De-sorting

Bill Bishop’s The Big Sort excellently explains and delineates how the cultural explosions of the 60s fragmented and factionalized the US into satellites of “like-minded” communities.  Thus, we Americans sorted ourselves into comforting mutual admiration mini-cultures, which, for the most part, disdained but did not confront the other mini-cultures.  It would seem that such a life would be the happiness that we were ordained to pursue. 

But we had forgotten and forsaken the better wisdom of the founders.  The states and the mini-cultures in them were not to be singular; they were to be united.  The problem with our post-industrial, post-modern world is that it has sparse memory.  What little memory we have involves only the chaos and fear of the 60s.  We sought the solace and serenity of our like-mindedness as a bulwark against what we could not bother to contemplate and understand.   It got in the way of our rampant consumerism.

A few years ago I did some research into the origins and manifestations of rap and hip hop.  One manifestation that warrants a great deal more research and analysis is the graffiti, or, as the “writers” preferred to call it, “taggin’.”  Taggin’ is the more appropriate term.  When it began (partially as a reaction to the chaos and terror surrounding the representative neighborhoods, the likeminded communities), it functioned as shout outs to the home community and competitive call outs to the other satellite communities in the region.  A debate remains whether it started in the Bronx, Brooklyn or Philadelphia.  The debate notwithstanding, the fact remains that its bedrock was social and psychological communication.

For all that Bill Bishop tells us about the religious, tribal and economic causes of “the big sort,” he neglects to discuss this phenomenon within the marginalized communities. And what distinguishes them from the comfort-seekers among the dominant communities is that they were reaching out to each other.

I won’t go into the historical sources of this re-socializing phenomenon in the history of the American and South American slave trade.  My point is that it sustained a survival mechanism based on shared cultural identifications, grounded in competitive art forms.  That is, as the turmoil around these marginalized groups imminently threatened to sort them into increasingly impotent satellites, they promoted a traditional de-sorting procedure that promised to re-group their energies and their identities.

I have a feeling that this is precisely what Barack Obama had in mind when he talked about change.  He wanted to de-sort our nation.  He wanted to dislocate the 40 year emphasis on difference and divisiveness.  He wanted to shout out the identity that we all once shared, a United States of America, to reject our fear and acrimony.  Re-charge our energies to do the right things.  Ignore calls for dishonor.  Make US a good people again.

Ironic end note:  Near the end of his book, in a footnote, Bishop cites Obama, saying “Illinois senator Barack Obama presented himself early in the 2008 campaign as the man of the earth candidate [a class of arbitrators in the Nuer tribe of the upper Nile…had no formal powers, but they had cultural authority to settle disputes], the politician able and eager to speak to­—and listen to—all sides.”

This sad and edgy irony is what currently impels us Americans into a murky and foul unknown.