But, maybe the loss of wasp(or mainstream white gentile)culture had to do with this bland, colorless, and 'organization man' ideal. Americanism for conservatives became white bread and milk. It made them complacent, conformist, and consensus-oriented. White conservatives came to abhor crisis, and thus lost the wit and will to creatively take on the challenges of counter-culture and the culture war. They preferred to make concession after concession to agitators in order maintain some semblance order than fight it out. Since they didn't have the guts to fight for their whole race, they withdrew into their private worlds and chose to protect/preserve their own privileges at all costs--even when it meant betraying less fortunate whites. At most, they threw a few bones of social values--pro-life rhetoric and prayer in school--to the poorer or less well-educated conservatives in order to garner votes.
Some of us may think that the the 'golden age' of the 50s and early 60s was representative of the glory of white mainstream dominance, but maybe it was an exceptional latter-day development that only served to undermine the instinctive will and wit to survive and win.
Consider just the arts. The great writers and other creative people among white gentiles had mostly been mavericks, rebels, or strong individualists. Or, they experienced the world from a perspective of crisis. Why did the SOUTH create so many important writers like Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor? Southern whites were faced with grave social, cultural, and spiritual crisis. Old South was rotting and new forms was growing on the decay like mushrooms. Notice that Swedish-Americans up in the North have been far less interesting. Generally, the great white artists were obsessive men who didn't fit in or had strong personalities: F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway, John Ford and Howard Hawks. Though there was the ideal of middle class comfort/stability throughout American history, the lives of most Americans--even whites--were filled with social drama, crisis, anxiety, challenges, etc. It was only in the postwar era that large numbers of white Americans realized the 'American Dream' and found sufficient comfort and privilege(often in the idyllic suburbs). This was all very nice in many ways, but it was a destroyer of the cowboy or the wildman spirit. (Though college boys often get wild, it's about gong along than expressing one's true identity). People who become complacent and entitled lose their edge. They either become happy in a whitebread dull way(if simple-minded or dumb) or grow neurotic due to lack of stimuli(if complex or intelligent). Or, they go looking for 'authenticity' in other cultures, as in 'stuff white people like'. The pervasiveness of the 'American Dream' washed white people of their cultural pungency with the All-American soap. Whites became scrubbed clean and polished into golden boys, but they lost the minerals necessary for creative alchemy.
Cultural ferment tends to dip without crisis. If William Faulkner or Martin Scorsese had been raised in white suburbia, he might have been just another 'organizational man'. Look at Germany in the late 19th and early part of 20th century. It was creative and interesting in many cultural fields. After WWII, Germans just wanted to be 'good' and 'normal', and they've been boring ever since. Look at Japan from the late 19th century to the late 60s. Faced with all sorts of challenges and tranformations, Japanese were forced to think, see, and grapple with things anew. Japanese culture became very interesting. By around 1970, Japan had stabilized into a middle class nation where most people could have a good steady job and stability. Japanese become white bread, or yellow cake. They've been dull ever since.
No comments:
Post a Comment