clash of cultures 1

Well as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the poet, says, life has her her cookies to give out, and sometimes maybe she likes the cut of your jib, and maybe sometimes she is just in a good mood and looks down and there you are.

And there you go, though I wouldn’t believe a word that comes out of flim flam man Bob’s mouth, this is what the writer does, he writes general enough so that it could mean something to almost anybody, and specific enough so that it has some substance. Well this song is not that specific, but it is full of rich images, and the language, oh my.

I particularly like the language on Blonde on Blonde. The words seem so meaningful and deep, but then when you see them on paper, they kind of don’t make any sense. Visions of Johanna has this nice little story of him cuddled up with Louise, but not able to get Johanna out of his mind, and then we come to:

He writes ev’rything’s been returned which was owed
On the back of the fish truck that loads
While my conscience explodes

Fish truck? Fish truck, Bob what the fuck? But anyway it is a song that you can relate to.

I think a good writer writes something that is complex and has ambiguity so that you can take his writing several different ways and still enjoy it. Good guy/bad guy stories can be taken in only one way and again, I don’t like them.

Nice story Beagles. I will be looking forward to hearing about those leaves and trees after the weekend, but right now I want to get to the the clash of cultures. I see that what I wrote yesterday was class of cultures, my mistake, I should reread more carefully.

But it does begin with a class. In order to get into edukashun skool I had to take a few extra classes that I had never taken at U of I. One of the classes was Cultural Anthropology, and I thought swell, Martha Mead, exotic lands, I like that stuff.

And it had some of that stuff in it, and that was cool, but then I noticed at the end of the chapter, in the summation, it always came out that everything the white man had done was wrong and everything the natives had done was right, and so it went on for chapter after chapter. This was all political correctness stuff, and one thing that political correctness doesn’t like is other opinions. Anybody who might quibble with them is by definition a racist or a sexist or a homophobe or something, so clearly they have nothing worth saying.

But maybe they have a point. Is any culture superior to another? Was the Incas’ culture superior to some culture of canoers in Indonesia? Well probably not, they both took what was around them and built up something and though they might be different, no reason to think that one was better than the other. Let’s say the Incas had more people, and covered more land, and they had a little better technology, does that make them any better? I don’t think so.

And we have a culture, let’s call it a secular culture because no particular religion predominates. We are against racism, we think women should be treated well, we like education, we believe in rationality. And we don’t only believe these rights are right for us, but we think they are right for everybody. But we don’t want to impose them on everybody. 

Strangers come to our town to do some manual kind of work, because they are not very educated, and they have their own religion, and their own customs, which seem odd to us, and also sometimes repellent, but we don’t want to be telling other people what to do.

Okay than we are France and those guys are muslims. Well certainly they are not allowed to murder us, we can all be against that. But are we allowed to make fun of them? In the one sense, certainly, everybody is allowed to make fun of everybody else, but that is our value system. In their value system nobody is allowed to make fun of the prophet. Well should we soft pedal it then, just to be nice? I think probably. But should we be forced to, should we be expected to stop some of our guys from doing it? But then isn’t that violating the principle of freedom of speech, which is one of our most important values? I think it is. How can you have freedom of speech if you are not allowed to hurt anybody’s feelings?

But the muslims aren’t that big on freedom of speech, so aren’t we at a point where we are trying to decide which culture is superior? But then we are in France, our country, so doesn’t that trump the question of which country is superior?

But if we look from the muslim side again, here they are in this other country, and there are doubtless a lot of white Frenchies who are out and out racists, so that it just looks like racism to them.

And then there is the matter of our servicemen and our businessmen working in Saudi Arabia who, if they are Christians, have to keep it on the down low, and if they are women they have to cover their heads. Well we do that, just to get along, but still does that make it right? And if it’s not right for them to do that to us in their country, is it right for us to make them do stuff in our country?

Just thinking this through here, writing helps me think.