Myth of America

Where we examine the legends, bullshit, and ideas that brought us to today. #BlackLivesMatter

[mythofamerica]

How do we allow the current movement for police accountability, justice, peace, and black lives to impact and change us RATHER than tone-policing and criticizing the movement? We, as a church and community of faith, can be enriched by this movement. It is calling us to a better way. It is calling is to remember the deeper values of what it means to have faith in community.

[mythofamerica]

Just listen...

#SayHerName

#SayHisName

[mythofamerica]

The Myth of Guns in America or Chekhov's Gun.

One of the biggest, and strangest, myths of America is the myth of the gun. We hope to find strength, not in ourselves but in a piece of metal in our hands.

Anton Checkhov said that "...if you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there."

And the gun was a part of America's first chapter. It has been repeatedly fired over and over again. What current gun advocates  forget is the Chekhov's theorem. I argue that it is not just a dramatic device, about plays and theater, but proving itself true to politics, people, and violence.

If we demand to have a gun in our house, in our nation, and in our hands we must know that it will go off. Guns are not static objects, they are made to fire.

Nothing proves this like This American Life's recent episodes about Harper High School. Listen here. 

Harper High School is an inner-city school where TAL reporters, "spent five months at Harper High School in Chicago, where last year alone 29 current and recent students were shot."

The school is a petri dish where the American Chekhov gun has gone off over and over again, killing children.

Gun advocates call out over and over for their constitutional rights for ownership but what about the constitutional rights of children who are shot? What about the rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness?  The constitution does not mean one right over others. It is not a document that we take part of, we must take it all. (Not to mention the constitution was written in a entirely different time where assault rifles, armor piercing bullets did not exist,  and the entire structure/geography of the nation was different).

We are demanding a gun be present but are not willing to admit that it must, and will, go off. Who will it hit?

[mythofamerica]

Jazz On A Summer's Day

I randomly picked to watch this film a year or so ago, it was on Netflix and I wanted some good jazz in the background while I puttered around the house. At first, I just listened to it in the background but soon I got sucked in. Yes, it is mostly music. There is no plot, no narrative. The film is a documentary, almost cinema verite, that chronicles the 1950 Newport Jazz Festival. 

But the film, by no means, is not just soulless cataloguing of an event. It is an engaging portrait, at times realistic and at times impressionistic, that captures the feel, the emotion, the heat of the summer, the cool of the evening, the blue notes, the hot jazz, the sweet sounds of scat vocals, the late night jam sessions, the zeitgeist of the time, and the joy of jazz on a summer's day. 

1958 was a glorious time for jazz. Some early innovators still lived and pushed the form, while new emergences popped up and made new sounds. Louis Armstrong performs "Up A Lazy River", reminding us of the down south origins of the blues and jazz forms. Chuck Berry prophesies the rise of rock and roll, taking the blues to electric frontiers. Thelonius Monk sits and creates abstract tones, the avant garde future and crazy cousin in one form. 

Jazz, in all its forms, is represented. The cool jazz, the hot jazz, and the pop jazz. 

The music is a huge focus but the cinematography is the real stand out. Subtle shots of fans singing along, tapping their toes, or the amazing scene of the house party with random musicians off the stage but equally a part, capture the frenetic and the relaxed. Never have I seen a film communicate such emotion through the visual medium. Never has something felt so romantic, transporting the viewer back in time to a moment when the future and the present were so wrapped up together. 

It never feels old. It never feels dated. It always, like jazz, whispers/shouts/sings in your ears and eyes. 

[youmightfindyourself]

By: Teresa Watanabe LA Times, February 26, 2013

African American public school students in Los Angeles County demonstrate significant learning gaps by second grade; those gaps widen with age and lead to the highest school dropout rate among all races, according to a report released Monday.

Black students are far less likely to take the rigorous college preparatory classes required for admission to California universities and miss more school days because of suspensions than their white counterparts, according to the study by The Education Trust-West, an Oakland-based nonprofit advocacy group.

Only one of every 20 African American kindergartners will graduate from a four-year California university if current trends continue, according to the report, which compiled data on academic achievement, suspensions and the psychological conditions of 135,000 black students in 81 public school districts in L.A. County.

