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
-
-
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
Show this thread -
Haha ofc Sarah’s doing a proper teardown of the article in subtweeting https://twitter.com/SarahTaber_bww/status/1323297129830469638 …
This Tweet is unavailable.Show this thread -
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).
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread -
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
Show this thread -
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.
Show this thread
End of conversation
New conversation -
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.