THE CULTURAL DIFFERENCE: CULTURE. In a pub. Underground. Brick walls. Wooden tab

THE CULTURAL DIFFERENCE: CULTURE.

In a pub. Underground. Brick walls. Wooden tables.

Faux Irish decor, much cleaner and better lit than the real thing.

A television over the bar. The opening olympic ceremony.

A digital jukebox. Silent. Slightly gaudy and out of place.

Friday at 6:30pm – waves of friends meeting after work.

Patiently. Calmly. Confidently. Humbly. One after another.

With long coats buttoned against the cold – still style conscious.

Scarves. Heels. Black shoes. No suits. Perfect hair.

All the women are beautiful, even if they are not.

No sense of urgency. Or of destination. Of nervousness.

Animated cheerful conversation everywhere.

No one bearing the burdened face of American isolation:

That conflict between a desperate wish for attention and total fear of it at the same time.

That fear: that our illusory self images, carefully tended in our private warrens, fragile as wisps of blown glass, might crumble at the first hint of rejection.

American culture, if we can call it that, died with the state’s intervention in civic affairs.

America is the fulfillment of the Smithian vision: a society predicated upon the moral action produced by commerce.

But these are loaded words. Full of as much self deception as our self images but nowhere near as fragile.

There is no culture. There is no american culture. None.

Culture requires a community of common interest.

Culture just means treating everyone as ‘family members that I just don’t know well”

These fools killed the family. The black family. Now the white family.

But they killed our communal sense of family as well.

The state is a predator.

It eats everything it can touch and kills everything else it can’t.