other times we shun them. Look at the reactions to the various French/Greek/Italian/Scottish/Fill-in-the-Blank Festivals across the country and you will see near simultaneous acceptance and rejection of these cultural identities.
Now what brought the concept of "culture" into my mind of late was a visit to YouTube where it was suggested I listen to a band out of Scandinavia (mixed group). Cool by me -- I am often up for new styles of music and this one proved quite interesting as it was a combination of rock sensibilities, traditional Finnish poetry, and a didgeridoo. For me, that smacks of extreme coolness, a blending of various vibes into a graceful whole. But the comments confused the fuck out of me -- there was a long-running diatribe (with many counters and additions) primarily from a practitioner of Asatru defending the notion of "pure culture".
My friends, there ain't no such thing.
In the USA it is easy to see that cultures rarely remain pure; we are a mongrel nation and, as Bill Murray would say, we are proud of our wet noses. We are all about getting away from another culture and creating our own. Even my beloved Scottish ancestors, at least one of whom entered this nation in an altogether involuntary manner, learned to roll with the punches, to keep Bobby Burns in the heart, but to accept bratwurst, mayonnaise, and rice pilaf on the table. But realistically even the "old country" (whatever that is for whichever of you might be reading this) has nothing like a "pure culture". Culture, by its very definition, is something that alters over time, usually in reaction to outside influences. That Asatruan might have been looking to utterly mythical "pure" viking ancestors, but their culture was an alteration from previous cultures in Scandinavia ... and very few people living in Norway, Sweden, Denmark or Finland nowadays would be overly excited about returning to it. Or, go give a counter-example, I have a friend who lives in Cork, RoI. She went to a Clancy Brothers concert one time. Her reaction was, "Oh Angus, they actually sang a song where the chorus was 'fiddle-dee-diddle-dee-dee' -- I was so embarrassed for them!"
Yeah, tastes (and thus culture) change with time and individuals.
So, I live in the USA. In late 1960s and early 1970s Santa Rosa (a town with a lovely Spanish name) it was common to see or hear, "My Country -- Love It Or Leave It". Not so much anymore up there -- shift in culture, donchaknow. Computers have changed our lives and the ways we interface with others -- again a shift in culture. Hawai'i was more or less forced into statehood, but now is gleefully celebrating its 50th anniversary as a state. Change happens, attitudes shift, cultures vary, what was once important isn't as much...
...but no need to throw away the baby with the bathwater. ;-) I still love my Bobby Burns, my bagpipe music, and my kilt, even though I have never stepped foot on the land of my traditional forebearers. I will celebrate anyone's New Year with great aplomb, revel in eating foods from many lands, give honour at the shrine of your choice, and hopefully open a few eyes. Yeah, there may be warts in a nation, a culture, a stretch of history, but there may also be goodness, wonder, and greatness there. Look for the positives; accept and try to move beyond the negatives. And keep putting one foot in front of another.
So, long thoughts there...