The Politics of Culture

Another thing people
really need to understand
is that the New Fade
works in terms of culture, too.

Countries were originally
built around the idea
that culture was mainly
what a country was built around.

That simply isn't the case anymore.

How many times does America
have to fight a war over this
for people to realize that?

Culture no more identifies
a country in the 21st century
than does the concept
of a breakdown for a music group
assumed to have become a
permanent part of the "mainstream."

Swimming in the same direction
doesn't make everyone the same.

You can't win or lose "culture"
by joining a new community.

You can't define "culture"
by the same concepts
that define a religion,
a family, an ideology.

Culture is now only
a means to define
what the majority
of a people are doing.

Heck, that's probably
what it always was.

But now we seem
all the more concerned
with "losing" it,
as if somehow culture
is immune from the same
basic laws of constant
permutation, of evolution,
as everything else in nature.

Doesn't it seem silly now?

I have a hard time
when supposedly learned people
discuss this topic
and think they're right
when they speak of
doom and gloom,
of the children of men
destined for doom
and to live in gloom
because progress
loosens borders
and causes problems,
as if all opinions
are to be taken as fact
and connections that
can be made are to
be made as fact.

You cannot come to the end
of anything, you cannot
split every quark to
nothingness, you cannot
find the end of a rainbow
with a pot of gold beneath it,
because that, folks, was only
ever something culture created.

I am living in a world
that has been changing
around me. I am only
near 30 years of age,
but already some of the basic
terms of my youth I wonder
to see still exist,
as if a new language
sprouts up around me,
constantly, flows forward,
bursts free without
my permission.

Do children still see
rainbows with the luck
of the Irish? Hell,
I already know that a
new Red Sox Nation exists
that does not need
a curse of the Bambino,
that someone watching
Lost today
will never wonder
what kind of show
it will be (it
is every show),
that a theory of Relativity
is more relevant to me now
than Einstein himself.

Culture is a fickle -
hammer & sickle -
and quaint creation,
nothing more.

It defines me
as much as
I define it,

and only as useful as that.