 |
|
JimmyCracksCorn
|
|
Macedonia - Sovereign country north of Greece.
Dec 2002
time: 05:33
|
|
Ludd and Che, you need to read up more on your North American History. We have had an elite for a long time, we were not just farmers and bums.
Check out this wikipedia page and start clicking around on the links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_England#History
Edit: And go to the history section.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
chegitz guevara
|
 |
Ft. Lauderdale, FL Communist Party of Apolyton
Jun 2000
time: 00:33
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by JimmyCracksCorn
Ludd and Che, you need to read up more on your North American History. We have had an elite for a long time, we were not just farmers and bums. |
It was a different kind of elite. Our elite was not an aristocracy, but of Americans rising out of the lower classes. As such, they carried their culture with them. The most striking example, of course, would be Andrew Jackson's Inaugeral Ball.
Any elites that managed to stay there for some time began to look for a way to differentiate themselves, and they borrowed a lot of trappings from Europe, but no indigenous elite culture has existed in America. All of our great contributions to world culture have been made from the lower classes.
On top of this, we have no heritage of art sponsprship, where the wealthy would patronize artists. Here, artists had to produce for the market, which means that they had to produce for the lowest common denominator.
I personally don't see much wrong with our culture. If you look, American folk culture is rich and varied and wonderful. It's the crass, consumerist, coporate homogenized culture we're force fed through the tube that's problematic.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
molly bloom
|
 |
Lundenwic
Oct 2001
time: 15:33
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by Agathon
Dear Molly,
I sympathize with your attempt to defend North Americans as cultured people, but I don't think that giving as examples the stars of Star Trek, Battlestar Galactica and Bonanza! is really helping your cause.
|
You just have a chup on your shoulder because people mistake you for a Tasmanian (or should that be an extra head?)
Re: Lorne Greene and Shatner.
Sometimes as with Lorne Greene, it's not what you think you know that matters, it's what you actually know, Mr. Smarty Pants:
http://www.canadianaconnection.com/cca/lornegreen.html
Even Orson Welles appeared in schlock and sherry commercials- it's called paying the bills.
As for Shatner, he also happens to have been an accomplished Shakespearian actor at the theatre in Stratford, Ontario, and has appeared in films such as Roger Corman's portrayal of racist demagoguery, 'The Intruder' in which he acquitted himself admirably.
He can also be an effective comic actor whgen he wants to be.
Let's not forget that Laurence Olivier should have had his acting in 'The Boys From Brazil' and 'The Jazz Singer' declared non-kosher, it was so ripely hammy, and yet could also deliver a fantastic Oedipus Rex and King Lear.
"We have a culture, it's just a lower class culture."
-chegitz guevara
What, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry and William James, the Boston Brahmins and Thomas Jefferson?
Not exactly Rosie the Rivetter stuff there.....
|
|
| |
|
|
|
chegitz guevara
|
|
Ft. Lauderdale, FL Communist Party of Apolyton
Jun 2000
time: 00:33
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by molly bloom
"We have a culture, it's just a lower class culture."
-chegitz guevara
What, like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry and William James, the Boston Brahmins and Thomas Jefferson?
Not exactly Rosie the Rivetter stuff there..... |
You really think they've had a great influence on our national culture? Okay, in certain aspects. Our political culture, which I would argue is better than most of what Europe can claim, owes much to Jefferson. Yeah, we had some upper class writers, and American literature owes a bit to its upper crust, but our two greatest 19th Century writers, Poe and Twain, were both from the lower class. Our greatest 20th Century writers have been lower class.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
molly bloom
|
|
Lundenwic
Oct 2001
time: 15:33
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by Agathon
Sorry Molly, I can only hear the theme from Bonanza! |
Yes, and I bet you hear the WilliamTell Overture and think 'Hi ho Silver, awaaaayyyyyy!!!!!!!!!!!' or 'O, Fortuna' and think, 'uhhmmmm, Old Spice....'
Philistine.
