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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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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End of conversation
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This country was founded as a liberal experiment, putting many of the ideas of the Enlightenment into practical form, if utterly imperfectly. These blood-and-soil Midwestern as%holes spit on that legacy with everything they believe. They are no more American than anyone else.
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America has "narrative homogeneity" because it still has a legacy 20th century media/information apparatus that was specifically created for that purpose; the only thing that changes is the narrative itself
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The reason it appears schizophrenic is because the newer, self-aggrandizing narrative of Blue America thought it could finally displace and bury the old self-aggrandizing narrative 20th century America told about itself, which later got coded as "Red".
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