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The joke used to be that the difference between yogurt and Denver was that yogurt had a living culture. But the metro area passed a cultural tax last week, which may demonstrate that even in these economic times, culture is good business.
It has been good business for E.D. Hirsch, Jr., who had a surprise best-seller in Cultural Literacy: What Every American Needs to Know. It sold so well that it inspired a sequel, which I haven't seen.
But I did peruse the original, especially its 64-page list of items that every literate American should know something about. Judging by Hirsch's selections, it is obvious that man's mental processes resemble that famous New Yorker cover, where America pretty well ended at the Hudson.
That river and the Potomac are important enough to make his list. But educated Americans don't need to know that the Big Muddy is the Missouri. Nor need they ever consider the Platte -- not much of a river, but still the route of the Oregon Trail, the Mormon Trail and the California Trail.
Most of that westward migration was inspired by the 1848
discovery of gold at Sutter's Mill in California. Like many
other important spots in American history and lore --
Tombstone, Deadwood, Cripple Creek -- it is something
Hirsch says educated Americans can ignore, although they
are permitted to sully their minds with the generic term,
gold rush.
Hirsch demonstrates his petty regional bias elsewhere. Central Park makes the list, but not Golden Gate Park. The 360-mile Erie Canal is significant; it's in New York. The transcontinental railroad of 1869 just ran 1500 miles from Omaha to Oakland. It tied a continent together, but it wasn't in New York, so it wasn't important enough for Hirsch's cultured Americans.
Hirsch has astounding notions as to what should and shouldn't be part of our shared culture. Christopher Marlowe, Anthony Comstock, Alan Turing and Carl Frederick Gauss are all omitted, while Sergei Prokofiev, Edouard Manet and Charles Sanders Peirce appear on his list.
This started with a noble idea. Hirsch was worried that our schools were not passing along traditional culture.
There are things one must know in order to understand
other things -- start looking at the Civil War, for
instance, and there's Lincoln's speech about how a house
divided against itself cannot stand,
which comes from
the Bible. There's the annexation of Texas, which started
the Mexican War, which put California in U.S. hands, so
there could be a gold rush, which established the
infrastructure for another mining excitement in the Rockies
on land recently won from Mexico, where the descendants of
those early settlers just had official English imposed upon
them.
Writing is easy for the culturally literate, since you
can refer to the patience of Job,
the strength of
Ajax
and the cunning of Odysseus
-- some of
which make Hirsch's list, more or less.
But shared culture is more than literature. If I write
that Hirsch's prose moves along like an overloaded VW
bus pulling the west side of the Eisenhower Tunnel,
our
shared automotive and Colorado culture conveys my opinion
of Hirsch's writing style.
However, our cultural betters generally don't see things that way. And there's my worry with that culture tax.
It will go to museums and libraries. I like museums and libraries. But they are often places where foreign cultures are imported, enshrined and embalmed, while local matters are ignored, just as Hirsch tries to do in his book.
Will that extra money improve the marvelous Western History Collection at the Denver Public Library. Or will it finance more Denver Symphony Orchestra performances of obscure Austrian composers? Will it help local playwrights stage their works? Or import more road casts from Manhattan? Will it help Colorado artists eke out livings? Or buy more Old Master culls?
The cultural world that Hirsch represents is a place
where regional
is a sneering put-down; no author,
artist or composer wants to be known as a mere
regional
talent.
With our regional inferiority complex in these matters,
we seldom accept anything as culture
until it gets
approval from people like Hirsch -- and Hirsch doesn't
think that anything that ever happened here was ever
important to anyone anywhere else. Unfortunately, he will
be right if that all that tax money is spent on importing
culture, rather than helping to create and nurture what we
have.
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