Неплохая статья для написания эссе about Yanks vs Brits

Culture, history and authenticity

Tom Waits & Peter Murphy / "Christmas Sucks"

One thing that irritates me is people from the Old Country claiming that there's no such thing as "culture" in America, and that it's all McDonalds and malls and MTV (how dated is the reference to MTV as a cultural homogeniser?) and, you know, it irritates me when some Americans seem to agree with them.

(To start this off correctly, I'm not talking about the culture of the previous inhabitants here, I'm talking about that of the invaders and colonists. Also, this is very much Part 1 Of A Continuing Series, or perhaps Part X.)

The basic rule is "where there are people, there is culture" - unless you're claiming there is something on the North American continent that saps the humanity out of everyone who moves there. People generate cultural artifacts because they are people. It doesn't take much research to find resultant culture in the US just as deep as any anywhere else; the idea that it's a "young culture" is nonsense. The individuals involved have just as much history as individuals anywhere else, it's just that, at some point, they or their ancestors moved continents. That can only add to the events that contribute to a culture.

You can still see a hankering after historical continuity. Wandering around American cities and seeing business signs saying "since 1975" does make me laugh, after seeing similar ones saying "since 1875" or indeed earlier in London. I've had (more than one) pint in the oldest known inn in Britain, just outside Edinburgh, where Henry VIII apparently drunk. Who cares? It's just frosting. Playing up to it is just conforming to the idea that there has to be not only a historical but a geographical link to the past to gain authenticity, or indeed that there's anything positive in this sort of continuity. If I read that a particular tailors' shop is still run by the family that been tailors for ten generations, my immediate thought is "Wasn't anyone rebellious enough not to be a tailor? That's kind of sad."

The issue of whether a culture exists or not segues easily into whether that culture is authentic or not. I'm not at all convinced by the idea that history gives a culture any more validity than any other. A fake culture would be one that is not actually possessed by real human beings. If I invent the details of a culture for a novel, that doesn't make that culture real; but, regardless of why, if a group of humans behave in a particular way, that is a culture.

(Entry paused here for tiredness and lack of caring. I actually tried to submit this as a draft only, but I've noticed on Thursday morning that Kung-Log decided it wanted to publish this incomplete nonsense as a full entry. Great. I can't very well change that now, people will have read it and it will have been syndicated.)