The New "Old, Weird America"

I've always been nostalgic for that "old, weird" America that we dream up in our songs. A land where people work harder than they should and stand up for others and do whats right 80% of the time. The rest of the time they are the connoisseurs of vice and perversion. The swindlers with a heart of gold. Hoboes, hippies, beats, punks, and maybe--if they're lucky--hipsters. They're all swindlers, and I'm one of them, sometimes proudly sometimes not. We dream of a world that never really existed and even if it did, it was never ours. I guess it's the romantic in me that longs for a promised land that isn't quite utopia but it's close. Then again, utopia has always been with us, always longed after, popping up in all those weird places that make America what it is.

There are a couple of analyses of utopia (Graham Ward and Paul Ricoeur in particular) that point out this impulse. It is most prevalent today in the dream of the suburbs, our idea of what the 1950's were like, and in political rhetoric. What becomes most disconcerting to me is that, as Ward has pointed out, the utopian dreams of "cities of endless desire" or "cities of eternal ambition" are dystopian from the start. As any urban hipster who digs folk and old-timey music will tell you, city living is no utopia. We city dwellers have become The Hollow Men. Perhaps we're not as desperate as these headpieces filled with straw, at least I don't feel that desperate, but I do find that the utopian dream remains.

Perhaps its not such a bad thing, to dream of the world as it is not. Certainly, the utopian dream can lead to a neglect of the sufferings of the present but it doesn't seem like the wrong dream to have. It is simply a different kind of utopia that I actually desire. It is the promised land of Woody Guthrie songs, John Steinbeck novels, and Wes Anderson movies. It is the "old, weird America" that Greil Marcus documents in his book of the same name that I long for. But it is the New, Weird America that I live in.

The New, Weird America bears a striking resemblence to the old one. Except this one has technology. Less hand cranks, gears and sprockets; more cables and remotes and keyboards. And the utopian dream still lives on in the new, weird america but it takes on new ways of dissemination, that is, new forms of distribution. I'll focus on one aspect of the new, weird america--partisan narratives.

As a philosopher partial to Narrative thought I should be happy about the way that people are throwing around narratives for their parties and how knowledgable about their construction. But my problem is precisely that which, I believe, most important: Content Matters. What the old, weird america did was create a narrative based on issues (at least from my recollection). Problems had solutions and you chose what solution you wanted. I know that I am generalizing and maybe overly so. What I've noticed in our political rhetoric, what angers me the most, is that these narrative swindlers spin their stories not about issues but about ways of life. My people, their people, us v. them, the people v. the elites, etc. On and on they go until they've made us suspicious of our neighbors. Maybe this is what they mean by identity politics. The problem with this, besides its questionable morality, is that it thinks that ways of life are fixed. But any student of history knows that the narrative keeps changing. Aristotle reminds us in his Poetics that action is what makes a drama a drama.

So when there's a farmer buying parts for his tractor on ebay and an urban hipster like myself listening to Dr. Ralph Stanley and the Clinch Mountain Boys without the slightest feeling of irony or anachronism, the narrative hucksters are dead in the water. Those narratives about dumb hicks loving their guns and porn and nascar are just as absurd as those narratives about the coastal ivy-leaguers with their indie music, art films, and smarterer-than-thou attitudes. Certainly, there are those people who we all know who make those stereotypes somewhat true. But to craft a whole demographic of people who are ruining it for everybody because they live a certain way, like certain music, movies, restaurants, etc. is completely bogus.

Sometimes these narratives are necessary; in particular I am thinking of energy use narratives. They give us a story by which to judge our actions and in the best cases, give us reasons to change. Here, in the New, Weird America, we can tell the most outlandish stories because they are true, Ivy-Leaguers do actually love appalacian music and farmers do have ipods. And if these narratives are good, they'll be big enough to incorporate both farmers and pharmacologists into their tale and hopefully provide us with new, weird utopian dreams to hope for.