Conversation

There will be some charming, schmalzy story about a lifelong farmer in rural Nebraska and his he feels betrayed and how he felt heard by Trump etc. And in several hundred or even thousands of words there will never be an acknowledgment of the (popular) majority of the country.
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This particular aggrieved minority is somehow worthy of radical humanization in American media, achieved via literal erasure of the presence of other people in this country/world in the telling of their story as some sort of national synecdoche. Hallmark channelification 🙄.
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While I’m annoyed by the clumsiness of the narrative wokewashing practiced by Hollywood, with its crippling focus on representation, it does underline the dangers of telling the story of any group as though it were the only group in the country/world.
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“Erasure” as meant by the woke crowd generally refers to explicit obscuring of important roles played in stories by specific people who aren’t chosen for spotlight focus. Like say the black women in Hidden Figures, but this is a slightly different beast.
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This kind of hillbilly-elegy sentimentality that washes out everything that’s “not Krikkit” from a story is a different genre of bullshit. The experience of a farmer in Nebraska cannot be meaningfully interpreted if you pretend the banker or cab-driver in New York doesn’t exist
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It’s fine in fiction. Friends, Seinfeld pretended New York was the whole world and the suburbs and rural America were occasionally played for laughs. There’s a whole bunch of Red America shows that return the favor (Hallmark channel is full of them, plus stuff like Hart of Dixie)
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But telling nonfiction “human interest” stories this way is bad. Yes, insular people everywhere are always going to tell their stories as though they are the only stories ones (or only truly, ineffably human ones). You do not have to pander to that conceit.
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I squarely blame the media for this. This isn’t even hard writing. It’s not investigative journalism. It’s barely a notch above service journalism like travel or restaurant reviews. It’s utterly lazy to default to simple human interest point-of-view-character throughline stories.
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You’re not writing a sitcom or telenovela. You’re not profiling the story of a Truman show type person living in an actual simulated reality bubble. These are functional adults who are aware of the rest of the world and choose to pretend it doesn’t matter.
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If Mr. Nebraska Farmer acts like Chinese people are a faceless Yellow Peril Borg, call him on it. If he acts like a California vegan hippie commune is somehow worth less than his trad Norman Rockwell painting family, challenge that.
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When the prejudices go the other way — a city elite person acting contemptuous of an exurban, small town or rural type — they get called on it, shamed for it, and a parade of politicians rushes to denounce them and extoll the virtues of Real Americans™
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In a way it’s a deep kind of patronization to not hold these self-proclaimed Real Americans™ equally accountable for their prejudice-soaked self-narrativizing the same way demonized urban elites are. They’re not children even if they want to be treated as such.
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On the flip side, actual under-represented minorities have to get less lazy too in telling their stories too, when given the chance. Self-essentializing intersectional tropes are part of the problem, not the solution. You’re a human being, not a baseball card. Act like it.
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When afforded an opportunity to tell your story, tell a universally interesting human story first. Worry about “representing” who you are second. Don’t let the nice-to-have representation and identity affirmation hijack your story and make it tedious. You’re better than Ayn Rand.
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On a related note, it’s telling that watching foreign TV/movies is coded as “elite” in the US, with an exception made for telemundo. Yes, the art-house stuff is affected and elitist, but you now have streaming availability of mediocre-middlebrow TV/movies from around the world.
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If you want to see people very different from you as human, there’s literally nothing stopping you these days. No access problems. Solid subtitled samples of middlebrow equivalents of your local fare from around the world are available on Netflix. It’s not elitism, it’s curiosity
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Just to be clear this is not a problem unique to the US. But the peculiar mix of unusual narrative homogeneity for a country this big and diverse is weird (328m, of which 236m is white. The 92m non-white fraction of this country is bigger than most countries).
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It’s one thing for say South Korea (51m, 99% ethnically Korean, largest minority, Chinese, at 20k) to tell that kind of homogeneous story about itself (it kinda does). It’s quite another for the US (6.5x in size, 30x the diversity) to do so.
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It’s particularly weird for me. Growing up in India, the population was 600-900m when I was growing up (1974-92). Only 2x-3x the size. But literally ~30 mutually unintelligible linguistic regions. They didn’t even all tell the Mahabharata story the same or explain Diwali the same
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Comparing American Christmas to Indian Diwali is revealing. The former is some sort of homogenized Boomer-childhood monoculture compared to Christmas around the world. Diwali *within* India has an off-by-one regional date variation and at least 2 unrelated mythologies.
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India is probably too much of a cultural chaos for its own good, just as Korea is probably way too monocultural, but the US probably needs to 10x the narrative chaos. There’s too little story for this much country.
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Telling only 1 kind of story as the Real American Story™ should count as a weapon of mass destruction in a country this big, and diverse. And not a young country either. 528 years of post-Columbian history is plenty. This country is too old to tell itself kindergarten stories.
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Things that happened after 1492: - Galileo, Shakespeare born 1564, 72y later - Napoleon’s brother Joseph *retired* to New Jersey - The French Revolution was *after* American one Enough with the “young country” excuse. More a country living in its parents basement at age 40
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Though Hollywood’s attempts to increase the narrative bandwidth are often cringe, at least they’re trying. Real America™ actively resists any sort of variation on the official story. A communist party propaganda wing could only dream of engineering this kind of mind-closure.
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