Even More Great American Inventions
Plastic grocery bags guaranteed to spill or break.
Mass telephoning of recorded sales messages (at suppertime).
A minority group endowed with large, unprecedented privileges by law, that continues to complain of oppression by the "privileged" majority.
Advertising and government spending on welfare defined as contributions to the Gross National Product.
Professors of humanities who have no learning, no intellectual curiosity, and no interest in their subjects.
"News reporters" who can't tell the difference between facts and feelings.
Christmas as a spending and consumption orgy.
Manufactured chewing gum (in multiple flavours).
White flight.
The cigarette, the most toxic form of tobacco use.
The pro-war bumper sticker.
Moral éclat by forcing other people into situations that one would never submit to oneself.
Presidential "debates" that are not really debates.
Libraries and bookstores filled with nonbooks.
Las Vegas.
The Easter Bunny.
Entries(RSS)
hip hop, bubble gum rock, and techno-pop
I like the Easter bunny also I never understood how it became part of Easter, can't remember a 6 foot tall Easter bunny in the bible. A whale, a talking bush. a bronze bull but not an Easter bunny.
Support our troops. (I'm against the Iraq war because....but I support our troops).
NGO’s.
Post sticks (Adhesive is to weak falls of).
Political references to Hitler (Saddams Hitler, Iranian pres dudes Hitler).
IMF (international usury organisation)
Militant homosexuality.
Guy pride marches.
Militant feminism.
Kosovo.
"Christmas as a spending and consumption orgy."
Christmas came at our house when you hit the door, sometime after Thanksgiving, and smelled Louisiana satsumas and Louisiana navel oranges: it meant that daddy was home and had already peeled one or more.
Christmas came at our house when daddy bored a hole in a coconut, which mama had bought for Christmas cakes, and drank the juice out of it. Tiny folk were not allowed to drink it because it was alleged to "give one the runs." Actually, I believe that daddy wanted it all for himself; however, at or about twelve, a sort of Protestant barmitsvah took place: a "man" got to drink the coconut juice.
Christmas came at our house when Uncle Charlie came. He was allowed out of the VA hospital at Christmas. I think that we loved him because he enjoyed the little things so much, little things Lwhich he did not get in the hospital. The main thing which he did not get he did not get in the hospital but got at our house was my mother's eggnog, with just enough whiskey to make us Baptists blush. I still make my mother's eggnog and toast Uncle Charlie who left us in the early fall of 1976 after thirty -three long years in the hospital following his wounding in a the landing near Casablanca.
Christmas came at our house when Mawmaw and Aunt Alice came to spend the night. Before retiring, the family read the Christmas story. Before I could read well, I had memorized most of the story. At about six years of age, I was handed the Bible and asked to read the story. Without really reading it, I read it in my best King James English. I was a hit! I am still ask to read it although, save for my mother of ninety-one years, all of the original cast and audience are gone to that place where Christmas really is.
Christmas came at our house when all of the old folks told of their Christmases: some funny and some sad, but always, even with the sadness, joyful. My father, the youngest of eight, recalled in wonderful narrative each year that Christmas morning when he was six and found in his stocking - actually an old woolen sock - horse turds rather than the navel oranges, the standard Christmas present in his family until he went off to WWII. It seems that his older brothers had already visited his stocking, eaten his oranges and replaced them with the horse "apples." Daddy said, well before Dr. Seuss wrote it, that Christmas came anyway. Uncle Bobby, after whom I am named and who was killed at nineteen somewhere in western Germany in the closing months of WWII, got, according to his siblings, a "cowboy" outfit for Christmas when he was about six. The outfit was really just some old jeans which my grandmother had altered to look like "cowboy" pants. That very day, a friend thew a firecracker which went into the cowboy pants, blew out the seat and burned Uncle Bobby. Although I never met Uncle Bobby, I think about him every Christmas.
Not a lot was spent on the Advent at our house. We did "consume" oranges, coconuts and eggnog in moderation.
My daddy, interestingly enough, always turned to Revelation at Christmas and read Christ's promise: Behold, I stand at the door, and knock: if any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me. Papa's Christmas prayer was always an opening of the door.
Dr. Wilson,
Assuming "white flight" is a reference to the white middle class's response to forced integration, affirmative action, and other egalitarian public policies in the 60s and 70s, I must ask you:
What should they have done? What could they have done, except move to suburbs where they wouldn't have to be forced to associate with masses of poor minorities?
robert m. peters
"The outfit was really just some old jeans which my grandmother had altered to look like “cowboy” pants. That very day, a friend thew a firecracker which went into the cowboy pants, blew out the seat and burned Uncle Bobby"
Classic, and very funny. Dr. Wilson was correct in saying that your reminisces of Looosiana are delightful.
