"There are times when all the world's asleep and questions run too deep for such a simple mind"
-- Supertramp
Hermione Granger had an hourglass pendant that allowed her to stop time temporarily and be in two places at once. These are the first two things that pop into my head, my bald black man's head in fretting over the fact that I cannot within decent internet time, come up with 2000 words that could rebut the navel gazing of the Anchoress in asking what, prey tell, is American culture. But I'm going to start writing now just in case I can pull something together today.
See the first thing I know about American culture is that I know all about American culture and you haven't heard any of it until you've heard it from me. That's a black man of my generation talking because we, and our parents and our grandparents have been scrutinizing this beast for three generations and we're still improvising on it. It is the necessity of our improvisation that legitimizes that which is ossified. Just as it is this black man quoting Supertramp and JK Rowling. American culture starts with English. My English, my jiveometrical, hoop-jumping stupefyingly awesome English. Not bad meaning bad but bad meaning good.
Until you capture the soul of a people in language, you don't have a culture worth speaking about. So I ask myself, how do people ask themselves questions about themselves. They don't, that's why so much of America is somewhat soulless. It's why we depend so heavily on our iPods and our Oprahs to say the things we wish we could say when we're falling in love and we want to tell somebody about our soul. We turn up the radio - and sometimes the first plaintive wail starts "Hey DJ.." So somewhere at the crossroads somebody sold his soul to the devil so he could sing the blues and guess what - he grew another soul in doing so. America's second soul is the language of the blues.
We have a violent temper because we kept it all bottled up. Them damn people on the other side of the Atlantic, they sold us. They kicked us out. We were captured in the Kamby Bolongo, we were Roundheads in the wrong part of London, we were Jews in Germany and we were potato famine refugees and they all sold us out and kicked us to the New World curb to take our chances among the dragons off the flat edge of the Earth. And some of us had hope when we came, and some of us had no choice but to come, and all of us were mad and tired and destined to find a second soul because the first soul was sold out. And we tried to keep it bottled up. But we couldn't.
When your mother comes home and she's pissed off you know you better start picking up your clothes and putting those dishes away. When you get nervous and somebody is staring down your throat, you start to scrub. And you scrub your English and you scrub your manners and you even try to make your toilet smell lemony fresh. And when you are halfway between getting over the pain of losing your soul and only vaguely aware that a new one awaits, you start scrubbing your environment and trying to make your dingy-ass curtains look presentable. And you try to make your daughter appear more chaste and sensible than she actually is, no matter whose head you have to bust. And you try to make your priest more holy than he actually is so that you can stand up and stare down somebody else with your Protestant ethic. And you point to all those other dirty niggers because there's always a nigger somewhere dirtier than you. And you don't stop pointing and you don't stop beating and you don't stop pretending until you grow your second soul.
To be born in America is to be born into a humanity somewhere between the past and the future because nobody is confident enough to build statues of people anymore. We over here have institutions. This is not a country of men and women -- oh we want it to be and we pretend that it might one day be, but there is no King, there is no Queen, there is no real poet laureate. Even John Wayne wasn't John Wayne and Lauren Bacall, no matter how confident she talked, was always wearing too much makeup. There is no real man of the country whose health is our health. But there is the Dow Jones Industrial Average, and there is Zero Percent Down (OAC) and there is always something a two day priority UPS ground shipment away that can satisfy the gap between your first and second souls.
What kind of car would Abraham Lincoln drive? Probably not a Lincoln.
American culture is motion. It is the 4/4 time of the clackety clack of the railroad track. No wait that was a sesquicentennial ago. It's the hiphop bhangra beat drumming your chopsticks on formica in anticipation of a snack served by a waitress wearing something cute. See her? She's winking over her shoulder and you catch her peering over your sunglasses. You're wearing sunglasses because you're cool and when you're cool you are in a superposition of states, in between souls. You can't look at me in my eyes when I am on the street - I don't have no time for you man, I got places to go, people need to see me. Important people. Sexy people. Cool people like me. In your sunglasses you can dance in your underwear, you can drive fast in your convertible, you can wear a suit like Sammy Davis Jr and dangle a square from your lips like Bette Davis. You are moving out of this bohunk town on the way to Easy Street. But you don't show the whites of your eyes until you have your second soul.
America delivers, in the modern day to everyone she bequeathes a fine first-class engineered automobile, on blocks. We sit in the drivers seat on daddy's lap unable to comprehend that we're not rolling anywhere, blind to the technology of the undercarriage and suspension. We are born in the driver's seat of a great beast we don't even understand, but we know it's a Cadillac. We know it's supposed to be the best in the world even though we don't know how it works. We just need to know how to work it. In the meantime we make motor noises with our mouths and damn anyone who dare charges us too much for gas, because its our right. We have a right. We have a right to everything, and why not? We invented rights, so why stop? We got a right to have more rights. You need more rights when you are in between souls.
There are gay men in $4,000 suits who produce music for 16 year old girls in America. We live too long. That's why we pretend we don't need to be wise.
But sooner or later we get wise and we grow our second soul and suddenly all the traffic slows to a crawl. We finally see. We finally know. We finally feel. And finally we grin and let it all go - we forgive and try to forget and blame it all on impetuous youth. We sing the blues in our gruff hacking, and smile through whiskey stains. Smile and wave boys, smile and wave, and still your eyes fog over a bit for the asskicking energy. You've found your second soul and you're living in liberty and you never had to doubt yourself and you ran and you romped and you brought all these children into your world. And they shine and they have straight teeth like the straight lines in the roads, as flat and perfect as the line between Dallas and Ft. Worth.
And then you put on your dad pants particularly because they make you look uncool, and you walk the sidewalks just for the pleasure of bumping into strangers and enjoying the contact. And you go to a church you've never been to before just for the pleasure of dropping a twenty in the basket - and you smile in the face of kids whose parent's last name remains unpronounceable. And you lean over the mall mezzanine to watch the ice-skaters wobble and spin with their scrubbed up faces realizing its your big watch and V8 automobile that's making them scrub up. And you walk down the hallway of the office building listening to the promptly answered ringing phones and through the little kitchens with five cabinets full of plastic stirrers and non-dairy creamer and the refrigerator with the handwritten note that says it's cleaned up every Friday.
America is a fishing pole in a big muddy river. It is the perseverance of hope through the powerful opaque. Our soul has grown deep.
No, I'm not finished, because I'm only just over the hill and my daughters haven't wed. But I know America has a culture, a flavor a soul which is robust and shows no sign of whithering away. Oh we have our doubts, but we never doubt that there's an answer and that somebody's going to find it and make a fortune, and be the new rising star and make us all change our favorite color. Somebody's going to tell us if it's good to drink red wine every day, and we keep listening to make sure we get a good spot in line. In the meantime, we're chilling in the living room. Because everybody has got a living room and we're listening to the singers on the loudspeaker singing them soulful songs.
We're always adding up inches more soul until the day we're full.
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