AMERICANS love culture, celebrate culture, lavishly endow culture. But paradoxically no one trivialises culture better than they do. Blue jeans, Coke, Hollywood are what constitute American culture in the minds of millions worldwide. In Fifties America it was also about Senator McCarthy who in those Cold War days presided over Salem-style political, cultural witch-hunts that saw innumerable political, cultural luminaries subjected to Kafkaesque interrogations; some like British expat Charlie Chaplin were so bitter they vowed never to return to the country. To the political establishment running a young resurgent country flushed with the triumph of a war won, a primacy established, an economy consolidated, Reds lurked everywhere. Jingoism reigned supreme. Communism was the bugbear that would undermine America. There was no such thing as another point of view. Only an American point of view.
To propagate which America devoted its energies through the Sixties. Communism was to be resisted with a cultural counterpoise. Tough. The Russians had vintage, the Bolshoi, Kirov. America had to originate and nurture institutions that would yield cultural/political dividend. Carnegie Hall, Lincoln Plaza, art endowments to universities, the carefully mimicked classical styles embraced in institutional interiors and facades, the great museums were as much reflection of expat nostalgia and longing for the continental homes they'd left behind as they were of a steely ambition to rival Russia in its accomplishments: architectural, cultural.
Culture in Sixties America, then, was commodity that gave it strategic psychological purchase when exported to East Europe, Russia. On homeground it became the insignia of national pride for a country that hankered for its own cultural identity, icons. Over ensuing decades American dance companies—Martha Graham, Merc Cunningham, George Balanchine—toured the globe capturing the hearts, minds and collective imaginations of Europe, Russia. Americans learnt to process, package, commodify culture early. Perforce.
Packaging is the skill that has proved to be both America's salvation as well as its nemesis. Salvation in as much as it gave them cultural tangibles: Broadway, the Hollywood movie, exportable American values like a wholesome shiningness, a knowingness of right from wrong that was both message and meat of its "westerns". America of the good life, of brave, upright men and toiling bright-cheeked women is what the moving image beamed out to the world as Real America. Fashioning exportable cardboard 'n paste images is one thing. Believing in them quite another.
Which is where America met its nemesis. By numbing belief in its own vacuity. A nation with no history, made a virtue of cultural bankruptcy by celebrating it. You find the average American movie, musical, cultural emblem/icon, whether Indiana Jones, Madonna, Warhol, Campbell, flat, unidimensional, tinselly? Good. They were never intended to be anything else. Stance, not substance, low, not high art, is what America embraced as its lot, projected as its strength, brainwashed itself into believing in as quintessential Americana. It would have remained a national tragedy had the American hype juggernaut not gone into international overdrive. America not only celebrated vacuity. It made it the currency of the world.
But America escaped into its lessness, found both license and leeway in it. License to assume stances for one. Stances allow for the binary oppositions America finds easy to digest: good/bad, black/white, right/wrong, capitalist/ communist, freemarket/controlled economy, Muslim/Christian, America/Cuba. Never a textured otherness, never a shade, a nuance, a shred of doubt. Which is the context in which one must examine the American penchant for self-dissection, onion paring, "sorting" their feelings. "Flatness" is what America is at home with. In its pulp fiction, pulp movie, pulp chewing-gum-for-the-mind music, its manic mindlessness whose supreme exemplar is their latest multimillion dollar offering at the altar of inanity: Godzilla. Clarion call promo line: Size Does Matter. Sure sums up the American malaise. In art, literature, theatre, music only size, scale, sweep matters. Content, who? Subtext, what?
Ousiders see virtue in America's extreme stances: America the Good vs Russia the Evil, America the Defender of the Western World against the Iraqi Attila and now America, the Brightest Starr on the Moral Firmament. For even as America assumes, usurps, affects its own stances, it leaves you free to retain your own. America's is a sheltering sky. No coincidence then that even as America embraces its lowbrowedness it welcomes and is home to the best and brightest from all over the world. So much high-mindedness, so much run-of-the-mill-ness. So much high art coexisting with so much low art. Within that matrix somewhere lies the America we will never know. Maybe Real America only exists in the movies!
