Thoughts From The Car

My dear brother is making excellent use of his car time to do his summer assignment. The assignment is simple enough: a single essay. The prompt: Describe the culture of Spokane.

What a stupid prompt.

This assignment would have been a good one say, 100 years ago, but it's absolutely undoable today. The reason for this, of course, is that we live in televised, instant-communication, standardized America. Because of this, the "culture" of Spokane is indistinguishable from the culture of the rest of the USA. Asking students to isolate bits of culture that are uniquely Spokanite is a nearly impossible task. The shoes we wear? The popular clothing brands? The music that makes its way to the top of the chart? It's the same all across the country.

The other beef I have with this assignment is that even if Spokane does have some relatively unique facets of culture--dominating political views, local attractions, etc.--They are a pain to identify. It's easy to spot the culture of another country, even another city, but it's impossible to define your own. Like the smell of your house, "local culture" is something we become immune to noticing.

A city is perhaps the most awkward level to analyze culture on. As I've previously stated, a nation has a culture, perhaps a state has a culture, but not a city like Spokane. A city falls in the bracket of being too small to be national, but too large to be intimate. Within small groups of friends, even in a group as large as a school, it is perfectly possible for culture to develop. The little inside jokes we share with our compeers becomes part of our language, mannerisms start being duplicated, and the group grows together. There is a debate culture. There is a Startalk culture, there's a Spokane Stake culture, there's even a bit of a Ferris culture. But there is no Spokane culture. I have nothing in common with the folks downtown, cannot hope to relate with the kids in the valley.

As for culture on the city level, it is merely a smaller model of national culture. This essay is pointless because we cannot pinpoint a culture unique to Spokane. Rather, we can only see the way the country's trends are emulated by a town pretending to have significance.

End rant.

Peace out, readers.