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Author Topic: In the Shadow of America  (Read 11863 times)

TheRaginPagan

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Re: In the Shadow of America...
« Reply #60 on: August 24, 2016, 12:06:20 am »
Quote from: Jabberwocky;195305
And those are only those off the top of my head. I'm sure as a local you could name many more.


Aye, they're not completely terrible. Some have never struck my fancy because I knew there was no possible way they could be true (Pecos Bill). Interestingly enough, though, the Jersey Devil - from what I've dug up - predates the "born of the devil" bogga-booga, and actually seems to be an Iroquois tale of a dragon or drake.

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But you are reminding me somewhat of those pagans I've met over here who claim Britain has no interesting folklore.  It has loads. They just don't work with it. Sometimes because it doesn't call to them, which is fair enough. Sometimes because it doesn't feel sexy and exotic, which is a silly reason.

 
I think, with America, I fall into the group of that it doesn't call to me. I grew up kind-of hearing them all, but I never took interest. It wasn't until I lived in Germany that I really took an interest in folklore, because it just seemed so much more... real.

Hearing Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan, it just seemed like America was trying too hard, making shit up to force cultural folklore on us. There was no lesson, just imposing "greatness." But then stories like some of the Grimm tales? Those - at least to my way of looking at them - were more prone to lessons. There was more to them than stories of picky princesses and grandmother-eating wolves.

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Re: In the Shadow of America...
« Reply #61 on: August 24, 2016, 09:09:58 am »
Quote from: TheRaginPagan;195345

Hearing Pecos Bill and Paul Bunyan, it just seemed like America was trying too hard, making shit up to force cultural folklore on us.

I've actually worked with Paul Bunyan, as part of my #localcultus project. There's a life size (ha) statue of him that I pass on my way to work most days.

I mostly keep my hands in traditions where honoring cultural heroes and ancestors (or even sometimes deifying them) is already part of the "process" but historicity is less of an issue to me than whether it works. I mean it's not like we read Grimm because we think Snow White was a historical princess. XD

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Tom

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Re: In the Shadow of America...
« Reply #62 on: August 28, 2016, 05:27:03 pm »
Quote from: TheRaginPagan;195311
"White culture," on the other hand, has progressively been America's "shameful" past, which we seem adamant to forget. I could say that it was the "Rebel Flag" of Southern culture... Oh, but that was deemed racist and quickly ostracized from our culture. What about the "Don't Tread On Me" flag, that tells the story of the founders of our nation? Nevermind, that's under assault too.

This, while it may seem like pure pedantic bitching, lends heavily to the problem; how can "white people" (a term I still find devoid of culture and meaningless) celebrate their culture when it's denied them by what's considered socially just?

 
Honestly, this Northerner who has a union soldier as an ancestor does not consider flags of the Confederacy to be part of their culture and heritage and that's because culture in the US is regional. My culture is not Southern culture, but instead is more closely related to the Midwest and the Northeast. In America, culture is also highly tied not only to region, but also to what economic class you're part of as well as your generation and weirdly enough, also what interests you cultivate, hence the idea of geek culture.

In fact, it is a fallacy that Nationalist organizations in general like to tout that there is such a thing as a monolithic culture that encompasses an entire nation. The fact that Nationalist organizations will tout a Confederate flag as part of "white culture" even though it only specifically applies in a historic sense to those who chose to leave the USA to form their own country, should tell you that it is actually a fiction they are touting.

This is a tactic that's been used since the 18th century throughout Europe to preserve the idea of the nation state or to unify smaller city-states into a larger entity such as Germany and Italy. Bavarian culture is not the same as Prussian culture for example, but a lot of people got the idea that promoting the idea of a general "German" culture was the right thing to do and created mythology based on that idea. And so many people from the outside tend to buy that because it's easier to assign one culture to one country. Heck, a person who grew up in West Germany would have come from a different culture than someone who grew up in East Germany if you want a different example.

Nationalism works on the idea that people can be homogenized into different national groups and that they can erase regional cultures and prevent cultural mixing from people they consider undesirable. And honestly that is why this philosophy is such a dangerous one.

As for the tread on me flag getting bad press, I would place the blame on the group that chose to use it to promote what they wrongly believed the founders to have promoted (they seem to believe that the founders were against all taxes whatsoever, not just taxes that were taken from them and not given back to the community, which was what the British were doing).

GrayEyes

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Re: In the Shadow of America...
« Reply #63 on: September 03, 2016, 08:10:01 pm »
Quote from: TheRaginPagan;195283


Even cultural festivals that are from a "white" (please, everyone, note the quotation marks to denote generalization for sake of argument) nation aren't left alone. St. Patrick's Day, or as it's becoming to be know "Irish Day" celebrates "[Irish-American] heritage". Only, it doesn't really. It celebrates beer, green, "leprechauns" and clovers. It's a day where "Everyone is Irish."



Not to be a dick, but this is absolutely untrue.

I am Irish-American and I grew up as an Irish American with Irish-American culture - that was as distinct and real as friends and family who were African-American, Armenian-American, Turkish-American, German-American, and Chinese-American. I was raised with Irish-American traditions around St. Patrick's Day and when I got to college, away from what amounts to a cultural enclave, I was horrified by how people celebrated.

Additionally, the admonishments about "white culture" are not denying people their heritage. The same movement is also calling for the decolonization of white culture, which, if you will allow me to grossly simplify a complicated concept, is a call for the white folks to reconnect with our roots. The idea, simply, is that "white culture" is a monolithic blank that also separates us from our heritages, our people, and our cultural practices, which we can take back.

GrayEyes

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Re: In the Shadow of America
« Reply #64 on: September 03, 2016, 08:59:51 pm »
Quote from: Materialist;186645

Sometime, in this little over a decade, I realized that this was one of the items of white privilege: only a people who had not been subjected to ethnocide could be preoccupied with questions like these; and further, a people who had not been disenfranchised by laws written by European colonists and their descendants.


 
Although, to clarify my previous comment, are you actually suggesting that no peoples who fall under the nebulous category of "white" have ever experienced a genocide - or that such a genocide might not be relational to migration to another area, such as America?

Because I would LOVE to have a historical explanation for the Irish diaspora, the Armenian genocide, and the Holocaust that don't involve ethnocides of white peoples. (Ethnic white genocides are not limited to these three.)

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