“What we have in this state for African American students is a school-to-prison pipeline, where they are more likely to go to prison than college,” said Arun Ramanathan, the group’s executive director. “We need to forcibly intervene as a California community to prevent this from continuing.”

But how to make lasting progress against problems that have been debated for decades drew no easy answers at a community meeting Monday at the California Community Foundation, which funded the study.

Franklin Gilliam Jr., a UCLA professor of public policy and political science, said that early childhood support was “the single most important thing you can do” to give black children a solid start.

The report, for instance, cited research findings by the Rand Corp. and Children Now that found African American toddlers were less likely than their white peers to have books at home or be read to everyday. The report also cited 2004 Rand findings that only 13% of black children attended preschools with teachers who have degrees in early childhood education, compared to about 41% for whites and Asians.

Nearly 150,000 children under age 6 are on county waiting lists for child care, according to Children Now, a nonprofit advocacy group. And $1.2 billion in cuts to state funding for those services since 2008-09 budget year has reduced the number of child care spots by 110,000, according to Sydney Kamlager, district deputy director for Assemblywoman Holly J. Mitchell (D-Culver City).

Marqueece Harris-Dawson, president of the nonprofit Community Coalition, was a bit more upbeat, saying that although only 20% of African American students in L.A. County take college prep courses, that percentage has nearly tripled in the last decade.

He said the federal government’s move to provide student-achievement data by race in 2001 was a key factor in raising public awareness about the needs of African American students. Last year, a state Assembly committee held hearings on minority males and the academic, economic and health challenges they face.

“As a rule, things get better when people are willing to fight over it,” he said.

He added that his organization would continue to push for lower class sizes, courses linked to careers, better college preparation and more effective discipline policies.

Thomas Saenz, president of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund, added that racial profiling in tracking students into low-level classes and other examples of “unconscious bias” bedevil both Latinos and African Americans, underscoring the need for the communities to work together. He also urged protests against moves to eliminate race-based data collection.

The report found that African American students are doing well in some school districts, particularly those with higher concentrations of other races. In the diverse Culver City Unified School District, more than two-thirds of African Americans are at grade level in reading and math, and 88% graduate. Officials there credited more counseling support, a culture of high expectations and targeted actions to support African American students, such as focus groups and teacher training on diversity.

The best performance was in such Westside districts as Wiseburn Elementary and Palos Verdes Peninsula Unified. In Palos Verdes, where African Americans make up 3% of the 11,840 students, 100% graduate, 60% complete the college-prep course work and three-fourths are at grade level in reading and math.

Those bright spots, however, are exceptions in an overall troubling picture. School districts in the north, such as Antelope Valley Union High, and the south, such as Lynwood Unified, showed particularly low levels of achievement.

In Los Angeles Unified, about four in 10 African American students perform at grade level in reading and math, two-thirds graduate and one-third complete college-prep courses.

“Whatever adjective is worse than bad, this is it,” Gilliam said about the plight of black students. “We’re concluding, either explicitly or implicitly, that these are throwaway kids.”

[mythofamerica]

The Roots: America's Band

By Patrice Evans on December 14, 2011 5:15 PM ET Christopher Polk/Getty Images

OK, Grantlanders. Pop quiz!

But with a twist: We’ll provide the multiple choice answers (a la Jeopardy!) and your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out the correct question.

Looks like this:

a. The Beatles b. The Beach Boys c. Nirvana d. Coldplay e. The Rolling Stones f. Jeez, are our music sensibilities still colonized by the Brits? g. The Roots

The answer is: “g. The Roots.”

WHAT IS OUR QUESTION?

[tune of the Grantland Theme Song plays in background]

OK. Sorry, I forgot to mention the timer, but: Time’s up!

The question is — Questlove drum roll, wait for it — Who is America’s Band???

Hmm, I feel a bit deflated. Is that not a sexy enough question? Maybe: Who is most likely to influence the next presidential vote? Or: Who is least likely to follow Lindsay Lohan in being featured nude on the pages of Playboy?

Look, never mind nude Lindsay Lohan! The point for me is that I’m an American. And dadgummit, I want to know which band is representing me as an American in 2011. And surfing on the wave of critical acclaim for their latest album Undun, I think it’s high time to big up The Roots as “America’s Band.”