The New Deal and The Great Society.
"Mass telephoning of recorded sales messages (at suppertime)"
Here, in this season, it is the political messages. These messages are an assault on the intimacy of supper. The politicians may have "approved the messages," but I have not and do not.
The long distance commute to work.
Brought about by forced white flight from the cities and the disappearance small farms amongst the rural folk caused by agribusiness and the gospel of 'progress'.
To Brock H. @4
I'm sure that Dr. Wilson doesn't blame ordinary white people, at least not as much as the government - for establishing the conditions that cause "white flight". And, by the way, ordinary white people will, sooner or later, will have to do something about this, for there will be less and less space to flee to. Either that or total dissapearance by blending in or outbreeding. You're welcome to make a chice.
#3 robert peters
Write the book.
White flight.
Moral eclat by forcing other people into situations that one would never submit to oneself.
Brock H., putting those two Great American inventions together, it's clear to this reader that Dr. Wilson isn't blaming ordinary whites for fleeing from the moral eclat of the elites.
I'm with GOM, Mr. Peters, write the book!
"Libraries and bookstores filled with nonbooks."
I know you mean CDs and DVDs, but the first thing I thought of were Harry Potter jellybeans (in "dirt" and "earwax" flavors).
And Mr. Peters, you do need to write a book.
#4. They might have elected better leaders. At the same time those people were inventing "white flight" to cope wih the conditions they themselves had created, they were self-righteously imposing revolution on the South.
#12. Nopes. I have in mind "nonbooks," i.e., books that are not really books but compilations of
.......junk thought
Football
Baseball
Basketball
"pro" wrestling
The Bible Belt
Appalachia
Country-Western "music"
Sunday Papers that require a forklift to carry
Women's Studies
African-American Studies
PBS
Trailer parks
Houses constructed of cheap timber and drywall ( and obscenely overpriced to boot )
Various sports "Halls of Fame"
to be continued..............
Brock H
They weren't just fleeing poor minorities. Whites are also fleeing legal asian immigrants who push up housing costs and property taxes. What should Whites have done? They should have shut illegal and legal immigration down to 0.
alcohol free beer
fat free snack foods
frozen dinners
tang
If Sempronius is referring to the modern pseudo-country music, then he has a point, but not if he speaks of the old country music, but that's going back a few years, and of course I'd rather not even get into the decline in morality of the genre since the sixties.
I'm not sure what he means by 'Appalachia' or 'The Bible Belt'.
How about these:
Starbucks
Megamalls
Wal Mart super centres
Fiberglass roofing cement (it shrinks when it dries or gets hot, so you cant just fix a leak with it like you could with the old coal tar)
Soy additives
What about Tofu, or is that an import?
Cultural oppression in the name of diversity (Southern culture, or banning the Irish shamrock)
Religious oppression in the name of religious tolerance (outlawing nativity scenes, etc.)
War To End All Wars
Edutainment
Marxist propaganda masquerading as business advertising
Propaganda masquerading as entertainment
the 'New Age' movement
Televangelism
Has anyone mentioned that other neo-pagan religion, the Lincoln cult?
Did anyone mention "public education," otherwise known as Compulsory State Indoctrination?
Friendly Fire.
"Has anyone mentioned that other neo-pagan religion, the Lincoln cult?"
Yes - Dr Wilson himself did in his last 'American Inventions' piece.
Madison Avenue, Hollywood, Las Vegas = the "essence" of America.
Mega churches = the "essence" of Christianity - they will preach another "gospel" and another "Christ."
Bobby Jindal = the Republican Obama, almost.
Ophra and Dr. Phil = the "feminine and masculine" voices of the fickle and whimsical mass labeled "Americans."
"
Brittany and Paris = the "faces" of the fickle and whimsical mass labeled "Americans."
Hunting = sitting in a prefabricated "stand" with heater, chair, iPod, cooler, thermos, etc. looking down prepared "firing lanes" baited with corn and wheat while looking through a scope, set to marked points on the range, mounted on a very expensive weapon, usually brought new each year, which itself is mounted on a tripod. They pose with their pictures in the paper. Ironically, all of us rednecks of yesteryear, even the rough McClain boys who lived down in Flaggon Swamp, who were perhaps the last or next to last generation which really hunted knew that when one killed a cow it became beef; a pig became pork and a deer became venison (Saxon versus Norman in our heritage); however, these post-modern hunters know only the term "deer meat" and accuse one who knows and practices the old ways of being "high-minded" for trying to impose such a "word" on them. Even "rednecks" ain't what they used to be.
