SGT. PEPPER’S LONELY VICTIMS CLUB — or Maxwell’s Silver Microaggressions? “When Beatlemania Is a Microaggression…It is time to rejoice, for all our troubles are so far away…,” Nick Gillespie quips at Reason.
Gillespie spots psychology professor Adam J. Rodriguez of California’s Notre Dame de Namaur University, who takes to the Huffington Post* to whine that “My friend, caught in his ethnocentric blindness, could not grasp that somebody would have a different experience and values from him:”
For him, there was a given. The given was that everybody would love the Beatles. My lack of interest in their music could only be understood by him as psychopathology. I was flawed. It could not be understood as a cultural difference. Of course, he has no idea who Oscar Hernandez is, and believes that Carlos Santana wrote Oye Como Va (he didn’t, by the way). But that’s okay. How should I expect him to know these things when they are so outside of his cultural experience?
As always, life imitates Bill Murray in Stripes, who said to his girlfriend at the start of the movie, “Someday, Tito Puente’s gonna be dead, and you’re gonna say, ‘Oh, I’ve been listening to him for years, and I think he’s fabulous.'” But then, as Gillespie — himself no fan of the Beatles** — responds, lighten up, Adam:
There has never been less of a dominant monoculture than ever before and there has never been as open a standing invitation to open people’s minds to what you like, care about, and think is totally fab and gear. Without a doubt, there are people who are convinced and terrified that the world they grew up is in its death throes (watch this if you don’t believe me), which only underscores the point that the mainstream has shrunk since the mid-’90s when we talked with Rodriguez, much less 1970, when the Beatles broke up (thank you for that, Yoko Ono, thank you, thank you, thank you). From that 1994 interview again:
Most people tend to use culture in a static sense—he represents this culture and I represent this culture. I think culture is much more fluid and experiential. I belong to many cultures. I’ve had many cultural experiences. And the notion that I’ve lost my culture is ludicrous. because you can’t lose a culture. You can change a culture in your lifetime. as in fact most of us do. I’m not my father. I didn’t grow up in the state of Colima in Western Mexico. I grew up in California in the 1950s. The notion that I’ve lost his culture is, of course, at some level true, but not interesting. The interesting thing is that my culture is I Love Lucy.
For the perpetually aggrieved, time has stood still as it did for Miss Havisham and they mistake the current moment, which has different problems and advantages and contexts, for a past whose issues and indignities no longer pertain in the same way. The hunt is always afoot not for moving to a future that is open-ended, inclusive, and far more interesting and innovative than the present but for reviving and maintaining grievances, no matter how trivial and inconsequential.
Read the whole thing; no word yet if Rodriguez has any strong opinions on the Rutles.
* In an age when so many global warming experts insist, as they have for the last 45 years, that Mother Gaia only has five years to live, is this really the best use of the Huffington Post’s giant air conditioned server farm to hasten her demise?
** No seriously, how can anyone not love the Beatles?