Crank dat cultural imperialism

I think the single, basic American idea that has spread through pop culture and caused more disruption than any other is that marriage should be based on romantic love and partners should choose each other. This is such a bedrock American assumption and so different from most of the world for most of history that we can't recognize what a radical idea it is.

I think the political freedoms that may be spread by pop culture are all based in that personal freedom. Not one in a thousand artists creating work to spread that meme even realize there would be anything controversial about it. And interestingly, India has developed an entire film industry that while it may not reject the idea, at least has it competing with more traditional views of marriage. (Though my ignorance of Bollywood is vast. Someone with a greater knowledge of the genre is welcome to correct my belief.) Just try to imagine a Hollywood movie having a happy ending where the heroine accepts an arranged marriage and the comforts of her family and community rather than rebelling and leaving her home to be with the man she loves.

I wonder how this happened - to what extent was this already an American narrative, and to what extent was it the result of newly American Jews trying to leave behind as much of the Shtetl and the Lower East Side as they could on their way to the West Coast? I guess I can add that to the list of graduate theses I'll never write...

This is a crucial observation for today. Historically, marriage is at base a legal arrangement for the management of property and children--love had little to nothing to do with it, except perhaps to complicate things considerably. Adultery was problematic not because of an abstract value of sexual fidelity, but the substantial likelihood that sex would create kids and thereby extend financial obligations; similarly divorce was an abdication of financial responsibility, not something that God hated because, well, it was just something that really got his goat and who are we to piss him off?

Boy, have we really helped to trip that up.

The dissolution of this legal framework has not been without consequence. Think of the recent wave of honor killings in the West and beyond, as teens follow their heart against the wishes of the patriarchs. I'm not defending honor killings by any means--just noting the phenomenon.

Separation and reinvention are so interwoven into the American fabric of personal identity that it's hard for most of us to imagine that things could be otherwise. It's equally fascinating to see how our internalization of the immigrant experience expresses itself in globalized memes.