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Weird how it never struck me until seeing those Canada tweets I just RTed just how strikingly centralized the American cultural imagination is. Even within the majority White+Christian, “All-American” seems to pick out a single archetype (small town football star?) not a spread
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It’s particularly surprising because I grew up in a country that was (at the time) strongly shaped by an actual, rather than theoretical spirit of e pluribus unum. This sort of cheesy essentialist imagery was common in ‘national integration’ public service messaging.
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You can see troubling signs in India now of a shift from a more spectrum-like sense of national identity like Canada to a more US-like centralizing one.
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Depends on where you are. The Northwest United States has very different demographics than the Southeast for example. The amount of different ethnicities and different combinations of people is staggering in the PNW. But you could argue because it's so close to Canada...
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Canada is fundamentally the contrarian America - whatever stance America takes, we take the opposite to see if it goes somewhere interesting. It started with the loyalists federating with the french colonists, and continues with our inexplicable pride in nationalized health care.
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Note that narrative is changing with lots of cultural wars over how / when / to what new narrative... there is a deep truth methinks though that the answer will not come from a centralized narrative.