Soul of the Body, Soul of the World

Most of the people who live in my part of the world are the offspring of the old South. They are good folks and very patriotic. I cannot stand against them because I know them well. I would trust them more than most I know of my former friends in the Beltway. I consulted for the Democratic Party and I can tell you that after I served on the Southern Governor's Conference Committee back in 1980s I realized just how bad some folks really are that work in Washington DC. I have gone in a different direction now and am attempting to find purpose in our distant past.

God bless us all, being alive is hard enough not to worry about politics.

This is no doubt true. Much has been written about multi-culturalism and it definitely does homogenise in certain places, but it is a complicated thing. Capitalism itself results in cultural homogeneity since we buy mass produced material as cheap as we can - that means creating markets for products that cross cultures.

This is quite superficial though. We wear denim jeans, t-shirts, drive German or French cars, eat Indian, Chinese, Japanese, Italian, American food. We drink Dutch beer, or Spanish, listen to music with global influences, have religions from the Middle East (which is a good point in itself; religion can have a far stronger cultural influence than clothes or food and ours are not local at all, though have been locally modified).

If we are American then those fashions and objects need to be the defining aspect of being American - even for Americans. I doubt this is true. I think it is more likely that it is surface stuff and that the local environment and more powerful cultural aspects than fashion and car type (especially since many don't care about them) come to define a sense of country identity.

I am not saying that it doesn't change though, just that we all influence each other. I have not seen much of the US, but find Europe to be more culturally mixed than the bits I saw. Perhaps American culture has been less altered by multiculturalism, but that does not mean that it defines the 'soul' of countries elsewhere, they can have just as many, if not more, incorporated cultures, as they do have American.

Entertainment is still a powerful American export though, but the quality of Hollywood output has dropped significantly, as has its appeal. Realistically the games industry is probably more invasive now, but perhaps more culturally ambiguous. Here we spend much more time with programs like X-Factor, Big Brother, Spooks and other BBC and Radio output etc. Shrek and Toy Story look to be the summers up and coming biggies and though we might see some American trends in them, such as perhaps 'The American Dream', which also exists in other countries, and such things as Frontierism, or notions of civilising outbacks and less developed peoples the popularism of those sorts of identities is, i think, less common in the Old World.

I guess the whole point of this is that the 'soul of the world' does not just absorb that which is mass produced and cheap, but also resists some of these other ideas while at the same time opening its arms to ideas and experiences from other places.

The questions would need to be 'what is it to be American? and are we seeing parallelism and co-development/co-evolution in global politics'. If American power has controlled global cultural development in a way more assertive than foreign people simply taking what is cheap/easy/convenient/good for them while ignoring what they don't like then what happens when America is not the superpower? More Chinese food perhaps and Chinese people thinking they are the 'soul of the world'.

(When homogeneity occurs, such as through fashion, entertainment, produce, then does the homogeneity imply a powerful normalisation across cultures, or do people simply start defining themselves using something other than what has been homogenised?)

I must protest: I'm not American! Though I fancy I was in a past life. Now what does that say about my soul?

:)

Dave