In Charlotte we see a new phenomenon -- black flight, caused by gentrification. Investors are buying up properties in inner urban neighborhoods that have long been in decline, scraping or remodeling and reselling to yuppies at outlandish premiums. Needless to say, most of the buyers aren't locals. The black folk are falling back into rental areas swarmed by Hispanics. Gang violence. The Queen City of the "New South."
GMP @ 10 and others
My daughter is about to come into possession of all of my short stories, three score or more, which have been heroically doing battle with mites, spiders, mice, heat and humidity over the years as they have sat on yellowing paper in old boxes which once held whiskey, soap, cigarettes, etc.. They have survived the physical elements in strange quarters. If they get by my daughter's blue pen and make their way to some publisher, then they might come to the page of some book which, like an unanticipated mushroom after a rainy day, might appear on a bookshelf near you.
#15 Do you mean the 21st century version of football,baseball and basketball
An incredibly new and clever way for White Males to waste their precious time on this planet:Fantasy Football. How about Fantasy Fantasy Football.
Football, basketball, and baseball are all New England inventions (and I will debate anybody about their origins, and their wonderful combinations of order, creativity, and violence), but are now mostly Southern games. Is the SEC dominant by accident? The cult has moved south, not entirely a bad thing.
Mr. Wilson, tofu has been eaten for a long time in most oriental cultures (without any repuation as hip or trendy) that I know of, so it must be an import if Americans are eating it.
New Age movement : I think America might be spared the "honor" of this invention, since Madame Blavatsky, Ouspensky, and Gurdjieff (two of them Russians; one an Armenian who spent some time in Russia) beat us to it by almost a century. But you are right in that it was (later) packaged in America.
When I look at the lists of what people have added to this topic, I am struck by how many of these things have been adopted by foreign countries. Or else copied.
I still can't figure out what is wrong with Appalachia, or how it was
invented. I thought it was simply a geographical region.
Dr. Peters, thanks for the update; I will be on the lookout for your book! (Or books? You could do one fiction based on your treasures at home, and then a non-fiction one based on what you've written here. Heck, all you'd have to do is copy/edit your last ten or twenty posts and have it printed up).
The game of basket ball was invented in Canada as an exercise game for high school and college students.
And the great American Unwashed occupy a significant portion of their time arguing about and watching this juvenile's game played by overpaid and under-talented freaks.
Agreed that the latter is indeed an American invention.
H.F. Wolff
robert peters
" Hunting = sitting in a prefabricated “stand” with heater, chair, iPod, cooler, thermos, etc. looking down prepared “firing lanes” baited with corn and wheat while looking through a scope, set to marked points on the range, mounted on a very expensive weapon, usually brought new each year, which itself is mounted on a tripod. "
Wow. Absolutely true. More and more hunters are now the 'Fudds' you describe so well. The 'firing lanes' idea always seemed more akin to a video game than a hunt.
Mr. Wolff @ 28
I began my basketball career in the 8th grade and ended two years later as the season of my tenth-grade year came to a close.
In the 8th grade, Mr. D., a man of Napoleon's stature and ego, took as his raw material my absolute lack of athletic ability and made of me a passable forward. He also instilled in me my love of language.
In the 9th grade, I was on the squad-in-waiting. I made the team in the tenth grade and became an award-winning member of the splinter gang, i.e. those of us who sat on the wooden bench most of the time. When we were fifty points ahead or fifty points behind, I or another member of the gang got sent in. My time into a game, I managed to make two points on the wrong end of the court. At the end of the year, at halftime, my teammates gave me a splinter of rich-lighter pine stump.
Through basketball, my humility was enhanced. I still love my two coaches and the boys I played with. I cannot say that for all of the persons and personae whom I have encountered in academe.
Give Robert M Peters his own column on this blog. He can write up his reminiscences whenever he feels he has something worth reading.
Reading RMP's memories would certainly be an enjoyable way to spend a few minutes.
Mr Maxwell: you're right, and I honestly forgot that the Lincoln cult was mentioned by Dr Wilson in the last piece , but it does deserve repeating nevertheless.
Mr Ezzo: of course you're right, but I was thinking more of the modern New Age movement, which has developed and changed and become partly political and environmentalist.
