Wojtek Sokolowski wrote:
>Good observation, but it makes me wonder what is the cause and what is the
>effect. Is it that people moved to suburbia because they rejected
>cosmopolitanism, or they rejected cosmopolitanism because they moved to
>suburbia? I am inclined to think it is the latter. Aside my obvious
>preference for a materialistic model of behavior (the being determines
>consciousness thing), the flight to suburbia occurred at a high point of
>cosmopolitanism in the popular culture (cf. _Breakfast at Tiffany's_ which
>is explicit embracement of cosmopolitanism and a rejection of the home-grown
>folksiness).
>
But wait the only thing they embraced about cosmoplitanism was the
enhanced consumption patterns. But cosmopolitanism is more than just
about getting Brie at your local supermarket chain; it's precisely about
enjoying a diversity of cultures; it's about wanting to understand and
learn from people who are different from you; it's about being
interested in how diverse cultures evolve when differences are tolerated
rather than repressed or excluded.
> In fact, social
>realism was a truly international style - itself a knock-off of the US
>architecture of the 1920s and a major Russian cultural export to its sphere
>of political influence (cf. this beauty http://www.pkin.pl/ in the middle of
>what before WW2 used to be Warsaw's Jewish district). Furthermore,
>internationalism has always been emphasized in the Soviet media and
>"mass-culture" - foreign coverage was the central feature of evening news,
>representatives of friendly Third World countries frequently appeared on
>television, streets and institutions were named after foreign leaders and
>luminaries (cf. Patrice Lumumba street where my grandparents lived or the JH
>Pestalozzi High School where I got my secondary education).
>
Yes, yes. And it was not an issue of consumption.
> In fact the US
>media are remarkably insular in their scope of coverage and intellectual
>perspective vis a vis the "communist" media I know from the other side of
>the iron curtain.
>
Very true.
Joanna -------------- next part -------------- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: <../attachments/20060408/d3b3bbb1/attachment.htm>