Burke: As culture changes, so should cultural literacy expand
Published 1:30 am Wednesday, March 15, 2017
By Tom Burke
So we were enjoying some culture at the Village Theatre in Everett: “Singing in the Rain.” Wonderful show! At intermission, started talking to a nearby couple, comparing the 1952 movie to this production. They allowed as they’d never seen the movie.
What? Movie number ten on the American Film Institute’s all-time top 100 list? Best movie musical ever? Never seen it? Impossible.
Well, not really. They’re millennials and the movie is 65 years old.
But, but … that movie is like bedrock American culture. How could you be over 30 and never see it? It’s like saying you’ve never seen “Schindler’s List,” “Dances with Wolves” or “Glory.”
Which gets me thinking about cultural literacy.
Cultural literacy is, according to University of Virginia professor E. D. Hirsch (who coined the term) our common cultural vocabulary; our “communal knowledge.”
Hirsch wrote a book about it in 1987, and it was a big deal, and remains a big, albeit controversial, deal today.
Take this pop quiz (no Google allowed):
Explain, identify, or describe: absolute zero, carpetbagger , El Greco, Homestead Act, Iago, Icarus, Valhalla, Battle of Waterloo, the French and Indian War (Who? Where? When? Who won?), Ganges River, Sacco and Venzetti, Sachmo, Guernica (bonus points for relating it to an artist), “I came, I saw, I conquered” (extra points if you know its original language), Seward’s Folly, Rachel Carson, Alexis de Touqueville, Elie Wiesel, three Dukes (in sports, music, movies), 1066, elevator pitch, Luddite, Sam Ervin and Bitcoin. And yeah, have you ever seen “Singing in the Rain?”
Now missing a movie isn’t a big thing. But being culturally illiterate can be socially excluding, personally embarrassing, and downright deleterious to getting a job, reading a newspaper or taking part in the political process.
Not quite on a par with not knowing how to tweet, but not knowing Julius Caesar said, “Vendi, Vidi, Vici” or Seward’s folly is now the state of Alaska can put one out of the conversation and out of what is, like it or not, the dominate culture of early 21st-century America.
And yes, not knowing about Duke Ellington and “Take the A Train,” Rachel Carson and DDT, and Elie Weisel and the Holocaust can put you even further out in cultural left field, near where Duke Snider played at Ebbets Field while Jackie Robinson manned first base.
“But wait,” as they say in the TV infomercials, “there’s more!”
Without getting into some sort of red/blue, conservative/progressive donnybrook, the fact is, as both America’s demographics and social understanding evolve, our culture changes, as it has ever since … forever.
During our pre-history, folks migrated here from Asia via the land bridge and up from South and Central America. Later, colonists from Europe and Africans in the holds of slave ships arrived creating a new cultural norm by both assimilation and conquest.
They’re still coming. But now they come mostly by plane from India, Korea, China, Eastern Europe, Pakistan, Japan, Kenya, Nigeria, Mexico, the Middle East and Central/Southeast Asia.
So today, cultural literacy can’t be the Euro-centric culture of America in 1952; and America tomorrow isn’t going to be the America of 2017. It’s going to be even more diverse. Multi-cultural, as they say. And cultural literacy needs to reflect that diversity. There’s different stuff going into our hallowed melting pot.
“Yesterday” mostly Europeans were getting tossed into the slow-cook cultural crock pot. Today its most everybody except Europeans and it’s vastly expanding Hirsch’s original list of 5,000 names, phrases, dates, and concepts that, in his view, “every American needs to know.”
In 2017, if you are going to be culturally literate, you must have what the academics call, “intercultural competence.”
Which is more than learning some Yiddish if you’re living in New York City. It means learning about the WW II Nisei (Japanese-American) soldiers whose unit won more medals in WWII than any other similar-sized group while their parents and siblings were in U.S. concentration camps; who wore No. 42 on the Brooklyn Dodgers; and the identity of the Harlem Hellfighters. (Hint: WW I.)
That many today don’t know the basics of American “culture” pains me greatly. That others resist adapting to America’s changing demographics and awareness (and the changing cultural vocabulary) pains me even more.
It’s not a time to unlearn or forget about the Founding Fathers, manifest destiny or swing music.
Rather it’s time to learn about the Great Migration; Harlem Renaissance; Scott Joplin; Trail of Tears; kafiyyehs, dashkis, and barong tagalogs; and adding Langston Hughes, Kahlil Gibran, and haiku master Matsuo Basho to the ilk of Robert Frost, Robert Benchley, and the Bard, who said, “Ignorance is the curse of God; knowledge is the wing wherewith we fly to heaven.”
Tom Burke’s email address is t.burke.column@gmail.com.