I know what you’re thinking. Actually, I have no idea. But among the infinitude of thoughts might be the stray notion that technically, yes, there’s no such thing as “America’s Band.” You’ve Googled, and there’s no reality show. No Twitter account. No Tumblr. The Facebook page doesn’t exist. Nada, zero, zilch. Only a 404 error message and you have no idea what to click on.

It’s also possible, being that your brain is such a dominant beast of thinkerly thinking, that in close proximity to the previous brain flash you’re now wondering how, in a variety of ways, this Q&A lacks logical consistency. In search of America’s band we have old bands, new bands, non-American bands? Also missing are all the rest of the bands? What are the rules? I don’t know the rules! I only know the answers. But in search of the best question, here’s four primary lines of argument to focus on:

The Generational Argument: This allows us to scratch off The Beatles, The Beach Boys, The Rolling Stones, etc. and move on with our lives!

The Genre Argument: Rock music is no longer the centerpiece of the music conversation. This is in some ways an old, outdated argument, but then again there’s the recent GQ’s “Gods of Rock” co-opting Wayne, Em, Badu, and of course there’s the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame as one of our most distinguished musical honors. That’s racist! (Just kidding.) This argument doesn’t scratch any band off the list, but it does mute the immediate reflex to say “Nirvana!” or “Radiohead!” (Brits in our head, man.)

The Indisputable Argument: The Roots are the only indisputable “best band” in an influential genre of music. Even if rock were still the soundtrack to everything American (sorry, Bruce!), we would still have to argue over The Black Keys vs. Foo Fighters vs. St. Vincent vs. The National, etc. (tie between Black Keys and St. Vincent, btw). This goes for country music, which I’m less familiar with so I won’t embarrass myself. But I am familiar with the fact that if someone is comfortable with a hip-hop band being representative, then The Roots are the only choice to be that band. They are also the only band that can cross platforms to respectfully cover popular songs from other genres, while most rock or country bands will strain to cover Kanye or Jay-Z or Drake with the same sincerity.

The 2011 America Argument: The Roots represent “how we live now.” When The Roots joined Fallon for Late Night, folks still used the term “sellout.” Now that’s a quaint, old-fogey notion from a time when your career represented “you” as a person. Now your Facebook page or Twitter feed does the selling out, and every job is just another “gig,” whether you’re a blogger, rapper, or financial consultant to the subhuman demons on Wall Street. Throw in Quest’s fluency with Twitterese, and generally avid use of social media (even breaking some Occupy Wall Street news), and add a pinch of their newfound political prankishness and you have a band that represents America in a way that runs deeper than sales and digital downloads.

Heretoforewith: I pledge allegiance to The Roots of the United States of America, and to the music for which they stand, one nation, indivisible, with liberty and justice and hot beats and rhymes for all. Amen!

Patrice Evans is a Grantland staff writer. Check out his (excellent) book Negropedia: The Assimilated Negro's Crash Course on the Modern Black Experience.

From: Grantland.

[fictionalanimal-deactivated2026]

[mythofamerica]

My friends and I each shared our top 20 songs. This is a first attempt, though its in flux and shifting.

[mythofamerica]

I, Too, Sing America

 by Langston Hughes

I, too, sing America. I am the darker brother. They send me to eat in the kitchen When company comes, But I laugh, And eat well, And grow strong. Tomorrow, I'll be at the table When company comes. Nobody'll dare Say to me, "Eat in the kitchen," Then. Besides, They'll see how beautiful I am And be ashamed— I, too, am America. I keep coming back to Langston Hughes. This poem, in response to Walt Whitman's masterpiece, "I Hear America Singing," is shorter but holds its own. It may be stronger, though I may argue with myself, but it is powerful. It portrays the overlooked, the oppressed, sitting in a kitchen. This human, in the servant's quarters, is possibly more America than those in the front room. Hughes calls out "I, too, am America" but it is entirely that this speaker would be more correct to say, "I am America."

[mythofamerica]

Human atoms.

