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...

How Yuppies Think

You have likely heard the term.. A lyricised acronym for Young Urban Professional, basically people who have, well, professions, they were the also-rans in college, the guys you always had a running joke with but never felt like baring your soul to... you were kind of underwhelmed with what they did with their life, knew they came from a nice enough family, but always kind of worried about what they really had to give.. They became famous in movies from the 80's, the decade when America made a clean break from it's working and rural class pasts, and created a shiny new world separate from practical realities other than economics. Movies like Working Girl, and like Melanie Griffith, they seemed prey to appetites that others would find a little pedestrian, like Antonio Banderas. They seemed to live a fantasy deferred, and talked about the future and what they would have and do someday. And that fantasy always seemed a bit sad, like something to please their father, but you would never tell them you felt so... They eventually became the but of jokes, and moved into a weird bubble that seemed artificial. After a while, it became harder and harder to give a shit about them... this is how they think:

• Yuppies like the path of least resistance. This makes them by definition mediocre, and on some level unprincipled.
• Yuppies get their ideals from their friends and family, not from learning about historical figures of role models
• Yuppies need approval
• Yuppies will mouth any platitude, but deep down inside they are in it for #1
• Yuppies rarely have a legitimate connection to their surroundings, which they usually view as inferior to some other place they abstractly dream of being. it makes it easier to live with a consumer mentality that they are rewarding themselves for some perceived suffering or deferred satisfaction in a place they are too good for.. if they took the time to realize what was really going on around them, the construct would fall apart, and they would have to divert from the path of least resistance which is usually a well paying job, and a perception of a compromised existence that 4/5 of the world would kill for...
• Yuppies would have no problem seeing others suffer to make their life or the lives of those they think they love safer...
• Yuppies equate money with all the rewards that are worth having in life.. They crave financial security at the behest of all else.
• When yuppies are in charge.. They stack the deck.
• Yuppies like to drink... They think it is a reward, and they only way they can have fun.
• Yuppies like safe edgy, and are afraid to venture into true fetish or pleasure seeking at the behest of security. In other words, Yuppies Love Vegas, but if they loved Tijuana, they would stop being yuppies and become something all together more sordid but human... Which might be their greatest fear.
• Yuppies always claim to want silence and peace and a chance to think, some beach vacation where nothing happens, but in fact, it is the thing they are most afraid of.
• Yuppies, no matter how much they claim to love rebellion and spontaneity, will judge you and discount you if you have not constantly made the same financially self advancing rational and logical decisions they have made.
• Yuppies believe they set the standards for normalcy in behavior, and that doing so is a virtue.
• They judge things outside them by the distance they deviate from that norm
• Yuppies are obsessed with Cancer. Since they play it safe in almost all regards, they feel like Cancer is the one thing that can sneak up on them and ruin the fun they are having being the norm. They mourn people who die of cancer as victims, and they love to mourn victims, since being a victim implies innocence, and they love to see innocence as a virtue. Innocence is usually defined by doing what is socially acceptable, and expecting to not be singled out or mistreated as a result.
• Yuppies love Coldplay, U2, and Wilco. These bands make their money preying upon the emotions of people who are fulfilling other's versions or fantasies of happiness, but are unwilling to stop doing so because they feel it makes them 'virtuous' and 'selfless'.