Excellent reading for a Texas boy who as an expatriate has spent over half his life in Asian cultures (and I mean in them as I know and associate with practically no other expats, largely by choice — between the dips and the scribblers and the sharp multinational entrepreneurs creative intellectual exchange is, to put it diplomatically, rather thin).
I kept thinking that as a kid growing up in a family immersed in an extraordinary number of disparate cultures you were circling around, but not pinpointing, the central issue: programmed chilluns of the Stars’n’Bars. Then you hit it: ‘… I find it interesting, incidentally, that so many of these discussions seem to have come from, or are based on, an assumption of race and cultural dynamics as they currently are in America. Perhaps one of the most unhelpful cultural assumptions a lot of these discussions make is that everything works the way it does in America, and everywhere is the same.’ As the White Man’s Burden is to wistfully observe the passage of the baton of privilege, embodied in intelligence, money, culture and status, to the tutti-frutti of cultures now infusing the abode of Lana the Free and Homer the Brave, peculiar phenomena have been excreted from the culture. The obsession with ‘appropriation’ is certainly one.
Think of how Jews in show business traditionally anglicized their names, to appeal to a mass audience (and ideally gain acceptance from racist Gentiles). One Jakob Wonsal, who grew up in a family of Yiddish-speaking Canadian Jewish immigrants, became ‘Jack Warner’, one of the most powerful and astute men in Hollywood.
I was subject to condemnation here on Medium by one Gutbloom for having impolitely pointed out the phony-baloney manufactured persona of one Robert Allen Zimmerman. Look at all of the not-particularly-Jewish stage names this fellow has adopted: Elston Gunnn… Blind Boy Grunt… Bob Landy… Robert Milkwood Thomas… Tedham Porterhouse… Lucky Wilbury… Boo Wilbury… Jack Frost… Sergei Petrov. Now is Bob Dylan to be scorned for ‘cultural appropriation’? Not bloody likely. And what the devil’s wrong with שבתאי זיסל בן אברהם (Shabtai Zisl ben Avraham)? Here is the traditional schizophrenia of the American ‘melting pot’.
When I fled to Canada as political exile during the aggression on Vietnam I found a ‘mosaic’ of cultures: Indians, Chinese, Arabs and Hispanics were encouraged to nurture their own culture, within a (somewhat nebulous) ‘Canadian’ context. That has its drawbacks as well, particularly when it proves comfy to Islamist extremism and Sikh activists blowing up 747s.