“In that high place in the darkness the two oddly sensitive human atoms held each other tightly and waited. In the mind of each was the same thought. "I have come to this lonely place and here is this other," was the substance of the thing felt.” ― Sherwood Anderson, Winesburg, Ohio

Sherwood is one of my favorite writers. His simple and focused stories transport the reader deep into the personal and haunting presence of haunting people. While in no means derivative of each other, John Steinbeck and Sherwood (who came before Steinbeck) seem to echo each other.

The above quote reminds me so deeply of many pieces of Steinbeck. Two human atoms pulled together and their presence together is everything. They are merely together and that is enough. That is the essence of community. No grand gestures but the simple presence, the simple act of being. Read Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio for this. Read Steinbeck's The Wayward Bus, East of Eden, Grapes of Wrath etc. etc.

I am also reminded of a recent episode of my favorite podcast, The Memory Palace. In that episode we learn of two lives revolving around the events of the infamous Donner Party. One is the supposed cannibal, murderer and villain. The other is the victim, daughter of those eaten, who lived her life under the shadow of that horrible event.

Listen to it here: http://thememorypalace.us/2012/09/after-party/

Without spoiling the end, it is about two atoms pulled together. It is about being and grace and community. Presence, healing, and forgiveness.

also check out: This.

[mythofamerica]

This song haunts me through and through. Perfect for a long road trip and melancholy times. 

[mythofamerica]

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE INANIMATE OBJECT?

a book. 

[mythofamerica]

David Simon (Creator of The Wire) and Tragedy.

I have been wrestling with the issues and tragedy of the Newtown shooting. I want to go all in with the "FUCK GUNS!" people and rail against the deep causes (and I probably will), but I also just feel sad. Then David Simon came along and wrote so honestly. 

By David Simon:

"I’ve sat facing my computer a few times since those school children were massacred, attempting on each pass to write something that expresses anything honest about the slaughter, about this horror show that we call modern, post-millenial America.  Elsewhere, I have read the words of people who are so devastated by this event that they cannot think of what to say, or who to blame, or how to bring our country to some better place.  As if words or ideas are no longer sufficient or useful against something as elemental to our society and culture as firearms.

For me, this isn’t the problem.  For me, the struggle goes to an opposite extreme.  Each time I start to write about this tragedy, my head begins to hurt.  And too soon, I sense that all of the contempt and bile I feel for America’s continuing worship of the gun will pour out onto the digital page,  that any meaningful argument I hope to express will be lost in my low regard for those in my country — leaders and followers alike — who demonstrate such cowardice in the face of the continued bloodletting.

It is all of a piece:  The mass murders by damaged citizens allowed easy access to lethal weapons.  The absurdist argument that more guns carried everywhere — into schools and malls and theaters and restaurants — will produce safety. The pretense that weapons in the classroom — handguns within reach of children; teachers armed and ready for firefights — is some sort of insightful, plausible solution, rather than evidence of moral bankruptcy and a nation in decline. The stand-your-ground laws adopted in state after state, and a gun lobby that no longer even has the need to hold to its empty credo that guns don’t kill, people do.  Now, we are excusing the people as well,  eschewing even the personal responsibility that conservatives so often exalt.  Now, guns don’t kill and neither do people.  Now, shit just happens, with our freshest legalisms simply rationalizing our preference for pride and property over human life.

On television the other evening, I caught a glimpse of a drama in which some future America was overrun by zombies, a thrilling narrative in which survivors could only rely on force of arms to keep the unthinking, unfeeling hordes at bay.  And I realized:  This isn’t mere entertainment, it’s national consensus.  More than that, it’s a well-executed and starkly visual rendering of the collective fear that governs us.  We know that they’re out there:  The less human.  The poor.  The godless.  The frightening other. And they want what we have, they are going to take what we have, and they understand nothing save for a well-placed bullet.  It’s my understanding that the show I encountered is quite popular; in this America, it may even be called populist in its argument — a morality tale that speaks to why we must arm ourselves, and carry those guns with us, and stand our fucking ground; it declares that we can’t rely on collective, utilitarian will to achieve a safe and viable society, that government by the people and for the people is, at this point, an empty catchphrase for fools and weaklings.  No, our future is every man for himself, and a gun in every outstretched hand, and if a classroom of six and seven year olds is the requisite cost every now and then, so be it.

