I was just thinking about this the other day. I was teaching a class on speech structure and for some bizarre reason the discussion turned to American culture. A student indicated that she felt her music and fashion tended to reflect the 1990s. Another stated that her music came from the 1980s. And yet another felt that the early 2000s were most of hers stemmed. Strangely enough, not a single one felt that his or her cues came from current ideas.
So I started asking similar questions in most of my classes, and what I started to notice was that very few of them felt that their culture came from current day themes. I started to wonder if perhaps American culture has faded since the early 2000s so that most people tend to be focused on periods of our past and very little on current day thoughts.
Now, before I go on, I should point out that 150 students in a Texas city, although a pretty large city, does not indicate a reflective sample of the entire United States. So perhaps fashion is going strong in some other segment of the American population, and we’re just stunted in this small backwater suburb of Houston, Texas.
But I follow a lot of trends across the greater parts of the country, and I suspect that I might be noticing a trend that other people just don’t seem to be following.
We all like to think that we have our fingers on the cusp of what is going on around us, so much that we might not even realize what all is happening in the greater context of the world within which we live. I think of it as the thought process of the Greek scholars in the early part of the thinking changes at the turn of the century when we went from BC to AD (probably not written on any of the clay tablet calendars of that time, as that type of notification didn’t come until many, many years later) when the Greeks were slowly dissolved into the beginnings of the Roman Empire. Or when the Roman Empire stopped being the change agent of its time and the empire became a lot of broken vassal states that had no reason for existing as a part of the greater good. Or the French monarchy, thinking it a natural state of being within young Europe right before the common people came at it with torches, swords, and eventually, guillotines.
And now, the United States, coming on its 250th year celebration, quite possibly heading towards ultimate unrest, and like the previous examples: collapse.
Many intellectuals have been predicting the eventual demise of this democratic experiment. But many others blissfully go through their daily struggles and enjoyments never suspecting that our civilization might be heading towards collapse. But one of the reasons a civilization tends to head towards collapse is that the people and the thinkers find themselves no longer capable of believing they are living in a stable society. And the reason for that is quite often that we no longer share a similar culture.
I often long to live within a civilization of our past. The 1980s is my time. It’s music, its people, hair styles and even clothing fits on me like a vested, long sleeve flannel shirt over a Van Halen t-shirt and jeans. I lived in the 1980s, and when I’m searching for music, I often find my Sirius XM channel pointed directly at the 1980s pop music channel. I even find myself getting upset when the deejay (who was at one time an MTV Veejay of the time I grew up with music). That’s my time, and I go back to it more than I would like to admit (but just did).
And I’ve started to ask other students, who grew up years after me (I’m almost always the oldest one in the room), what they think constitutes “their” time. And I get all sorts of answers. But rarely do I get a “I think right now is ‘my’ time.
That says something. Really.
Granted, I’m a political scientist first and a communications scientist second. That just means that I think more politically than in a communications’ process. I see the world in a sense of “how does this best serve a specific process or ideology”. If I thought in “communications”, I would be thinking, “how does someone say this to convince the most people” rather than “why do people do what they do.” Having both thought processes serves to first understand them and then figure out how they make that happen going forward through speaking and writing.
So, does America have a current culture? And if so, what is it? I have a good handle on what exists today in a certain area of the world. But how do you feel you exist, communicate and relate to others? Do you go back to a certain time, or do exist in the here and now? And if the latter, what does that look like to you?