One of my oddball hobbies is playing guitar in a 50’s & 60’s band on the weekends. We have a “take no breaks rule” in the band so we will often play for 4 hours straight. I’ve had to memorize all my guitar parts over the years for about a hundred songs to accommodate this policy.
Once you commit a block of music to memory it allows you to get better at the details and tonal qualities of the songs. It also allows you to play the easy stuff mindlessly, and concentrate on the audience you are playing for.
One of the reasons I play in a band is to be able to go to a party, but not have to actually dance. My dancing is off beat, herky-jerky and uncomfortable, and those are just the compliments I’ve received. That being said - I am always amazed at great dancers and an event we recently played for was a private party for a group of professionals and their office staff’s in the South Bay Area, with a lot of great dancers.
The audience for this particular event was what I would characterize as a great example of the classic American melting pot. This was a night where I found myself playing to Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Vietnamese, Mexican, Russian and Indian immigrants, and native born Americans black, white and brown all mixing on the dance floor and singing classic 50’s and 60’s rock and roll songs.
What amazed me is that so many people knew the words to these songs as you figure 50’s music is 50-60 years old, and the 60’s tunes are only slightly younger. Yet these folks knew so many of these “moldy oldies” and had somehow learned these classic rockers. Must be the oldies radio stations doing the advance work for us.
The other concept that hit me is that everyone was engaged in a classically American activity, i.e. attending a party with a live rock & roll dance band. Yet none of the normal ethnic or racial separation that occurs in many foreign societies was present that night. My take away was that the American Melting pot concept works. Not to say that these folks have abandoned their individual cultures. Instead they have decided to embrace the American language and culture while living in the US, whether in music or sports or arts and literature.
My software pals from Asia and India often tell me how their kids are so American now that they resist learning the native language of their parents and don’t want to spend a lot of time going to the old country. They just want to be assimilated into American society. The kids have in turn educated the parents that they too need to release the mores of their old country and more fully embrace the American system. It seems that American culture tends to be the universal solvent, dissolving and absorbing bits and pieces of hundreds of other cultures into an ever changing new standard.
Contrast this to the cultural apartheid advanced by the cultural elites under the banner of Diversity and Multiculturalism. Every culture is supposed to be “separate but equal”. Foreign languages are to be embraced over American English. Every group is supposed to organize their community to loudly rally for greater prominence among a sea of other cultural islands, each vying for ascendance over the other. The metaphor of a salad bowl, where tomatoes and lettuce and cucumbers are thrown together, but never mix is the ideal of the diversity crowd.
The facts are of course, are that in America, people do mix. People from all races and cultures intermarry, often for the first time as they would not be allowed to - in the old country. They each carry pieces of their cultural identities to a new American mix, to create a hybrid that is both vigorous and vibrant. The salad bowl is the wrong ideal, as even the best salad will rot and wilt in just a days’ time.
Yet our Universities and many liberals still promote the vision that a distinct, stubbornly unassimilated tribal identity is what gives America its strength. Even dopey Al Gore bungled our most famous Latin phrase in a speech in 1998. He claimed “E Pluribus Unum” meant “out of one – to many” while we know it is the polar opposite “out of many – to one”.
The America I know and love is one where everyone is welcomed and assimilated into our society. Immigrants who obtain green cards or pursue the path to citizenship are warmly embraced and set free to pursue their careers and businesses. On the dance floor that night was a small slice of America where people had come together from all over the world to build their professional practices. They had risked their savings, built businesses, and employed many others. From behind my guitar I saw the America where dozens of formerly distinct and sometimes warring cultures can forget all that, and just gather together to dance and sing Beach Boys, Everly Brothers and Beatles songs, and celebrate by kicking back and rocking out a bit.
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