The president asked for the flag to fly at half-staff, a symbol of mourning reserved for extraordinary events, for the deaths of heroes and grievous national tragedies.  I understand the worthy sentiment, but something in the act itself makes me want to call bullshit:  What happened at that elementary school is no longer extraordinary at all.  Yes, it  is horrifying and, by standards, even remarkable within the context of a daily, or even weekly news cycle.  But extraordinary?  The national flag is usually brought to half staff for ten days of mourning.  Does anyone firmly believe that the United States can, in its current pathology, go anywhere near that long anymore without someone using a gun to take lives of innocents on a wholesale basis?   Somewhere, a shopping mall is about to be shot apart.  And another school.  And then a sporting event or street parade.  And somewhere in Florida or any number of other states that now devalue the act of homicide, another young black kid is playing his radio too loud or walking in the wrong subdivision ready to be confronted.  Admit it:  If the interval for national mourning is a week and a half, America has no business raising its flags ever again.

I know.  Too much anger and despair.  I should have walked away from the computer, and left this to folks more measured and thoughtful. There are better voices, to be sure.  In fact, here’s the best:  If you read just one thing more about what kind of society accepts the slaughter of its children as a political and cultural inevitability, let it be Gary Wills.  

What follows from Mr. Wills is real clarity, and an honest verdict on what has become of the American experiment: www.nybooks.com/blogs/nyrblog/2012/dec/15/our-moloch  " 

[mythofamerica]

Wayne White is a genius. 

"It's so beautiful it hurts my feeling."

[mythofamerica]

Dolorean: modern neo american romance

Over the past year I have listened to the Dolorean album, The Unfazed, over and over. There is something so hauntingly American about every minute of it. The main man, Al James, is from sleepy little SIlverton, Oregon. This rural town in the rolling hills is just about what this music sounds like. "Full of taverns and motels/lets stay here for awhile."

Listening to these songs something romantic always comes over me. The melody and the stories come together in some gloriously American way. The songs sound like the place and the lyrics echo the deeper soul of town, country and inhabitants. These are real stories of real people from real places. 

It is rare to find songs so haunting and so deeply rooted in the past. These are wholly new songs but feel old.

They feel like the kind of songs you'd expect to hear on a dusty jukebox in a roadside truck stop.

They feel like the kind of songs you'd get in a Wim Wenders movie about the desert. 

Al James has somehow tapped into the deep, deep vein of soulful Americana. That is dangerous ground. It is so easy to slap a slide guitar on a track or swing in a fake drawl. Americana and alt.country have become a popular style. Look at the Avett Brothers and Dawes and Mumford and Sons. Proof positive that it is easy to dabble as tourists in the folksy past. But James and Dolorean are not tourists. They are full blooded citizens of the towns they sing about. 

[mythofamerica]

"How did I know you were American? No, not by the color of your skin; we have range of complexions in this country, and yours occurs often among the people of our northwest frontier. Nor was it your dress that gave you away; a European tourist could as easily have purchased in Des Moines your suit, with its single vent, and your button down shirt. True, your hair, short cropped, and your expansive chest-the chest, I would say, of a man who bench-presses regularly, and maxes out well above two-twenty-five- are typical of a certain "type" of American; but then again, sportsmen and soldiers of all nationalities tend to look alike. Instead, it was your bearing that allowed me to identify you..."

Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist

[youmightfindyourself]

[mythofamerica]

youmightfindyourself:

By WILLIAM DERESIEWICZ NY Times: November 12, 2011

EVER since I moved three years ago to Portland, Ore., that hotbed of all things hipster, I’ve been trying to get a handle on today’s youth culture. The style is easy enough to describe — the skinny pants, the retro hats, the wall-to-wall tattoos. But style is superficial. The question is, what’s underneath? What idea of life? What stance with respect to the world?

Previous youth cultures — beatniks, hippies, punks, slackers — could be characterized by two related things: the emotion or affect they valorized and the social form they envisioned. For the hippies, the emotion was love: love-ins, free love, the Summer of Love, all you need is love. The social form was utopia, understood in collective terms: the commune, the music festival, the liberation movement.

