Brad,
Go forward 50 or so years and wonder what people then will make of today's popular culture??
I am aware that popular culture is complicated, and that any symbolic form may be metabolized in many different ways. On the other hand, e.g., "You can't always get what you want" (The Rolling Stones) is almost 40 years old now, and that's relatively "grounded".
Perhaps the "musical comedy"/crooning mindset should be seen as an advance over the soul-darkness of central European 19th century peasant Roman Catholicism, instead of wondering how it could have *postdated" J.S. Bach et al.? For Bach/Kant/... and Jacques the Peasant inhabited different space-time frames in a more profound way than envisioned by Einsteinean relativity, which is merely a problem of different wireless operators synchronizing time signals but sharing a unified commitment across all space and time to the ideal of universal communication, not a problem of massive disjuncture of orientation in life....
But I have made some progress in focusing my thoughts:
(1) Might America become happy again if we would just start singing in the rain again? (This includes our soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan)
(2) Here's a quote I found I'd saved from some years ago:
"One of Mr. Hwang's routines... perhaps explains
how he could have spent so much of his life glorifying
the North Korean authorities: At bedtime, he likes
to read fairy tales." NYT, 21Apr97, p.A8. Story about arrival in Seoul
of Hwang Jang Yop, a high ranking North Korean
defector: "the philosopher behind North Korea's
ideology of juche, or self-reliance, which was
used to justify its repressive Stalinist rule
and cult-like leader worship."I wonder if "singing in the rain" is alive and well in some areas deep in the American Heartland which may not yet have heard of The Vietnam War or marijuana or abortion, etc.?
How much more interesting such persons would be to discover than aboriginals in the Amazon basin!
\brad mccormick
arthur
-----Original Message----- From: Brad McCormick [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Sunday, August 31, 2003 4:15 PM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: [Futurework] A different question
A friend once told me:
Other than chance encounters, You can only encounter in reality What you have previously encountered in fantasy.
In other words, our fantasy life shapes our experience of our real life.
I have long wondered how the symbolic "world" of 1940s American popular culture was metabolized by 1940s American people. (I've captured a few images from the net at:
http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/sq/astaire.html
"What must have been going on in the minds of the persons who enjoyed this kind of stuff?" Where I am coming from is my puzzlement that adults could relate to such stuff as meaningful. Were they as "ditz-headed" as this imagery? What effects did this imagery have on their self-understanding in their own middle to lower middle class and working class lives?
Does my puzzlement make sense? What are the conditions for
the possibility of adults seeking out this kind of
symbolic material to bring into their inner life?
In the end, it derives from personal experience: How were my parents with their so superficial imaginative life (which nonetheless did not prevent them from having real problems that imagination horizon did not help clarify or give them a handle on!) possible?
I am aware that there was more substantive symbolic material in America at that time, although probably a lot of it was known only to relatively small circles But the fact that something like Krazy Kat cartoons appeared in the newspapers suggests some more substantive imaginative life among at least some ordinary Americans....
Any thoughts etc. will be appreciated.
Tea for two
and two for tea,
Can't you see
How happy we could be?
Etc.
\brad mccormick
--
Let your light so shine before men,
that they may see your good works.... (Matt 5:16)Prove all things; hold fast that which is good. (1 Thes 5:21)
<![%THINK;[SGML+APL]]> Brad McCormick, Ed.D. / [EMAIL PROTECTED] ----------------------------------------------------------------- Visit my website ==> http://www.users.cloud9.net/~bradmcc/
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