Beer brewed for long distance shipping instead of quality and taste
Food designed to sell, not eat
The TV commercial
Popular culture as a prepackaged corporate product ('culture' than can be mass produced and sold as a commodity)
Image masquerading as substance (porn being the most profound example of this)
The Cheap Imitation (such as imitation leather, or soy burgers)
'Music' as a preplanned invention (rap)
ghetto 'culture'
Imitation redneck culture (CMT)
The fake, affected Southern Yankee accent (produced by self-hating Southerners trying to be Yankees)
The fake, affected white ghetto dialect (produced by self-hating whites trying to be black)
Knee-jerk rejection of high culture and classical music (this has to be an American invention)
and the most bizarre invention of all: Country Rap (it's a good thing somebody invented barf bags)
Mr. Maxwell @ 29
There are at least one hundred true hunting stories seeking to make their way out of my head, sans Jägerlatein!
I was never an avowed survivalist - a guy who takes only his teeth into the woods and gnaws the bark of trees for nutrition. But I was a minimalist - I took only what I could carry in an ammunition belt, along with a rifle or shotgun, a pistol and a Bowie knife, often staying out four or five days.
One cold winter when freezing rain was not uncommon in November in Louisiana, my father and I set out separately from our base camp of poles and tarp in the Tensas Swamp to stalk deer. Later that day, after the shadows had reversed their position, although they could not be seen for the clouds, my father and I met, unexpectedly, near a canebreak. We decided to go back to camp together. We came to a slough with four to six feet of water in it. The slough lay between us and our base camp which was about four hundred yards further to the east. To the south, the slough ran into a bayou which fed into the Tensas. To the north, about a mile up, it simply ended among some palmetto. It was there that we had both, separately, circumvented the slough that morning.
My father suggested that if we waded the slough we would be at the base camp within minutes rather than within an hour or more. So, going waist deep into the slough, with rain freezing on our jackets and our guns over our heads, my father turned, grinned and said, "We wouldn't rake leaves in this weather, would we?" I replied, "No, sir!" and remembered the times I had told my mother that the weather was too bad to do some chore outside.
Mr. Peters, I am sure your short stories are fine, but your memoirs are priceless. They invoke the true dignity, courage, and humour of the vanishing South---the essential Southern literature that Mel Bradford called "hard pastoral."
Addendum
"Fresh" food shipped from California to the East Coast.
32 Mr. Wilson:
Imitation leather...
I believe that the substitution thing is probably of German origin due to wartime shortages.
Ersatzkaffee comes to mind, and Ersatzleder.
Mr. Peters,
Would you happen to remember how high your baskets were above the court floor?
It seems to me that for the professional game the baskets ought to be twice as high so as to permit some skills to be developed.
I played soccer for a very brief period. My joints, knees especially, were too valuable to subject them to such punishment.
Saaaay, are joint replacements an American invention?
H.F. Wolff
Mr. Wolff @ 28: "Overpaid" is correct; about everything else you are wrong.
The worst American invention: Viva Viagra!
North American Union
Flouride in drinking water.
Not sure if the US create these things.
Speed bumps (perfect smooth roads then install speed bumps on them).
Internet censorship filters like "intolerance filters" in libraries and airports.
Kosher tax on food and non food items.
It's hard to tell whether Dr. Wilson's list is intended to be a criticism of America (i.e. its laws) or of Americans (i.e. us, ourselves, "we da peeps"). If it's a criticism of America per se, I can't agree. There's nothing necessary about the development of most of these things. Strictly speaking, there's nothing necessary about ANY of them, but there are a few where at least the temptation to engage in them can be put down to our fundamental laws. In the majority of the cases, however, it is not the fault of our laws, but the corruption of morals in our citizens.
Insofar as the corruption of morals has led to odious laws in modern times, then yeah, you can say these are in some sense the fault of "America." But in that case it's an America that really isn't America: it's not the America of the Founders; it's not the America created by our original Constitution. Intrusive, discourteous mass marketing, reverse discrimination, the crass commercialization of Christmas, etc. are all effects of our flight from Christian-based government (and Christian faith in general) and the adoption of essentially amoral doctrines in its place. It is, in the end, modern, flesh and blood Americans who are responsible for the evil, not "America."
As I said, though, a couple of the things listed ARE basically American in origin, and can be traced back to our form of government as the cause. Political debates that aren't debates, for instance, are a product of democracy. True enough, when morals were higher, when politicians were more inclined to actually care about the people they governed and their liberty, political debate was more substantive and honest than it is today. Nevertheless, the desire to be elected and to sway the public has always spawned rhetorical excess and a tendency toward manipulation. Similarly, the pro-war bumper sticker isn't something uniquely modern. Certain classes of people--generally, those in a position to profit from it and not to have to fight it themselves--have always clamored for war when it suited their interests.