The beatniks aimed at ecstasy, embodied as a social form in individual transcendence. Theirs was a culture of jazz, with its spontaneity; of marijuana, arresting time and flooding the soul with pleasure (this was before the substance became the background drug of every youth culture); of flight, on the road, to the West; of the quest for the perfect moment.

The punks were all about rage, their social program nihilistic anarchy. “Get pissed,” Johnny Rotten sang. “Destroy.” Hip-hop, punk’s younger brother, was all about rage and nihilism, too, at least until it turned to a vision of individual aggrandizement.

As for the slackers of the late ’80s and early ’90s (Generation X, grunge music, the fiction of David Foster Wallace), their affect ran to apathy and angst, a sense of aimlessness and pointlessness. Whatever. That they had no social vision was precisely what their social vision was: a defensive withdrawal from all commitment as inherently phony.

So what’s the affect of today’s youth culture? Not just the hipsters, but the Millennial Generation as a whole, people born between the late ’70s and the mid-’90s, more or less — of whom the hipsters are a lot more representative than most of them care to admit. The thing that strikes me most about them is how nice they are: polite, pleasant, moderate, earnest, friendly. Rock ’n’ rollers once were snarling rebels or chest-beating egomaniacs. Now the presentation is low-key, self-deprecating, post-ironic, eco-friendly. When Vampire Weekend appeared on “The Colbert Report” last year to plug their album “Contra,” the host asked them, in view of the title, what they were against. “Closed-mindedness,” they said.

According to one of my students at Yale, where I taught English in the last decade, a colleague of mine would tell his students that they belonged to a “post-emotional” generation. No anger, no edge, no ego.

What is this about? A rejection of culture-war strife? A principled desire to live more lightly on the planet? A matter of how they were raised — everybody’s special and everybody’s point of view is valid and everybody’s feelings should be taken care of?

Perhaps a bit of each, but mainly, I think, something else. The millennial affect is the affect of the salesman. Consider the other side of the equation, the Millennials’ characteristic social form. Here’s what I see around me, in the city and the culture: food carts, 20-somethings selling wallets made from recycled plastic bags, boutique pickle companies, techie start-ups, Kickstarter, urban-farming supply stores and bottled water that wants to save the planet.

Today’s ideal social form is not the commune or the movement or even the individual creator as such; it’s the small business. Every artistic or moral aspiration — music, food, good works, what have you — is expressed in those terms.

Call it Generation Sell.

Bands are still bands, but now they’re little businesses, as well: self-produced, self-published, self-managed. When I hear from young people who want to get off the careerist treadmill and do something meaningful, they talk, most often, about opening a restaurant. Nonprofits are still hip, but students don’t dream about joining one, they dream about starting one. In any case, what’s really hip is social entrepreneurship — companies that try to make money responsibly, then give it all away.

It’s striking. Forty years ago, even 20 years ago, a young person’s first thought, or even second or third thought, was certainly not to start a business. That was selling out — an idea that has rather tellingly disappeared from our vocabulary. Where did it come from, this change? Less Reaganism, as a former student suggested to me, than Clintonism — the heroic age of dot-com entrepreneurship that emerged during the Millennials’ childhood and youth. Add a distrust of large organizations, including government, as well as the sense, a legacy of the last decade, that it’s every man for himself.

Because this isn’t only them. The small business is the idealized social form of our time. Our culture hero is not the artist or reformer, not the saint or scientist, but the entrepreneur. (Think of Steve Jobs, our new deity.) Autonomy, adventure, imagination: entrepreneurship comprehends all this and more for us. The characteristic art form of our age may be the business plan.

AND that, I think, is the real meaning of the Millennial affect — which is, like the entrepreneurial ideal, essentially everyone’s now. Today’s polite, pleasant personality is, above all, a commercial personality. It is the salesman’s smile and hearty handshake, because the customer is always right and you should always keep the customer happy. If you want to get ahead, said Benjamin Franklin, the original business guru, make yourself pleasing to others.

I was contacted recently by a young man who plans to start a Web site to promote the need for reading and reflection to people of his generation. Not just promote it, though, of course, but market it. When he asked me for advice, I suggested he begin by pointing out the superficiality of so much social media. Well, he said, I agree with that idea, that’s a big premise of what I’m trying to do, but I wouldn’t want to come across as negative, because that turns people off. If they think you’re criticizing them, they won’t want to buy what you’re selling.

