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Hell yeah
I think most USA hate comes from the US government’s history of global political interference. It’s understandable. For the same reason that Britain is still viewed negatively in many parts of the world.
Personally, I don’t hate the US or Americans generally. Things exported from the US whether physically, technologically, or culturally have played a major part of my life. It would be dumb to have a blanket hatred of anything American.
Most Americans I’ve met have been very friendly and cheerful.
Personally, I don’t hate the US or Americans generally.
~ Vietnamese Guy circa October, 1955
~ Chilean Guy circa September 10th, 1979
~ Iraqi Guy circa July, 1990
~ Palestinian Guy circa October 6th, 2023
Most Americans I’ve met have been very friendly and cheerful.
Most people I’ve met have been very friendly and cheerful. But that goes afield from “culture”. When you start digging into what constitutes a US cultural export - plastic Coca Cola bottles, Ford F-350s and Chevy Suburbans, whitewashed jazz music, 6-year-olds doing beauty pageants, CIA blacksites, Ads on top of Ads on top of Ads on top of Ads, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion - you lose a lot of the characteristic friendliness and start feeling a bit creeped out.
The young, curious, carefree American traveler is a delight. The old, cynical, covetous American businessman is less so.
You’re ignoring a lot of the cool stuff that America has put out:
- Broadway musicals
- alligator wrestling
- Cajun food (basically French, African, and Spanish fusion food) and American Pizza
- a wide variety of music genres (grunge, big band/swing, etc)
The best thing about America is the fusion of different cultures. It started as a refuse for the oppressed, and its culture reflects that. Unfortunately, it has itself become an oppressor in many ways, but that shouldn’t detract from its unique, blended culture.
The best thing about America is the fusion of different cultures.
Absolutely. But as you get closer to the heart of American mass media and corporate commercialism, I tend to see a flattening and homogenizing of those cultures until it comes out as a bland inoffensive gruel. American music is a great example of this phenomenon. The really gripping and transformative musical movements start on the periphery, often in migrant or other minority communities, and are treated with a range of indifference to outright hostility by the current central figures in the industry and in society as a whole.
The stark unabashed hatred of rap music, during the 80s and 90s comes to mind. Or the Boomer cultural response to GenX/Millennial grunge and metal. In more modern music, you see a strong influence among gender queer and Middle Eastern / East Asian artists, which has provoked a string of vitriolic social and political responses (Don’t Say Gay laws, mosque burnings, social media censorship of East Asian media, etc).
The fusion happens regardless, and eventually this stuff is normalized and digested by the central cultural institutions. Pop music transforms the more queer and colorful presentations of culture into something for rich white kids. Hong Kong and Bollywood hits get rewritten as mediocre midwestern knock-offs. Transgressive Rap and Heavy Metal and Punk music become anthems for the US military and patriotic pro-sports franchises and even ultra-orthodox political campaigns. Revolutionary ideas in comic books and pulp fiction get transmuted into mass marketed white nationalism and reactionary conservatism.
The media is diluted, thinned, and flattened until it is inoffensive and trite. That’s the end result of mainstream American incorporation of peripheral arts. Its the Chicken McNugget of culture. Ground up, overly processed, and stripped of flavor so as to be safe to distribute to the widest possible audience.
transformative musical movements start on the periphery
That’s true with everything. Do you think France always had highly regarded cuisine? No, they hired chefs from all around to come to France, and through that they developed a unique food culture. That’s the same general process for pretty much every important piece of culture. Someone creates something great, then the masses adopt it and mix it with existing things and the fusion becomes a part of the culture.
Look at the cowboy hat. In the 1800s, people moved out west to make a life for themselves, and their clothing styles and whatnot were fused with existing people in the area (e.g. the 10 gallon hat largely came from similar hats in Mexico at the time). It was derived from prior art, but it turned into something uniquely American, and is now a symbol for a certain part of the US.
The media is diluted, thinned, and flattened until it is inoffensive and trite
I disagree. The US has a very unique culture, and that culture is constantly evolving. The same happens in other regions as well. For example, Europeans aren’t still fighting wars over which country has the best classical composers (well, at least not the majority), they’ve largely moved on to newer genres that have evolved from older genres (e.g. I think Eurobeat derivatives are still popular?).
The underpinnings of American culture are still present in the current iteration of things: individual freedoms and exceptionalism. Look at modern rap, country, and pop, the songs are largely about breaking free of constraints and asserting your identity. Sometimes that comes from the queer end of the spectrum, and sometimes it’s about flashing money or cars in music videos, but it all has that distinctly American feel. If you look at K Pop videos, it’s all about tight choreography and fashion, which reflect the values in Korea. In Indian music from what I can tell, it’s all about the community, so large groups of dancers and traditional clothing, and that reflects value in India.
Culture evolves and is constantly adapted and changed, but the core identity is usually still apparent.
And yeah, pop culture tends to get diluted, which is why younger generations tend to push the envelope to “spice up” the bland. mass market media, which then get absorbed and becomes the current mass market media as that generation ages, and the cycle repeats.
Look at the cowboy hat.
A great example of the degradation of culture through Americanization. The modern bright-white cardboard stiff western hat is a facsimile of a facsimile mass produced so a bunch of oil tycoons could play-act as working class cattle rustlers with the oodles of money they harvested from the native population.
It was derived from prior art, but it turned into something uniquely American
When you watch a crowd of old white businessmen in cowboy hats talk about how we need to round up all those illegal border dwellers and send them back where they came from, you’re getting an American aesthetic on a very classically European attitude towards native people.
The US has a very unique culture, and that culture is constantly evolving.
The pastiche changes, but the underlying white nationalist nature of the culture endures. What you’re witnessing isn’t evolution so much as digestion. Foreign bodies picked clean of the meaty bits, broken down into their baser elements, and reincorporated into something the body finds palatable.
The modern Pop Music scene - where it sources material, how it packages and distributes the media, and who ultimately benefits from the windfall of popularity - hasn’t meaningfully changed in nearly a century. There’s a movie - Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom - that does an excellent job of illustrating this phenomenon. The harvesting of talent from disadvantaged communities, the flattening and homogenizing of the content, and the subsequent profiteering by corporate magnets that have only grown fatter and more burdensome on the industry to this day.
You get fed the same recirculated slop decade after decade via a narrow channel of hyper-sensationalized advertising. You’re going to listen to Dolly Pardon at the Super Bowl until she’s too old to walk, and by god you’re going to like it. You’re going to watch the Amy Winehouse biopic thirteen years after the industry chewed her up and spat her out and then you’re going to buy tickets to the next Britney Spears world tour right after that.
Culture evolves and is constantly adapted and changed
The wheel can’t spin forever. Eventually this thing America has built is going to break. But until it does, the Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer Christmas special will be airing in the same CBS timeslot its occupied since 1964.
The post: Can we just take a moment to acknowledge that there are at least some positives to be found in in the US?
The comments: No
Can’t blame us when Americans see any non-american as second class citizens. As per their laws.
The bad overshadows the good. And the good is still nothing to write home about either.
What do you mean? One relatively unique thing is that the US Constitution protects anyone physically on US soil, not just citizens. There is very little that treats physically present US citizens different from non-citizens beyond voting and certain welfare benefits.
That said, the police here can absolutely enforce the law unfairly. But that’s not really a problem with the law, but instead the individual police departments.
As an American, I think there’s a lot we can do better to be more fair, but I also think our system of laws is quite fair in general. We just need to get our police in line and change the “us vs them” mentality in our military and policing. I’d really like it if we would stop bombing people we don’t like and instead strive to open trade routes.
