[lbo-talk] Re: stupid americans?

[Carl Remick]

>From: Jon Johanning <jjohanning at igc.org>
>
>On Sep 26, 2004, at 2:34 PM, Carl Remick wrote:
>
>>There are still regional differences in the US, but they are diminishing 
>>and I think outsiders are correct in seeing the US as a place of fairly 
>>uniform degenerate culture.  The stupefying commercialism that binds 
>>America together as a nation is more powerful than any dwindling traces of 
>>regional tradition.
>
>That's your perception; I have a different one. I see plenty of diversity 
>in the people I brush shoulders with, the clothes they wear, the food they 
>eat, and (I'm assuming, if I could read their minds) the ideas in their 
>heads within one square mile of me, let alone the whole country.
>
>What I'm questioning is the inference: everywhere you go you see McDonald's 
>Golden Arches; therefore, everyone is alike. Where is the evidence 
>supporting it? Go into any McDonald's and actually spend some time 
>conversing with the people there, and I'll bet you would be surprised by 
>how individualistic they are.
>
>It's fascinating to me, by the way, that so many leftists are captured by 
>this ideological concept that their fellow Americans are soulless, 
>mass-produced robots whose minds have been totally rotted by 
>"commercialism." Have they ever actually talked to these people they 
>dismiss so glibly? I think this idea is mostly a way leftists rationalize 
>the lack of success they have had in persuading ordinary working Americans 
>of their ideas. The argument seems to be: "My radical views are obviously 
>the right ones for working class people to have, but hardly any of them 
>agree with me. So it must be because they don't have any brains; it can't 
>possibly be because there's anything wrong with my views, or the way I am 
>presenting them."

You sure took your Walt Whitman pills this morning -- The People, ya gotta 
love 'em!  But my point is not that working-class USers in particular are 
dolts; Americans of *all* classes float around in an amniotic sac of 
complacency and ignorance.  This is not new (see Dickens' _American Notes_, 
e.g.), but it has gotten much, much, much worse during the reign of 
Chimpanzee in Chief GWB.

Carl