Ineptitude
Oct. 31st, 2004 08:41 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
cosmolinguistIt's odd because British people still write it with the apostrophe, Hallowe'en, which (I think) makes it look so much cooler and is impressive for a country full of people who can't even be bothered to use periods (or full stops, if you like) in abbreviations any more. (And they don't even captialize all the letters of acronyms! So you read the news and thinks What's a Ukip? Well, you do if you're me. But anyway, I digress.)
It's odd that British people write Hallowe'en with an apostrophe, which makes it all cool and quaint and more obviously shows the history of the word, and yet so many of them still have no idea how it works.
I always considered trick-or-treating limited to (a) young children, (b) people who at least try to have costumes, and (c) the night of October 31. No one in Britain thinks this, apparently. They think they should just get candy if they show up at your house and say "trick or treat"! A couple little kids who, at first glance, appeared to be wearing black garbage bags over their clothes said these three new magic words a few times at Andrew and I as we were walking through the city centre. I don't know what the world's coming to these days!
Stealing another country's stupid culture is a thing USians like to do—especially stealing just the payoff, just the candy in this case. We've had a lot of practice. Not only does this mean that we're skilled at it, but it means that I can't imagine why anyone would want anything after it's been put through the cultural wringer of the lowest common denominator of USian culture.
These kids come to the door and say "trick or treat" and I tell them to go away; maybe I should be telling them that they should just buy their own candy instead of buying into this buffoonery. That'd really scare 'em.
It's odd that British people write Hallowe'en with an apostrophe, which makes it all cool and quaint and more obviously shows the history of the word, and yet so many of them still have no idea how it works.
I always considered trick-or-treating limited to (a) young children, (b) people who at least try to have costumes, and (c) the night of October 31. No one in Britain thinks this, apparently. They think they should just get candy if they show up at your house and say "trick or treat"! A couple little kids who, at first glance, appeared to be wearing black garbage bags over their clothes said these three new magic words a few times at Andrew and I as we were walking through the city centre. I don't know what the world's coming to these days!
Stealing another country's stupid culture is a thing USians like to do—especially stealing just the payoff, just the candy in this case. We've had a lot of practice. Not only does this mean that we're skilled at it, but it means that I can't imagine why anyone would want anything after it's been put through the cultural wringer of the lowest common denominator of USian culture.
These kids come to the door and say "trick or treat" and I tell them to go away; maybe I should be telling them that they should just buy their own candy instead of buying into this buffoonery. That'd really scare 'em.
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(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-31 12:57 pm (UTC)I blame this on a lot of factors, from the hard-wired intractability first displayed when colonists revolted against the various Intolerable Acts to that streak of remarkable puritan conservativism to be found even in southern baptists nowadays.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-31 01:03 pm (UTC)(no subject)
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Date: 2004-10-31 01:59 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-31 02:16 pm (UTC)As you point out, though, awareness or whatever I really meant has nothing to do with intelligence, because it seems to be displayed and absent in intelligent and stupid people.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-31 02:35 pm (UTC)Also, I think there's a distinction to be made between appreciating another culture and assimilating that culture. I would have more to say about this if I were awake, I'm sure of it...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-31 01:04 pm (UTC)Rather I think she's referring to the attribute that many USians have, which doesn't seem to be shared by much of the rest of the world, of picking up on a few surface impressions of a culture and creating a junk-culture facsimile - the kind of thing Neal Stephenson talks about in In The Beginning Was The Command Line. Like all the people who celebrate St Patrick's Day and say "I'm Irish" because their great-grandmother once met someone named McGann ;)
Weirdly, the only other country that seems to do this is Japan - and even more weirdly, Americans seem now to be doing their own junk-culture appropriation of Japanese junk-culture appropriations of American junk-culture, so you get millions of American teenagers doing webcomics on keenspace drawn in a manga style, and with characters called Yuko Mitsubishi...
I hope that doesn't sound horribly patronising, towards anyone, because it's not meant to...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-31 01:08 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-31 01:11 pm (UTC)What's interesting to me is how every European I've spoken to wants desperately to tell people from the USA that they aren't Irish, Italian, etc because they've been in the States for three or four generations. Imagine if the Greek colonies, which after all in many cases had no direct contact with their parents states for decades at a time, had taken this tack. 'You're not Greek at all!' Syracuse might have become its own culture instead of remaining Greek even as it became a powerful nation in its own right, and maybe Syracusan culture would have spread unfettered from its Hellenistic parent... hard to say, of course. But I do find it fascinating: being from a family where my grandparents all identified with a european culture or another, I take the inevitable 'You're not *really* X' with a grain of salt. After all, how 'Norman' were the Plantagenets by 1400?
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-31 01:41 pm (UTC)Interestingly, Britain *did* have a period in the late 50s and 1960s of essentially attempting to be the USA, desperately copying American trends in music, film, fashion etc and getting it slightly wrong. Then, of course, many Americans would try to imitate the British imitations, so you'd get bands in Chicago covering the Yardbirds covering Muddy Waters. That sort of thing isn't as prevalent in British culture any more (although in the 1980s a large number of writers, such as Martin Amis and Julian Barnes, tried to use the stylistic tics of the previous generation of American writers, to a simillar though less extreme effect. I suspect that this may have *some* connection, however tenuous, with the 'British invasion' of American comics around the same time.