Anyway, I won't go on. I just read this in passing and it struck me that I didn't know for sure what Dr. Wilson was claiming. If his disdain is for the America of the Founders, then I think his disdain is misplaced. But if it's for the corrupt, phony America we live in today and the malignant products it has spawned, I'm with him 100%.
#37 Mr. Willson:
Look up 'James Naismith' of Ontario, Canada.
H.F. Wolff
I both agree and concur with Dr. Wilson's condemnatory mention of cigarettes, for I consider them to be an abuse against good tobacco. Yes, I, as did so many others, started out with cigarettes; but I gave them over directly I caught the knack of smoking a brier pipe. In so doing, I ascended an order of magnitude in smoking pleasure:
No perfume, no artificial flavor, no combustion-accelerants (Why do you think a lit cigarette keeps burning when you set it down?), and no moisture preservatives. Only the varietals of the eastern Mediterranean, the most beautiful tobaccos on God's Green Earth, in one tantalizing blend after another.
But I had rather simply not smoke at all, than smoke cigarettes.
H.F. Wolff @39
Yes, and James Naismith was in Springfield, MA when he invented basketball, and it was a New England American game from the beginning. It is a New England game, just as hockey is a Canadian game, both invented by orderly Anglo-Saxons and taken over by cultures more suited to the playing of these noble sports.
Respectfully, JPW
And by the way, although I have not smoked for many years, I enjoyed every cigarette I ever had, and firmly believe that the snobs who dignify pipes and cigars are just that--snobs.
Mr. Willson @ 42
Uncle Willie, my one of my daddy's older brothers, was dangerous with both cigars and cigarettes.
On one of his trips back South, from which he lived in self-imposed exile in Detroit, Michigan, (we used to say "Detroit City") because he had blown up a laundry in Pollock thirty years earlier, he gave me a life-long case of acrophobia with a cigar. I was about eighteen-months old; he had come for a visit and had gone on a walk behind our house with a lighted cigar. The behind of our house was a huge sage patch which Uncle Willie set ablaze with his cigar. The fire threatened our house. My father, in a frantic effort to save the house, put up a ladder to access the roof so that he could get the pine straw off which had accumulated there. Once he had done that, he and others directly attacked the conflagration. With the adults so occupied, I climbed the ladder and walked onto the roof, from which I promptly fell some ten feet to the ground without a scratch, or so folks thought. About nine years later, while climbing a fire tower, I discovered that I had acrophobia. Uncle Willie had given it to me.
He also smoked cigarettes. In his two story and basemented house in Detroit, he had a sofa in the upstairs bedroom. When Uncle Willie smoked there was always a sense of alarm - the blown up laundry and the fire at our place contributed to it. But the real cause of the alarm was the long ashes which accumulated at the end of his cigarettes. It seemed that he could smoke nearly then entire cigarette to ashes without dropping them. Apparently, he dropped some of the ashes on the sofa in the bedroom in the second story of his house. My Aunt Ann, while at work, got a call that there was a fire at their house. The sofa had smoldered, gotten very hot, and burned a hole straight through the bedroom floor and had then fallen into the living room. From there, it burned a hole and fell on into the basement. Lots of smoke damage, but the house was otherwise intact.
When Uncle Willie walked the Earth, the lines between snob and common man were blurred. To my knowledge, he did not smoke a pipe. Had he, there would have likely been a third fire.
My father had a neighbour who, when he couldn't find an ashtray handy, would flick cigarette ashes down into his shirt pocket. They all came out when the shirt got washed. I have found this practice handy on rare occasions.
I wouldn't go so far as accuse cigar and pipe aficionados of snobbery, but I concur that cigarettes, though the lowest form of tobacco smoking, is nevertheless alright, in moderation.
Even so, a pack a day is way too much. They should be smoked slowly, for the taste, and not just to get a nicotine fix. Dont smoke seven days a week. Finally, stick with good brands and not cheap generics.
Try European cigarettes on occasion.
Mr Wolff, of course you are right, but I wasn't really thinking of substitution in wartime, rather of The Cheap Imitation in times of peace and relative plenty.
Mr. Peters @ 43: That is a hoot, and maybe the best morality tale I have ever heard about smoking.
I advise cigarette smokers to pay a visit to the factory.