Welcome everybody, everybody welcome. everyone meet everyone else. Be glad to know you are all here because you are all very intelligent people in my own personal belief of what intelligence actually is on a basic street level understanding.
I decided Id spend the day in bed (Sunday), I have been very busy and sick for the last few weeks so Im on vacation in bed today with my new Radiohead album http://www.inrainbows.com I paid a quid for it.
Im browsing the internet like I havent done in ages looking at other peoples photography and came accross this guy http://www.chrisjordan.com/ and am fascinated by his vision. However it almost shits me now to the point that I want to turn the tables and start laying the shit on the Europeans. (even though ironically this photographer is in fact American himself, though a victim of his own short commings -this will become apparent as you read on).
its become quite the catch phrase for use to drop the open gated gesture of “In the US..” which from living here now for three years and going from the open mouthed ignorance of a audienced outsider to an informed “embed”, I can honestly say is possibly the most over used and under appreciated turn of phrase currently bandied about without much regard for its actual meaning.
Im not one for religion, to me its the politicism of ones personal belief mechanism and convenient metaphore for understanding the things which are not that understandable. However, the largest policitcal institution out there -the HRE (Holy Roman Empire), (I enjoy a fully paid up membership being Irish, I dont have to subscribe every month or even year, we are endebted with lifelong memberships from birth we can get away will all kinds of stuff you pagans cant -I dont even have to go to church its great) anyway sorry for boasting, where was I, oh yes..
Not being one for religion etc, they (we) have a great book out there that if it wasnt called the Bible would probably be on the NY times best seller list indefinitely, and in it somewhere around page 368 it says ‘Let he who is without sin cast the first stone” which basically means people who live in glasshouses shouldnt throw stones.
It bothers me considerably that our impotent (in any real sense) guardians of moral elevated authority -the media- Im thinking specifically of non american media and within that specifically british media because every other media organisation with inclusion of al-jazeera (yes yes yes these people just love to copy the already tried true and tested formulae and drop it on its head and re-engineer if from the waist up -but they fail to realise that their signiture methodology comes from a source that is the antithesis of what they themselves represent, kind of like eating your own hands, but then agian its because of that religion stuff -again), is parrot-like in the shadow format of these two organisations. Specifically the BBC. Its that over use of the phrase “In the US” which bothers me so.
In the US, the US part of this phrase refers to a country for those of you who have forgotten. This country is not a bucolic paradigm to which it has been customarily designed through the culpapble lack of language.
America is the pretty red ribbon used to bind the segments of that beautiful whole, that whole which represents vastly more then the sum of its parts. It is a basic and complex summation of parts. It is easy for us to use a phrase to prescribe a percieved mindset which exists within a geographic location to a single fragmentalised action, a pre-structuralised subset or a specificly designed mechanism, and even easier for those of us who cannot begin to wear the livery of pre-established foundation, to throw valuable words around in a trivial frivolous inconsequential manner, specifically in this time when every syllable and inference is of the utmost of importance.
I can relate to your feelings about the US and living there. I have grappled with the national Australian identity for many years; and why I don’t feel like I am a part of this society and never have; despite my desire to be so. Never having lived in America, I can’t fully understand what it is like there. For Australia, it seems like there is a media driven national identity. It is quite aggressive and exclusive. It is also quite dishonest. Issues of origin and heritage are rarely, if ever addressed or tackled in a historical or social sense, by the same media. Anyway, I don’t even know if this relates to your post at all. I guess this is what came to my mind when I read it though. Good luck with your own adaptation to the US.