Posted on 09/18/2013 8:56:08 AM PDT by newb2012
Some stuff still leaves me puzzled here. How can a 'Bollywood 'dance sequence be considered 'Miss.America's' talent? If someone’s born an American and claim to be all American, wouldn’t they have some original American talent to show and win the prestigious Miss.America title? Does a nation have to become so diverse that it'd loose its own identity? The most sad part is the dance number the winner performed - in no way shows how beautiful Indian fine arts are either. I find the performance to be more of mockery of classical form of the art.
I don't honestly think that any girl of non-Indian descent would have been crowned Miss.India in India or for that matter in any other country. Sonia Gandhi is from the Gandhi family which is still India's first family. Gandhi’s family had been loved and kept on high pedestal by the people of India through her fight for independence and thereafter. They celebrated the family's political victories and mourned each time they lost a Gandhi to extremism through generations. And each time they elected someone from the family to succeed their deceased leader. Yet, because of her Italian origins, Sonia Gandhi is taking a back seat when it comes to leading the country unlike any other person from that family. And that decision is expected and respected by the nation and most leaders.
Each country has its own talent and people capable enough to represent and lead the country. It is important for America to remain America and India to remain India. It’d be lovely see people from any country to stand their ground and take pride and humility in what and where they are from and represent their own country in its originality with its strengths and setbacks. We dont want to see ‘Miss.The Most Diverse Nation On The Planet”, but certainly love to see Miss.America without having to miss America.
We do too, we just don’t note the same stuff. They shout it from the rooftops because it’s a first. White Christian Euros win a lot of stuff.
Actually it probably will be a Euro Christian woman next year, maybe not blond, brunettes win more often. You gotta go back 5 years to get the most recent non-white, and 6 more years before her to get another. Really we’re under no “threat” of the award no longer being available to white girls.
Most of them are contriving, they really are regular folks. Like everybody else they’ve got a lunatic fringe, just happens that their fringe is a bit more lunatic than most.
Many of the ingredients may have come from other parts of the globe, but those stews never existed anywhere before they were cooked here.
Hey! That dude’s Canadian!
Now excuse me while I dance the tango & sing opera.
Isn’t that enough?
NO.
I went back and looked at the original comment that you responded to, and I understand why.
It was a reply to a reply starting with my original comment to this thread:
Can you think of any cultural event or talent that solely originated in the United States?
I replied in that context, which if you didn't follow it all the way back, you wouldn't have realized it. You can ignore the rest of that comment, as I was trying to make a joke about rap.
However, The point I was trying to make and I still believe: The US is truly the "melting pot" of the world, where people of many cultures and origins bring their ideas, art, music, education, etc. from their ancestral lands and it all gets mixed together into something else. And we are richer for it.
The important part is WHY people do it: it's because the opportunities are better here. At least it WAS, until recently.
<...”It was the whole shoving of the diversity agenda down our throats. Even worse, she’ll be touring the country pushing that”....>
Correct...The Miss America Contest has always been political... ....India is one of the BRIC nations allied with Putin. The winners will always play into the political dynamics going on.
I like bagpipe music as well - especially when the pipes are accompanied by claw-hammer-style banjo and a didgeridoo or two...
And who was it that fused them and developed them in to new styles of music?
By your logic, it can be argued that NO culture has any original music forms, because ALL music is derived from Cro-Magnons banging rocks together.
Without rhythm, there is no music. It's just random noise. But, I'll quote Louis Armstrong:
Talking of swing, Louis Armstrong, one of the most famous musicians in jazz, said to Bing Crosby on the latter's radio show, "Ah, swing, well, we used to call it syncopation, then they called it ragtime, then blues, then jazz. Now, it's swing. White folks - yo'all sho is a mess!"
The cite is from Father of the Blues by William Christopher Handy, 1941 MacMillan (page 292). And if you look up syncopation, you'll find it describes a type of rhythm.
As for the origin of the blues, you don't have to take my word for it:
Tracing which musical traits came from Africa and which mutations and mergers occurred in the Americas, Gerhard Kubk, a cultural anthropologist and ethnomusicologist, shows that the African American tradition we call the blues is truly a musical phenomena belonging to the African cultural world.
And from Early Jazz: Its Roots and Musical Development:
This new music developed from a multi-colored variety of musical traditions brought to the new world in part from Africa, in part from Europe. It seems in retrospect almost inevitable that America, the great ethnic melting pot, would procreate a music compounded of African rhythmic, formal, sonoric, and expressive elements and European rhythmic and harmonic practices.
If you don't accept that, do you dispute that jazz and blues originated in the African American slave culture? Where do you think they learned the predecessor components (rhythm and melody)? They didn't just spring up out of thin air.
From my hometown. (Audio even worse than video gotta turn it up.)
I asked: Can you think of any cultural event or talent that solely originated in the United States?. You claimed: Jazz and the Blues
Now, you have added "influences". I won't dispute that, although I think that "influence" doesn't give enough credit that Jazz and the Blues are fusions of other melodic and rhythmic styles. So, while it is certainly "American", it isn't "uniquely American".
I'll repeat what I wrote earlier: I don't know why people are so sensitive about this. Acknowledging the original sources used to merge and derive new styles of music or any kind of culture or technology doesn't diminish them at all.
I'm not an artistic type, as I don't have the talent. However, I am named as inventor or co-inventor on several patents. All of them are built on other patents, and contain references to them. And my patents are cited as references for even more patents. I consider my contribution to be important, and not diminished because it built on previous work. And I'm not jealous because I didn't think of an improvement to my idea that someone else patented.
My problem is when someone claims that anything: culture or technology, it somehow "ours", and frets about how it is being diluted by "theirs". That's how it has always been, especially in the US. And it is what makes us different -- and better -- than the cultures that actively suppress it.
I think appreciating your own culture is admirable. But, "not wanting to see your countrymen displaced" is phobic. It's not really rational unless you are talking about an armed invasion.
I didn’t see the pageant but i don’t get the controversy. Miss New York is of Indian descent. So what? She’s beautiful, well mannered, well spoken, dances without twerking and represents America well. I guess I must have missed something.
What earth shattering event are you complaining about?
Loose it!
Aboriginal Americans werent granted universal US citizenship untill 1924 by an Act of Congress.
...or unless you don’t know what “displaced” means.
You can’t import a million without displacing a million. The country isn’t half empty anymore.
Funny, you can’t use the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders as an example. Snicker
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