Is it, perhaps, possible that there are two kinds of Civilization--one for home consumption and one for the heathen market?
Samuel Langhorne Clemens, 1835-1910
Personally, I always find it especially piquant when cultural conservatives, usually quick to profess their devotion to the Free Market, rail against the success in said market of some product of which they disapprove.
Nowhere on Earth was sex so vigorously suppressed as in America--and nowhere else was there such a deep interest in it.
The British Empire wasn't some project designed to bring enlightenment to ignorant savages, but rather a brutal and rapacious exploitation of peoples who were often more humane than us.
Suddenly, stories of abuse and harassment are being believed; abusers and harassers are being toppled. Yet, at the same time, one of the top movies in the country right now is 'Daddy's Home 2,' which has a biggish, comedic part for Mel Gibson. He's the man whose anti-Semitism and racist rants became part of the cultural lore.
There's an underlying puritanicalness in America that is not that different to the prudishness of Britain - it just manifests itself in different ways.
When Priyanka Chopra makes a mark for herself internationally, we claim her achievements as our own and then threaten to ban her films and make her apologize for a work of fiction that has been created by someone else. Can we please attempt to be larger than that?
The Woman had once been supreme; in France she still seemed potent, not merely as a sentiment but as a force; why was she unknownin America? for evidently America was ashamed of her, and she was ashamed of herself, otherwise they would not have strewn fig-leaves so profusely all over her. When she was a true force, she was ignorant of fig-leaves, but the monthly-magazine-made American female had not a feature that would have been recognized by Adam. The trait was notorious, and often humorous, but anyone brought up among Puritans knew that sex was sin. In any previous age, sex was strength.
Everybody wants to psychoanalyze horror. They don't want to psychoanalyze a book like Gay Talese's "Sex with Your Neighbor" [sic] or something like that. It's pretty much accepted that Americans should be interested in who they're diddling and how they're doing it.
The country and culture commonly known as "America" had had a badly split personality all through its history. Its overt laws were almost always puritanical for a people whose covert behavior tended to be Rabelaisian; its major religions were all Apollonian in varying degrees---its religious revivals were often hysterical in a fashion almost Dionysian.
There is something deeply disturbing about a popular culture that will not forgive the sins of the Confederacy seven generations past but celebrates the teachings and legacies of Che Guevara, Mao Zhe-Dong, and Jeremy Wright.
These are the fifties, you know. The disgusting, posturing fifties.
Americans have been taught that their nation is civilized and humane. But, too often, U.S. actions have been uncivilized and inhumane.
Radical Chic, after all, is only radical in Style; in its heart it is part of Society and its traditions.
American hypocrisy consists of thinking that everything is serious; French hypocrisy is to think that nothing is serious.
The sort of man who admires Italian art while despising Italian religion is a tourist and a cad.
Though this nation has proudly thought of itself as an ethnic melting pot, in things racial we have always been and continue to be, in too many ways, essentially a nation of cowards.
I hate it when people in India throw in an American or English accent while rapping without even a passport in possession.
I chose not to jump into the media frenzy and defend myself, though I was begged to be on every single TV show in existence. They want to blame entertainment? Isn't religion the first real entertainment? People dress up in costumes, sing songs and dedicate themselves in eternal fandom.
The Germans are called brutal, the Spanish cruel, the Americans superficial, and so on; but we are perfide Albion, the island of hypocrites, the people who have built up an Empire with a Bible in one hand, a pistol in the other, and financial concessions in both pockets. Is the charge true? I think it is.
In our society, in our culture, we love to build people up. We love to build the pedestal, and we love to put 'em up there on it, and then we can't wait for the day they fall off of it.
I know nowadays the common wisdom is to celebrate diversity as long as you don't point out that people are different.
Some people hold themselves above the fashion business but are still complicit and fall prey to it.
In the United States of America, we are so liberal-minded on so many different aspects, but for some reason there's always going to be this weird connection with nudity being a bad thing. Americans can be so prude sometimes.
'Memorial Day' is about 'spring break' girls-gone-wild culture which is the seedy underbelly of our American Puritanism, the inverse side of the coin. It's also about how we forcefully exported that culture and then pretended to not know what we were doing.