By the way- mourning the passing of a great countryman of yours:
'Robert Burchfield, who has died aged 81, was editor of the huge, four-volume Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary from 1957 to 1986. In that post he received many communications that went beyond outrage to the lunatic, and worse. "You won't know where or when, but you'll be dead," was one such, indicating the feelings that language arouse. In this case, he suspected that the anonymous correspondent was a Middle East resident - Arab or Jew - who took exception to the OED's disinterested record of derogatory usage. '
http://www.guardian.co.uk/obituarie...1255701,00.html
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Comrade Tassadar
|
|
American culture can be nice.
Its just that, most times, it isn't.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Comrade Tassadar
|
|
Which, interestingly enough, is in the United States.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
JimmyCracksCorn
|
|
Macedonia - Sovereign country north of Greece.
Dec 2002
time: 05:33
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by chegitz guevara
You really think they've had a great influence on our national culture? Okay, in certain aspects. Our political culture, which I would argue is better than most of what Europe can claim, owes much to Jefferson. Yeah, we had some upper class writers, and American literature owes a bit to its upper crust, but our two greatest 19th Century writers, Poe and Twain, were both from the lower class. Our greatest 20th Century writers have been lower class. |
Ever been to Boston?
|
|
| |
|
|
|
molly bloom
|
|
Lundenwic
Oct 2001
time: 15:33
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by chegitz guevara
You really think they've had a great influence on our national culture? Okay, in certain aspects. Our political culture, which I would argue is better than most of what Europe can claim, owes much to Jefferson. Yeah, we had some upper class writers, and American literature owes a bit to its upper crust, but our two greatest 19th Century writers, Poe and Twain, were both from the lower class. Our greatest 20th Century writers have been lower class. |
Ohh, come on, Poe wasn't lower class- he'd had an education in Great Britain, certainly something far beyond the reach of the majority of any of the lower classes. That he died destitute and alcoholic isn't a class indicator, just bad judgment or poor moral character on his part.
I'd certainly say that William James had a great influence, on philosophy and culture in general, not just in America. Then there's the Transcendentalists:
http://www.litkicks.com/BeatPages/p...endentalAmerica
Nathaniel Hawthorne isn't generally regarded as being 'working class', nor is Edith Wharton, nor the painter John Singer Sargent.
You are including Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot amongst America's greatest 20th Century writers, then ?
And Gertrude Stein?
Dorothy Parker?
John Updike?
William Burroughs?
William Faulkner?
|
|
| |
|
| |
|
|
|
JimmyCracksCorn
|
|
Macedonia - Sovereign country north of Greece.
Dec 2002
time: 05:33
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by chegitz guevara
You mean that city of working class Irish and Italians? |
Yes, but ever hear of Beacon Hill? The Back Bay?
|
|
| |
|
|
|
JimmyCracksCorn
|
|
Macedonia - Sovereign country north of Greece.
Dec 2002
time: 05:33
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by chegitz guevara
I've heard of the Bay City Rollers. |
That was San Francisco.
But you should know Boston has had a very distinct and influential upper class since the colonial days. Sometimes they are called the Boston Brahmins, some call them "yankees", but they are there are are very upper class. Countless important and influential politicians, writers, scientists, etc have come from there.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
molly bloom
|
|
Lundenwic
Oct 2001
time: 15:33
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by chegitz guevara
You mean that city of working class Irish and Italians? |
Nah. The place that's chocker with the American aristocracy:
"So this is good old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where the Lowells talk only to the Cabots,
And the Cabots talk only to God."
"The term "Boston Brahmins" refers to a class of wealthy, educated, elite members of Boston society in the nineteenth century. Oliver Wendell Holmes coined the term in a novel in 1861, calling Boston's elite families "the Brahmin Caste of New England." The Boston Brahmins have long held the interest of casual and professional historians because of their unique place in nineteenth-century American culture. They were mostly the descendants of Puritans, having made their fortunes as American merchants, and they could not be described as egalitarian. Rather, they were the closest thing the United States has ever had to a true aristocracy.
