Growing up in Europe, I had a lot of conversations with other Europeans about American culture. And more than once, people claimed that the U.S. "doesn’t hav...
“American” is how they usually describe themselves. You might be familiar with them from movies like “star wars” or “captain america”, or their countless export of songs, reporting, jingoism, and comic books.
It can be easy to be confused since they still call their language “English” and there is a bevy of actors and other creatives from Canada, Australia, and the UK, but there are actually people who aren’t from those places or any other place.
The problem with the “American” national identity that you claim is so indelible is it’s not coherent or consistent. Ask several different “Americans” what it means to be American and you’re likely to get several, significantly different, possibly even mutually exclusive answers. They may all identify as American but they have different conceptions of what that means.
I want to make something clear: I was born and raised in the US and I’ve lived here my entire life. I always identified as American, and I thought I knew what that meant, but I don’t anymore. I travel all over the country and everywhere I go I encounter people who feel more and more foreign to me all the time. We don’t understand or relate to each other very well. It’s even gotten to the point where there’s a good amount of hostility and animosity between us. I think all of that is pretty antithetical to a shared national identity, regardless of what movies and songs come out of a handful of big corporations in LA.
And what’s that?
“American” is how they usually describe themselves. You might be familiar with them from movies like “star wars” or “captain america”, or their countless export of songs, reporting, jingoism, and comic books.
It can be easy to be confused since they still call their language “English” and there is a bevy of actors and other creatives from Canada, Australia, and the UK, but there are actually people who aren’t from those places or any other place.
The problem with the “American” national identity that you claim is so indelible is it’s not coherent or consistent. Ask several different “Americans” what it means to be American and you’re likely to get several, significantly different, possibly even mutually exclusive answers. They may all identify as American but they have different conceptions of what that means.
I want to make something clear: I was born and raised in the US and I’ve lived here my entire life. I always identified as American, and I thought I knew what that meant, but I don’t anymore. I travel all over the country and everywhere I go I encounter people who feel more and more foreign to me all the time. We don’t understand or relate to each other very well. It’s even gotten to the point where there’s a good amount of hostility and animosity between us. I think all of that is pretty antithetical to a shared national identity, regardless of what movies and songs come out of a handful of big corporations in LA.