As for the 'you're not really X' thing, I would argue that the experiences of (say) a third generation immigrant to the US from an Italian background and one from an Irish background are far closer than the experiences of an equivalent Italian and Irish person would be, and far closer to each other than to the people from their respective country of origin. An Italian-American will have far more in common with an Irish-American than with an actual Italian. The Italian-American may well have more in common with someone from Italy than with someone from Ireland, so it can be a useful cultural identifier, and to say they have no connection at all isn't realistic; but to claim that the Italian-American 'is Italian' seems to me to ignore a vast amount of what someone from Italy would think of as making someone Italian. I myself come from a family where, four generations back, the entire family come from Ireland (I believe I could qualify for an Irish passport if I wanted to). And indeed most people in Liverpool, where my family comes from in the subsequent generations, are from Irish immigrant families from roughly between the potato famine and about 1950, the same time-frame as most Irish immigration to the US (if I have my facts right there). None of those people, however, think of themselves as Irish- they think of themselves as Liverpudlian and English - even though Irish culture has had an *enormous* effect on the very unique atmosphere of Liverpool. They 'are' Irish in that they have Irish surnames, drinking habits, religious views, the accent is strongly influenced by the Irish accent, the local food is Irish, and so on, but they are far more English than Irish even so... that's not to say that a USian of Italian/Irish/whatever descent can't refer to themselves as 'an Italian' or as Irish if they so wish, but it seems to me to be putting a minor factor ahead of a major one.
If you're talking to another American, then saying "I'm Irish" might make sense - it gives them an idea of what cultural background you come from. However, when talking to someone from outside the USA, the important cultural background information is "I'm American"...I think that's what it is.
Again, sorry if this is patronising/inaccurate/whatever. It is *VERY* difficult for me to write 'you're different' without the words coming out sounding like 'you're wrong' - however, that's not my intention...
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-31 01:57 pm (UTC)You do go to London from time to time, yes? Between 'The American Cafe' and so on, I'd day the cultural infestation is on in spades. See, what I'm saying is simple: Britain doesn't have to do this stuff, because we do it for you. American cultural imperialism, the far more insidious version of imperialism than naked military aggression and, to my mind, the one that's far more likely to work is in full-swing around the world... ironically, Bush's grandstanding armed fantasy camp may in fact be the counterbalance needed to slow its spread.
As for the 'you're not really X' thing, I would argue that the experiences of (say) a third generation immigrant to the US from an Italian background and one from an Irish background are far closer than the experiences of an equivalent Italian and Irish person would be, and far closer to each other than to the people from their respective country of origin.
Maybe so, but that's not how they perceive themselves: ask any of my Morgan relatives, who are genetically almost all the children and grandchildren of people straight off the boat from Ireland. They fetishize their irish heritage, in a great deal deliberately so under instruction from their grandparents and great-grandparents: they drink Irish beers, they watch the World Cup and root for Ireland... viewed from outside, perhaps it's fair and accurate to dismiss their belief in their own Irishness, but fuck, I didn't see the people of Ireland rejecting John F. Kennedy's claims of Irishness. You can't embrace us as your lost kin only when it's convienient to you: either Americans of Irish, English, French, Italian, etc etc descent are in fact akin to the various peoples of the European nations their ancestors come from, or they are not: and if they are not, then it's time to stop making appeals to our shared origins when it suits you.
In America people tend to use their family origin and the circumstances of their departure from said origin as an identifier, as you suggested: they don't generally think of themselves as Irish before they think of themselves as American. But to tell them, as is often the case, that they're simply not Italian is disingenous and I believe you expressed the reason for that already: they do live in the context of their position in the nation they grew up in - "Italian-American'.
Of course, I'm a mutt, so I can't claim that kind of purity of context.
This is, of course, not aimed directly at you here: but it is a tendency I've encountered both when I actually was in Europe and since returning, and it irks me.
(no subject)
Date: 2004-10-31 02:11 pm (UTC)And anyone who dismisses those people as 'not Italiam' is an idiot - most people who I've seen comment on that are doing it in a more humorous manner. What bemuses people (at least those who don't understand the context in which people mean it) and possibly angers some people (*definitely* not myself) is when people use that as a cultural identifier to non-Americans - like the story the comedian Mark Steel tells of being on a plane next to an American woman who said "That was my first visit to Ireland - I've been looking forward to it all my life, because I'm Irish". In the context of talking to another American about it, that comment would of course make perfect sense, but when spoken to an English person the comment just sounds odd.
Personally, I see the preservation of various aspects of other cultures in the US as an almost wholly positive thing - given the USA's tendency to cultural homogenisation, any little pockets of difference are to be encouraged, and those differences shouldn't be minimised. I just find it amusing when friends of mine who are (both culturally and genetically) far less Irish than I am refer to themselves as Irish, which is something it would never occur to me to do. But it's definitely bemusement, rather than hostility, that it evokes, and if I think about it for half a second it makes sense...
And the Irish may have celebrated Kennedy as Irish, but they never seemed so keen on Reagan, did they? ;)
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Date: 2004-10-31 03:54 pm (UTC)my family's very irish, but we got to avoid that shit by converting to protestantism.
(no subject)
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