Problem #16: The Best of US Culture
It’s tough so speak of a single “US culture.” As Colin Woodward suggests in his book American Nations, there are more like 11 different nations in the US (read the summary at http://www.colinwoodard.com/americannations.html for more details). But, for the sake of this brief essay, let’s consider “American culture” as that which has been distributed throughout the US, and the world, by media.
I’ve said for a long time that the two greatest contributions of the US to world culture are jazz and baseball. Jazz can be seen as the ultimate musical development of the blues, which have their origin in African rhythmic storytelling traditions brought here by slaves. Baseball is a collective memory of the rural, agricultural- even Jeffersonian- ideal that is a prominent part of US history. As George Carlin put it, “Baseball is a nineteenth-century pastoral game. Football is a twentieth-century technological struggle”1. Or, as I put it, baseball is poetry; football is more like instant messaging. Baseball is a perfect radio sport, not so much focused on the visual as the drama and overall plot. Football is a perfect television sport: everything fits neatly into a single frame, and at least a single horizontal plane. Baseball features long-developing plotlines. Football is ultraviolence alternating with boredom. Or, as George Will described it, ““Football combines two of the worst things in American life. It is violence punctuated by committee meetings”2.
I’m not sure that there’s a musical contrast to jazz to compare to football as a contrast to baseball. But, the more that the US can be jazz and baseball, the better we’ll be as a nation.
Endnotes
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