American culture is being abused

Kiran Barthapudi
From a Distance

America is a nation that is compulsively dependent on Prozac and fast diets, a nation obsessed with sex, where people get married to be divorced, and children are shot at schools in daylight. A nation where anyone can sue claiming to be a arcane child of Elvis Presley, where most white men are gay and all black men are criminals. Sexual offenders, sexy models, sleazy talk, insane reality, dehumanized war escapades, family debacles, vulgar music videos, dumb blondes and arrogant leaders ˜ it is American culture in one line.

In more blatant terms, America is a snobbish, self-centered nation with no cultural identity. I remember sitting on a cozy couch back home in India, glued to the box for a decade and coming to these conclusions.

I have lived in the United States for three years and realize that there is more to America than the meanings that I constructed for over a decade. However, it is naïve to assume that cultural representations in popular media are abandoned by reality. These caricatured images in multitude, though exaggerated versions of a culture, most certainly influence and reshape the culture.

These representations may not truly reflect the culture we live in, but in subtle ways they advocate the ways in which we should live. They normalize the abnormal and endorse the unwanted. For instance, children in the American society have an unrestricted rendezvous with sacrilegious video games and television programming with explicit violence from a very young age. Though not necessarily a direct or isolated cause, violent images do "desensitize" children toward violence and portray violent behavior as "common" and socially acceptable. So ˜ no surprise ˜ there are free shooting sprees in schools every now and then.

As defined by anthropologists Larry Samovar and Richard Porter, "culture refers to the cumulative deposit of knowledge, experience, beliefs, values, attitudes, meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time, roles, spatial relations, concepts of the universe and material objects and possessions acquired by a group of people in the course of generations through individual and group striving."

In other words, culture is a complex structure that encompasses various facets of a society and donates identity to the society. But the incessantly bombarded American popular cultural product is mostly incognizant, incomprehensive and inept. It is very simple and binary, with meanings void of any context. No longer does it want to reflect the culture, but it wants to determine the culture.

The closest term to the word "culture" is the term "history." If culture is not a perfect synonym to the term history, at least it is a true reflection of history. Culture is the legacy that history has bestowed us. As we deposit ourselves along with our times into the "dustbin of history" we are going to leave an altered, distorted and newly created legacy (culture) behind for future generations to use as a guide for defining and shaping their own identity.

As Abraham Lincoln, one of the greatest rhetorical maestros, stated, "We cannot escape history." So as long as we cannot escape history, we cannot escape culture, and as long as we cannot escape culture we cannot escape but we will continue to create, alter, evolve and distort culture. But the popular cultural product lacks historical background, and a sense of time and space. So, the creation is crude, alteration is asinine and the distortion is deadly. Celebrating the undesirable, endorsing the incomprehensible and exaggerating the reality beyond recognition, most of the popular media images not only have misrepresented American culture but also have established a fleeting cultural identity that fails to take refuge under history and brutally discounts the multiplicity of the cultural kaleidoscope.

When MTV becomes more reliable consultant than mom, Britney Spears articulates the rubric of "cool," and "The Man Show" constructs the meaning of masculinity, culture is most definitely abused, and abuse of culture is an invitation to insanity.

From a distance appears every other Friday. Kiran is a doctoral student in the College of Mass Communications and Media Arts. His views do not necessarily reflect those of the Daily Egyptian.

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