At Odds with Democracy
In her book Elite Families, Betty G. Farrell writes, "Visiting Boston for the first time in the 1830s, Harriet Martineau noted that it was 'perhaps as aristocratic, vain, and vulgar a city, as described by its own "first people," as any in the world.' What particularly distressed Martineau was the evidence of an aristocracy of wealth amid a new republic, a group whose cultural pretensions and social exclusivity she saw as particularly at odds with the democratic ideals of egalitarianism and inclusive citizenship."
Socially Exclusive
Several factors, besides wealth, made Boston's Brahmins stand out as an aristocracy even from the wealthy of other cities. With waves of immigration to America's cities in the middle of the nineteenth century, the position of the wealthy and elite in every city was threatened. But in New York and Chicago, despite prejudice, the influence of immigrants quickly took root. In Boston, the Brahmins fought fiercely to close immigrants out. While they may have prided themselves on being the champions of abolitionism, they did not actually want black Americans, or any other non-Brahmin group, encroaching on their power or society."
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/murder...p_brahmins.html
|
|
| |
|
|
|
Bereta_Eder
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by JimmyCracksCorn
Inspired by patikis' comments in LeftHand's thread, why do Europeans see North Americans as being cultureless and backwards?
As it regards Americans, people will usually point to current politics as the reason, but this has been going on since this continent was first colonized in the early 17th century.
Whats more, alot of North Americans (especially Canadians) believe this nonsense and think we have nothing to offer as far as culture and tradition, while the opposite is clearly true.
So, Euros et al, Iraq war and GWB aside, why do you think we're all just a bunch of cookie-cutter provincials on this side of the world? And North Americans, why do you believe it?
Discuss. |
Eh? Funny what you wrote... considering I never called you specifically (the french canadian community) cultureless or backwards. I simply stated a fact about your pronunciation. One which you have trouble accepting. That's fine.
Funny that you filled the void with your conceptions about yourself, but they are your conceptions, I didn't say anything of that sort. (of course I believe it and have substantiated it for the US but nevertheless I did not say it in lefty's thread) - we were discussing something completely different.
I view your culture as "hamburger" culture, something not really nurising, certaintly not healthy and definitely not rich but ok for filling your stomach for an hour or two.
But I come from a country where if a song doesn't have a layer of 4 readings it's considered a song for dogs or mindless casanovas.
This is not always a good thing. I laugh in a good way at some of the "carelessness" of the new world and I laugh also in a good way in your little child mentality and naivete.
Plus to say that you're completely cultureless is a minor injustice. You did produce some culture, nothing really noteworthy so far, but you do a good job at filling dirt cheaply the dead hours of TV chanels with your "culture".
Anyway you do an injustice to yourself to compare to someone like me, I'm Greek culture is ingrained in my bones.
You can compare yourself to a dane or someone other in the continent. There are plenty of european countries which have a very minor production of indigenous culture and are in a sad position to feed off your own.
You'd feel more at ease comparing yourselves with them.
Again sorry for making you thinking that in THAT particular thread but I never said anything of that sort there.
|
|
| |
|
|
|
The Emperor Fabulous
|
 |
Apolyton's Resident Actor-in-Training
Aug 1999
time: 00:33
|
|
quote:
Originally posted by JimmyCracksCorn
But you should know Boston has had a very distinct and influential upper class since the colonial days. Sometimes they are called the Boston Brahmins, some call them "yankees", but they are there are are very upper class. Countless important and influential politicians, writers, scientists, etc have come from there. |
pssst...You really shouldn't use the word "yankee" in correlation with the city of Boston...
All Baseball talk aside, there is a great deal of American culture. As far as Boston goes, it has often been the upper class that has had influence, from Adams to Kennedy to Kerry. There have, however, been those from the lower class in Boston and the area who have done great things to contribute to American culture, including Poe, Thoreau, Dickinson, Kerouac, Frost, and even Aerosmith.
|
|
| |
|
| |
All times are GMT. The time now is 05:33.
Apolyton Time is 00:33. |
top of page
|
| archivepost |
|
Forum Rules:
You may not post new threads
You may not post replies
You may not post attachments
You may not edit your posts
|
HTML code is ON
vB code is ON
Smilies are ON
[IMG] code is ON
|
|
|
|
|
|
24-07-2004 07:48
Attachment: 
@ Ted.
|
