Any authentic culture but our own

I must say that through Savage's blog I found a link to this interesting post speculating on why liberals praise "authenticity" in any culture but our own, in which case it tends to give them the hives. Excerpt:

Recently I was ruminating on the epithet "white-bread," used to mean boring, bland, and homogeneous, as when Charles Murray said that he'd "a hell of a lot rather live in a Little Vietnam or a Little Guatemala neighborhood, even if I couldn’t read the store signs, than in many white-bread communities I can think of." The idea being that white-bread communities don't have the festive music, the vibrant colors, the spicy foods of Little Vietnam or a Little Guatemala, so no intelligent sophisticated man of the world would want to live in one. Yet, of course, traditional Western culture does have exciting or "vibrant" aspects--just listen to Beethoven's 9th symphony, visit a museum with a collection by Leonardo da Vinci or Manet, sample some French cuisine, attend a German Oktoberfest; the list goes on.

So what explains this? We conservatives, rightly, make much of the fact that the left simply hates traditional Western culture (for, e.g., its inequality) and wants to destroy it, as Richardson and John Savage have commented. Yet perhaps it is not always necessary to dig so deep. I believe that liberals fail to see the cultural distinctiveness, the "authenticity," of our own society because they have been immersed in it since birth; it is what they see as the "default," the state of man without any interesting cultural adornments. They view Western culture as a vacuum, a blank template onto which can be written all kinds of "enriching" distinctive cultural traditions, a kind of foundation for a culture, but inadequate as a complete culture.

In fact, this could be seen as a reason the left hates Western culture, that they view failure to provide any interesting "add-ons" as a moral failure. We could have had interesting cultural traditions, but we failed to develop them. Meanwhile, look at these wonderful non-Western cultures. They add loud, exciting music, parades with elaborate costumes and rich colors, spicy foods, and what do we do? Eat our dinners of roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and cooked peas and then retire to the living room to put our feet up and read the Saturday Evening Post until little Jimmy gets home from Boy Scouts.

I can't point to any published examples that show this is how liberals think; it's based mainly on my observations of and interactions with college-student-style liberals. Based on the way they behave and innumerable little things they've said, I get the impression that they view that dinner of roast chicken, mashed potatoes, and peas not as its own, perfectly legitimate cultural particularity, but as the base one is left with if one strips away the curry powder, habanero peppers, wasabi, or whatever.

I think there's something to this, though one must be careful. What strikes at least some of us as "white bread" has nothing to do with race, it has to do with a certain processed, conformist blandness that seems to think that being Nice and Comfortable is the epitome of human striving. "Nice" and "Comfortable" aren't antonyms of "Spicy" and "Colorful," I know.

Still, there is something kind of pathetic about someone who lives in a condition of material abundance and physical security the likes of which few ordinary people have ever seen in the entire history of man taking the luxury to complain about how boring and "white bread" the culture that provided him those blessings is. (And yes, I am reproaching myself on this point too). We bourgeois want the simulacrum of cultural exoticism without the smelly, messy, chaotic, semi-barbaric aspects of various cultures whence it came. I don't think this is entirely wrong. I mean, I don't think enjoying, say, Ethiopian food is an example of middle-class phoniness unless one partakes of it in Addis Ababa, or one approves of all aspects of Ethiopian culture. Still, there's a reason those Ethiopians are making their delicious national cuisine for you here in bland, boring, white-bread America, and not back home, and maybe that's worth appreciating more than many of us do.

UPDATE: I forgot to mention the conservative version of liberal hatred of ordinary American stuff. I call it "Frank Booth populism," after Dennis Hopper's villain in "Blue Velvet." When Jeffrey Beaumont orders a Heineken, Frank famously screamed, "F**k that s**t! Pabst Blue Ribbon!" It's the idea that anybody who likes any kind of food (for example) that's the least bit exotic or "foreign" or non-mass-produced is a snob, un-American, and probably gay.

(Here's an irony for you: Heineken is the Pabst Blue Ribbon of Holland, and the fashionable Stella Artois brand is Belgium's PBR).