2 Americas

The two Americas.. one of animal ferocity, but somehow in touch with it's civility, the other of docile playfulness, but somehow disconnected from it's wildness until it erupts...
One has skinned a deer and the other thinks it is savage to consider doing such a thing, but will still eat meat at the table. I wonder how many cultures have ever gotten so far into such a separation between food production and consumption.. it is a superlative of our culture, and sadly might be on our epitaph, but what evidence of how complex we have become, but at the expense of making generations of people squeamish like children when it comes to the reality of where food comes from. Butchering my first animal was for some reason a huge treat for me, like an anthropology class of the greatest value, and if you react to this you definitely are telling me which America you belong to. the other America, that of the raw side of our equation, would just wonder why I would make a big deal of it.. We enshrine them in films, like No Country for Old Men and The Grey, but most don't really want to be them.. the norm functions in the conventional wisdom of actuarial safety, protected by an OSHA for the mind, no matter how many people get blown up in Schwartzie's Commando ( I think this 80's B movie held the record for the most killings in a feature length film.. it must have been surpassed by now. Not to sell it short, it was Elissa Milano's debut as well. What a gift this film!).
If you learn about some of the villains of our time, like Kliebold and Harris, you can almost see that part of what drove them was a curiosity about the forbidden, which isn't that forbidden in any of the less economically blessed places in the world.
This reminds me of something I once saw in a remote high floor corner of the American Museum of Natural History on Central Park West in New York (for those of you from the squeamish America, your reference would be that it is one of the two museums represented in A Night at the Museum, that Ben Stiller movie that never grosses you out like some do, and it does have a statue of Theodore Roosevelt in front, riding a horse in all his proud glory...). It was a statement on an old display by a woman who had collected most of what was in that gallery. She had been working someplace in either Polynesia or South America with a famous anthropologist (which I believe she eventually became) who was training her, back in what must have been the 50's when National Geographic actually had differences in the World to write about, and he asked her if she had ever witnessed a death in her own country. She said she had not. He sent her home to witness one, then asked her to come back. He didn't want her perspective on death to come from a cultural vacuum.
So often ours in America does seem to come from a reflexive vacuum. I wonder how many Americans first experience with witnessing a real death was from Video on September 11th. It's a funny thing, what we have created.. so safe it's dangerous...