America ...

Such a cliche post, but I feel obliged. 

I always went back and forth on The Rolling Stones as a band.  Sometimes, I quite enjoyed their music, but others I had immense hostility to them, not just their music, but as a band.  It was funny because I never really had that set of feelings toward any other band, just The Rolling Stones.  Some bands I loved, and some bands I hated, but there were no other bands that I felt both ways about!  Then, this summer, I was watching Pete Townshend's interview at the end of The Rolling Stones Rock and Roll Circus (for which I had already adopted the name The Who's Rock and Roll Circus featuring The Rolling Stones), and he really, permanently, changed my perception of them.  It was so strange.  One minute, I was ranting and raving about how much better The Who are than The Stones, and how bad the Stones' performance was, etcetera, and then I saw the interview, and my opinion of the band was permanently changed, for the better.  Why?  Pete Townshend had done something which, quite possibly deliberately, had never really been done before, at least in my knowledge, he had really painted the Stones as individuals, as humans, who were really just like any band at the time, just sort of doing their thing and doing their best to be successful at it.  And they were.  They were very, very successful.  They are not just a classic band, but an iconic one.                                         

That was the problem.  Satisfaction, Mick Jagger's swagger, Keith Richards' drug usage, Brian Jones, hedonism, Altamont ...  those were all in your face before you even knew two of their songs.  In that way, I think I would say that they were the single most successful group in Rock history.  They had an image and a sound and everyone knows it.  They have pretty much come to define the "darker," for lack of a better word, side of Rock Music.  On the one hand, they were immensely successful, well done, and I think there is a bit of an intrigue factor with it.  On the other hand, it's easy to look at the image they project and not look any deeper, and feel that you understand the band.  Then, it is easy to take a band you really like and care about and are actually familiar with, and compare them on the completely different levels.                                                                              

So what does this have to do with America? 

I think that people tend to treat America in the same way as I treated the Rolling Stones. 

Again, there are both good and bad elements, and it has all led to some sort of intrigue about America, but I've come increasingly to feel that many people sort of have a two dimensional vision of America and American culture.  When they come here, they visit New York, Washington DC, and Florida (much in the same way as Americans, when we go to France, go to Paris).  They see our TV and our movies, but not the good ones, just the blockbuster hits.  We're rich, pushy, arrogant, loud, uncultured, and rude.  We're powerful (and we always were).  We're country music, McDonald's, Red, White, and Blue, and, oh yeah, we don't put extra 'u's in words.  We're also a military and economic powerhouse, maybe not for long, but that's what we are.     

And that's fine, I don't get offended by people thinking that.  In fact, I quite enjoy some parodies on Americans, in particular, the American on Fawlty Towers, brilliant.  I wanted to go to American night over here (if for no other reason than to request that the "American music playing" DJ play "American Woman" by the Guess Who ;) ).  It's not just foreigners, either.  I have had teachers who argued that there was no such thing as American culture, or even American heritage.  That said, equating American culture to country music and hamburgers is about as accurate as equating The Rolling Stones to Altamont and Satisfaction, there's just more to it.                 

Actually, since being over here, I have really grown to have a finer appreciation for American culture than I did before.  We do have a unique culture and a unique identity, and it's not the one that most people would give us.  We're actually quite an innocent people in a lot of ways.  We don't drink as much, our TV is tamer, so are our movies.  We really identify with states and locations, which is not a trait unique to us, but saying which state we are from means something.  We have an unnatural obsession with peanut butter, which I would actually argue is the single most American food, forget apple pie.  I quite like an observation made of Americans in the early eighteen hundreds, by two people, one of whom thought it was positive, while the other did not.  The general observation was that Americans were not interested in high society or high culture.  They simply did their work, lived their lives, enjoyed themselves, and that was the emphasis.  Thanksgiving is, apart from Christmas, our biggest holiday. As for food? Yes, we eat some hamburgers and hotdogs, but so much is forgotten. You haven't eaten American food until you've eaten biscuits and gravy. Seriously. Then there's cornbread, summer squash, collard greens, key lime pie, and tons of regional variation. Fish tacos. Lots of it has been imported and adapted from other people's recipes, but that's one of the things we do. Cajun food, jambalaya, red beans and rice, dirty rice. Oh, and don't forget creamed corn, or black eyed peas. I could go on. If you're interested, watch Alton Brown's show Good Eats, or, even better, the first and second seasons of his show Feasting on Asphalt, they're amazing. Another thing, iced tea, sweet tea, in the South, and our lemonade is lemon juice, sugar, and water, most other people's lemonade is our Sprite. Yeah, all of those have far more to do with American culinary identity than hamburgers do.  We came from humble beginnings as a country and now we are something.  We didn't have to be, but we are.  We are a country of people trying to do the right thing, and that is one thing my middle school Geography/History teacher always said, America always tries to do the right thing.  Sometimes it fails, but it always tries.                                                                                         

None of this means that I think that people should think America is better than any other country, I mean, The Rolling Stones are still not my favorite band, although they are great.  It's just to say, whether you're American or not, because Americans do this with their own culture almost as much as foreigners do, at least some Americans do, that, well, I'm not sure, just be aware of this?