Marvin, sorry it took me so long to reply. Been thinking this over some,
and also did a LOT of drafting in the last day for other stuff. Thesis
thesis thesis, I really am writing one. I finished the first draft for a
60-some-page story last night. Whew.
Now:
At 1:02 PM -0400 04/12/2000, Marvin Long, Jr. wrote:
>Gord, I think you're really, really reaching for it here. A bad case
>of grad-schoolitis, maybe? :-)
*giggle* That is possible, but I don't think so... and I have considered it
seriously. But I don't think so, not the more that I think about it. It
does take a small imaginative leap, but not as big one as you think -- if
you take one tiny point into account (which I'll mention below, about who
was making the pies and who was eating). I have no cable, so I don't care
about the Dune TV show, so maybe I'm also just trying to stir up the
hornets... :)
> Or maybe just mistaking the silliness of
>a sentimental gesture (mock apple pie) for the irony of a
>counterproductive clinging to tradition (such as insisting that an
>institution like the electoral college is important for democracy, when in
>fact it actually impedes democracy)?
*grin* Oh, okay, I see we're looking at it from two different perspectives.
What stuck out in my mind from one of the pages I read online about mock
apple pie was that it was something that pioneer moms and then wartime moms
made to fool their kids, who were craving and missing apple pie during
periods when apples were scarce. So, while for the mom in the kitchen (and
maybe the *odd* dad in those days) you might be correct to say that there
was no delusion about the symbols, and that there was knowledgeable
manipulation of them in the face of all kinds of crappy circumstances, and
that it wass therefore a kind of brave fist-shaking against the "bastards
of fate" and so on [though I think there must also be some room to note the
fact that without pressures of culture and others' expectations, the apple
pie would not be symbolic -- ie. that the symbol itself exerts some kind
of necessity regarding its own enaction] . . . but I think for the main
consumers (literally -- the eaters) of those pies the point actually *was*
to fool them. Kids still got to enjoy the old apple pie somehow, and were
none the wiser.
[That was my impression, but I may be wrong. Maybe kids routinely helped
mom make them. I could be wrong. But I wouldn't know *where* to look to
resolve that question either way, just as I wouldn't know where to look to
resolve the question of whether the pies were actually effective fakes back
in the 19th century.]
Sure there are more pressing examples: with the SUVs, yeah, it's a
wonderful kind of symbol for that faux-pioneer sentiment. There's an ad
with 3 city kids (you can tell they are, because they dressed up like
campers), two of them worrying like crazy aloud, and the other trying to
reassure them that their ride is coming. He only reassures them when he
tells them what brand of truck (or is it minivan, or SUV?) their ride is
driving, as evidence that he *will* find them. However, I think it's true
in American (moreso than in NorthAmerican in general) film, the car is a
metonym for the individual. I can't recount how many times I've seen a
person judged (or actively characterized) by his or her car in a film . . .
and a handy image for mass destruction that I've seen a few times is the
destruction of a number of cars. And actually, cars was one of those things
I was railing towards, when talking about things that seem to have become
completely naturalized and made essential within culture, regardless of the
real resources and circumstances surrounding them, and regardless of the
consequences. But I don't know that we want to get into that here. It's a
very touchy subject, I've noticed.
Your example about the electoral college is also a good one, but only to
some degree, because I think it's less of a mass-culture symbol, and
because it's also not the kind of thing I imagine nees to be enacted widely
and domestically, and that's what I'm really interested in because such
small, quiet, domestic symbols seem to have more force in our lives than
something that's enacted out there somewhere once every 4 or 5 years.
That's why, while I agree that mock apple pie therefore *seems* a rather
innocuous, sentimental type of starting point to start on a tirade about
the bogusness of so much of what people are "fed" and "believe" as a
result; and that such bogusness is usually designed to be very palatable. I
like that about it, that it's a weird starting place. But certainly it only
takes on any resonance for me when I hold it up to the larger picture.
Things we've learned since childhood to think are good for us, but if we
look at them now we can see are not only innocuous shams, but also bad for
us. We acquire the taste for them, thinking they are real, and thenceforth
we can be fed them anytime. If apples were in shortage one time once,
what's in shortage now?
Ha. That hesitation (I hesitated too, for a good long while) suggests we've
developed a taste for mock apple pie. :)
Gord
