Wednesday, September 20, 2006

Cultural Literacy and Keeping it Real

I'm not all that sure why "Keeping it Real" is stuck in my head. Not as a song or anything, just the phrase. As I'm a bit culturally illiterate about the latest "hip hopping" happening, um jive? I really don't know why it's in my head in the first place...la la la...ignoring it.

But the first bit? Yeah, so a not-so-recent lunch conversation popped up when everyone in the room had finally seen "Pirates of the Caribbean-Dead Man's Curse" (or as I started calling it, "Dude! It's my dad!") that I've been meaning to share...but yeah, where have I been?

Moving on:
One person in particular simply HATED it. Every single minute was torture as she understood little to none of it. The line that made everyone look at each other and wonder if she really had been transported here from Mars was, "I mean, who was Davy Jones? And what locker? That was a chest! They didn't explain anything!"

Yep, that's where that there "Cultural Literacy" comes into play. Someone else asked if she'd ever watched the old Warner Bros. cartoons, you know with Bugs and Elmer and such...that would be a no. They were no longer playing them on regular ol' TV when she was growing up...eep.

Right. Well, I don't know about you, but if it hadn't been for those intriguing cartoons from the 40s, 50s and 60s (most of which I didn't get until I was WAAAAY older--esp. the placards that various toons would hold up showing a screw + ball? Yeah, anyway) I think I probably would have been deep in the dark cave of misunderstanding myself. I grew up in a Mexican household. I had no idea music in ENGLISH existed until pretty late in the game. Didn't everyone answer the phone "Yell-ooo?" Didn't everyone put their daughters' hair in braids and learn to dance around in big skirts and clunky shoes (okay, maybe that was just my kindergarten), didn't everyone know English as their second language?

How weird is it gonna be for the future generations...and sometimes I do have to consider someone a mere 4 years younger than me in the "next" generation...not to have those, um, what would you call them? Pointers? Clues? Connections? That bind us all as goofy Americans.

So what makes me laugh out loud now is the fact that those old cartoons are being beamed all over the planet now...so if you do not have a satellite dish in your backyard, you will never be exposed to classic Marvin the Martian and Bugs Bunny hijinks...but someone across the planet from you might be. Does that mean they will be more Culturally Literate in American ideology than, um, us?

How scary is that?

1 comment:

Bezzie said...

Good points. I still think I missed out on some bits of the 80's growing up in AK where everything took about 5 extra years to hit.