That kind of thinking is precisely what I’m talking about, what lies behind the bland, inoffensive, smile-and-a-shoeshine personality — the stay-positive, other-directed, I’ll-be-whoever-you-want-me-to-be personality — that everybody has today. Yes, we’re vicious, anonymously, on the comment threads of public Web sites, but when we speak in our own names, on Facebook and so forth, we’re strenuously cheerful, conciliatory, well-groomed. (In fact, one of the reasons we’re so vicious, I’m convinced, is to relieve the psychic pressure of all that affability.) They say that people in Hollywood are always nice to everyone they meet, in that famously fake Hollywood way, because they’re never certain whom they might be dealing with — it could be somebody who’s more important than they realize, or at least, somebody who might become important down the road.

Well, we’re all in showbiz now, walking on eggshells, relentlessly tending our customer base. We’re all selling something today, because even if we aren’t literally selling something (though thanks to the Internet as well as the entrepreneurial ideal, more and more of us are), we’re always selling ourselves. We use social media to create a product — to create a brand — and the product is us. We treat ourselves like little businesses, something to be managed and promoted.

The self today is an entrepreneurial self, a self that’s packaged to be sold.

In “Bobos in Paradise,” David Brooks articulated the phenomenon of the bourgeois bohemians, a class that merges respectable incomes with countercultural attitudes. Where, I wondered recently, do the real bohemians — the hipsters, in other words — fit into the scheme? Some are just bobos in training; others are destined to remain bohemians for life. But whatever their individual trajectories, hipsters possess a relationship to mainstream society that is radically different from that of their youth-culture forebears, and they have the bobos to thank. Indeed, they have them to thank for their very existence.

The rise of the bobos in the 1990s (when creativity became lucrative and money became cool) put a new kind of pressure on the true bohemians. Now they no longer stood in opposition to mainstream culture, as the beatniks did to the company men or the slackers did to the business boys. Now they looked exactly like it. Mainstream culture had come to them, and it drew them to itself. Et voilà, the hipster. Instead of having to get a haircut and a new wardrobe, not to mention a new set of friends, if you wanted to go over to the man, you just kept doing what you were doing, at gradually higher price points. Hence the hipster as Bobo-in-training, bohemia merging imperceptibly with the bourgeoisie.

Hipsters and bobos are symbiotic. I should know; I’m a bobo in a hipster-bobo neighborhood — which is pretty much what I was looking for when I moved to Portland in the first place. We’re all into organic food and progressive politics; we just have different relationships to the commodities through which those attitudes are expressed. Hipsters create bobo culture. They make or sell or serve, or simply pioneer, what bobos buy. Try to picture Allen Ginsberg having a chat with Don Draper, across the counter at the local coffeehouse, about the latest Lady Gaga video, and you’ll realize how far we’ve come.

All this is why, unlike those of previous youth cultures, the hipster ethos contains no element of rebellion, rejection or dissent — remarkably so, given that countercultural opposition would seem to be essential to the very idea of youth culture. That may in turn be why the hipster has proved to be so durable. The heyday of the hippies lasted for all of about two years. The punks and slackers held the stage for little more than half a decade each. That’s the nature of rebellion: it needs to keep on happening. The punks rejected the mainstream, but they also rejected the previous rejection, hippiedom itself — which, by the late ’70s, was something that old people (i.e. 28-year-olds) were into. But hipsters, who’ve been around for 15 years or so, appear to have become a durable part of our cultural configuration.

Or maybe not. These movements always have an economic substrate. The beatniks and hippies — love, ecstasy, transcendence, utopia — were products of the postwar boom. The punks and slackers and devotees of hip-hop — rage, angst, nihilism, withdrawal — arose within the long stagnation that lasted from the early ’70s to the early ’90s. The hipsters were born in the dot-com boom and flourished in the real estate bubble.

Affability is a commercial virtue, but it is also the affect of people who feel themselves to be living in a fundamentally agreeable society. Already, the makings of a new youth culture may be locking into place.

[mythofamerica]

“Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires.”

― John Steinbeck