Why is there a general sneering going on east to west?

[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.

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.

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by Agathon
I don't think that there is a major difference in the percentage of people who engage in cultural activities as opposed to mass market consumer crap (although it's not an exclusive distinction).

What is different is that in European countries and to a lesser extent in other non-American English speaking countries there is state funded public broadcasting and an increased role for the state in arts funding.

While, the difference is somewhat offset by the American tradition of philanthropy, things that aren't mass market consumer culture have a harder time being visible. If you watch PBS, there is all sorts of good stuff on (and some lame Britcoms), it's just that elsewhere that stuff often gets played on the state owned networks (although not as much as it used to).

Very true.

Accessibility and visibility play a big part in it.

PBS OWNZ

[JimmyCracksCorn]

Originally posted by Ted Striker


Very true.

Accessibility and visibility play a big part in it.

PBS OWNZ

And don't forget NPR, awesome radio station.

[chequita guevara]

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]

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.....

[Ted Striker]

Originally posted by JimmyCracksCorn


And don't forget NPR, awesome radio station.

Vanessa Williams (I'd hit it ) is singing some pops stuff tonight on public tv.

[Ted Striker]

Shatner

[Agathon]

Sorry Molly, I can only hear the theme from Bonanza!

[Ted Striker]

Ted slips a babe pic in under the radar

[chequita guevara]

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]

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/obituaries/story/0,3604,1255701,00.html

[Nubclear]

American culture can be nice.
Its just that, most times, it isn't.

[Ted Striker]

Yeah but you live in utah

[Nubclear]

Which, interestingly enough, is in the United States.

[Agathon]

@ Ted.

@ the death threat.