{"id":478,"date":"2004-08-12T00:52:34","date_gmt":"2004-08-12T00:52:34","guid":{"rendered":"0"},"modified":"2006-09-28T12:08:44","modified_gmt":"2006-09-28T12:08:44","slug":"is_the_culture_gap_real","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/?p=478","title":{"rendered":"Is The Culture Gap Real?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Randomly surfing today while I’m doing some writing, and a tripped over ‘ MY WAR – Fear And Loathing In Iraq<\/a>‘ by milblogger ‘CBFTW.’<\/p>\n

First of all, it’s a damn good blog – whoever this guy is, he’s a helluva writer. He conveys the immediacy, determination, and frustration he writes about incredibly well.<\/p>\n

Other bloggers have pointed to him, so he’s only a discovery to me (if you haven’t been there yet, click on over and read a bit, you’ll be glad you did). But aside from discovering a good blog and a good writer, this kicked off an interesting round of thinking in me.<\/p>\n

I’ve been wrestling for a while with a post on the ‘two Americas’ cliche. Yes, it’s a cliche, but sometimes cliches exist because they are true. I’m going up to West Los Angeles pretty much every day from my suburban home, and I really do see a huge cultural gap between the well-off residents of Brentwood, Venice and Santa Monica (my old haunts) and the South Bay, where I live now.I’ve written<\/a> a bit about it before:<\/p>\n

…I was having a late-night dinner at a terrible Italian restaurant in Long Beach, CA (wow, too awful to even allow me to remember the name), and the only other party was a group of \u201cmodern-Okie\u201d aerospace workers … badly dressed, overweight, uncultured (they were talking excitedly about \u2018The Bachelor\u2019). The dads (two couples w\/multiple kids) were apparently in the aerospace industry, and I had a jolt of realization … these were the families that built the airplanes that I fly around in, and millions of families like them build our houses, buildings, sewers, provide water and electricity, etc. etc. And I began to look at my own attitudes and wonder just why the hell I felt permission to look amusedly at them, and to wonder for a moment which team I was on, and which one I wanted to be on.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

and in getting connected with all the amazing people in the military I’ve met through Spirit of America<\/a>, most of them definitely were not on the same side of the cultural divide as my friends in Venice Beach.<\/p>\n

CBFTW is.<\/p>\n

Here’s his Blogger profile<\/a>:<\/p>\n

Interests<\/p>\n

* drinking
\n * skateboarding
\n * reading
\n * music
\n * anti social behavior
\n * film
\n * culture
\n * politics
\n * San Francisco
\n * 80’s music
\n * Charles Bukowski
\n * whiskey
\n * Military History
\n * cult movies
\n * photography
\n * art
\n * punk rock
\n * abandoned buildings
\n * Your Mom
\n * dive bars<\/p>\n

Favorite Movies<\/p>\n

* Taxi Driver
\n * Swingers
\n * Say Anything
\n * Reality Bites
\n * Pretty In Pink
\n * Clerks
\n * Full Metal Jacket
\n * Breakfast Club
\n * Dirty Harry
\n * The Warriors
\n * Falling Down
\n * Texas Chainsaw Massacre
\n * Beat Girl
\n * Cape Fear
\n * Chopper
\n * Reservoir Dogs
\n * Pulp Fiction
\n * True Romance
\n * Barfly
\n * Apocalypse Now<\/p>\n

Favorite Music<\/p>\n

* JAZZ
\n * Blues
\n * punk
\n * harcore
\n * metal
\n * alternative
\n * grunge
\n * SLAYER
\n * 80’s music
\n * classic rock
\n * classical
\n * Social Distortion
\n * Rockabilly
\n * Sinatra
\n * Big Band
\n * everything.<\/p>\n

Favorite Books<\/p>\n

* Love is A Mad Dog From Hell
\n * Ham On Rye
\n * Catcher In The Rye
\n * On The Road
\n * Hells Angels
\n * Fear and Loathing In Las Vegas
\n * Steal This Book
\n * Anarchist Cookbook
\n * The Killer Inside Me
\n * Army Training Manuals and Field Manuals
\n * Ranger Handbook
\n * Jack Kerouac
\n * Hunter S. Thompson
\n * Hemmingway
\n * Naked Lunch
\n * James Ellroy<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Here’s a guy as comfortable as I am hanging out at Skylight Books or searching for an old Social Distortion live album.<\/p>\n

Maybe – just maybe – there are a lot of us trapped at the boundary between the two cultures. Maybe it’s the old guys like me who are so polarized, and many of the younger cohorts just don’t worry about it as much as we do.<\/p>\n

That’d be good news.<\/p>\n

More good news in the form of the response of his chain of command on discovering his blog.<\/p>\n

He calmly looked up and told me that my shit was really good, and he liked reading my stuff, and that I was a good writer. He even mentioned something about including it in the units history and archives. That didn’t relieve me one bit, like I said, it made me more freaked out. I’m waiting for him to say the word: “BUT” followed by my punishment. Then we discussed things, and he pointed things out, and told me things. I agreed with 100% of everything he was saying, and the final conclusion from what he told me was that I could continue writing, but maybe have my Plt Sgt read my stuff before I post. He stressed that he didn’t want to censor me and that I still had the freedom of speech thing, as long as I wasn’t doing anything that would endanger the mission. I totally 110% agree with him on that one. I thanked him and I told him that I of course would not want to do anything that would endanger anybody here or back home, which is of course true. He suggested that I should look into getting this stuff published and made into a book someday.<\/i><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Yes, the military continues to impress me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Randomly surfing today while I’m doing some writing, and a tripped over ‘ MY WAR – Fear And Loathing In Iraq‘ by milblogger ‘CBFTW.’ First of all, it’s a damn good blog – whoever this guy is, he’s a helluva writer. He conveys the immediacy, determination, and frustration he writes about incredibly well. Other bloggers […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=478"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=478"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=478"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/marcdanziger.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=478"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}