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Old 02-06-2009, 10:22 PM
 
Location: Chicago, Illinois
3,047 posts, read 9,034,911 times
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Budweiser (insert alcohol beverage here), McDonalds (insert unhealthy choice of food here), HDTV, television (insert the most un-talked about legal drug to ever exist here), and letting others do the thinking for you because it's just easier that way! That is American culture in a nutshell.
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Old 02-06-2009, 10:29 PM
 
895 posts, read 2,366,587 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by creepsinc View Post
Native Americans are anybody born in this country.


p.s. guess what? the oh-so-noble "Native Americans" came over here via the land bridge from Asia and displaced the people who were already here, ie the true natives. See how ridiculous it gets to stay stuck centuries in the past?
There were people in the americas before the "native americans" came? Never heard of that..
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Old 02-06-2009, 10:35 PM
 
Location: RVA
2,420 posts, read 4,713,272 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Maki-Chan View Post
There were people in the americas before the "native americans" came? Never heard of that..

I've heard speculation. Regardless, the various nations of "indigenous peoples" stole land from each other, committed atrocities against each other and enslaved each other. Darwinism isn't pretty, it's just how the universe works. I'm cool with it.
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Old 02-06-2009, 11:05 PM
 
Location: Southwest Suburbs
4,593 posts, read 9,199,422 times
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Its hard to figure out what is American culture. The US is one of the most diverse countries and you have varies of culture pack in one country of over 300 miilion. Its not like Japan, where the country is homogenous and almost everybody is ethnic Japanese.
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Old 02-06-2009, 11:11 PM
 
Location: RVA
2,420 posts, read 4,713,272 times
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Jazz. Death Metal. Seinfeld. Taxi Driver. Football. BBQ. Porn. Let's not be silly. American culture is immediately identifiable and it's as valid as any other culture.
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Old 02-06-2009, 11:15 PM
 
Location: RVA
2,420 posts, read 4,713,272 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by At1WithNature View Post
Budweiser (insert alcohol beverage here), McDonalds (insert unhealthy choice of food here), HDTV, television (insert the most un-talked about legal drug to ever exist here), and letting others do the thinking for you because it's just easier that way! That is American culture in a nutshell.
And give me a break. I'm far from a stereotypical flag-waving patriot, but c'mon. This country was founded by free-thinkers. And they didn't all own slaves, either.

Television gave us All In The Family and Roots, and McDonald's fries are one of life's greatest pleasures. I haven't eaten meat in almost 20 years and I've never stopped going there. Sounds like somebody got their idea of American culture by reading trite bumper stickers on the back of a Subaru Outback.
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Old 02-06-2009, 11:25 PM
 
3,674 posts, read 8,663,931 times
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American culture in many respects is the "assertive" culture.

Since moving to Sao Paulo, without having to think about it the people in my life have started doing things my way. I think American culture is a much more dominant culture than others-- it's easy to fall into the American way of doing things, and the American way of being.

I mean it helps that I'm assertive, but without exception it never occurred to me that foreign country or no, I should adapt to another way of life. I've found a pattern that works for me, and I rearrange everything else to fit that

The only thing I can't really force others into is working more. The rest of the world moves at such a slower pace compared to the pace I was accustomed to in Chicago or NYC.
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Old 02-06-2009, 11:30 PM
 
Location: Rural Northern California
1,020 posts, read 2,755,182 times
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Somewhere in England June 5th, 1944

"Be seated."

"Men, this stuff that some sources sling around about America wanting out of this war, not wanting to fight, is a crock of bull****.

Americans love to fight, traditionally. All real Americans love the sting and clash of battle.

You are here today for three reasons.

First, because you are here to defend your homes and your loved ones.

Second, you are here for your own self respect, because you would not want to be anywhere else.

Third, you are here because you are real men and all real men like to fight. When you, here, everyone of you, were kids, you all admired the champion marble player, the fastest runner, the toughest boxer, the big league ball players, and the All-American football players. Americans love a winner. Americans will not tolerate a loser. Americans despise cowards. Americans play to win all of the time. I wouldn't give a hoot in hell for a man who lost and laughed. That's why Americans have never lost nor will ever lose a war; for the very idea of losing is hateful to an American."

"You are not all going to die. Only two percent of you right here today would die in a major battle. Death must not be feared. Death, in time, comes to all men. Yes, every man is scared in his first battle. If he says he's not, he's a liar. Some men are cowards but they fight the same as the brave men or they get the hell slammed out of them watching men fight who are just as scared as they are.

The real hero is the man who fights even though he is scared. Some men get over their fright in a minute under fire. For some, it takes an hour. For some, it takes days. But a real man will never let his fear of death overpower his honor, his sense of duty to his country, and his innate manhood. Battle is the most magnificent competition in which a human being can indulge. It brings out all that is best and it removes all that is base. Americans pride themselves on being He Men and they ARE He Men. Remember that the enemy is just as frightened as you are, and probably more so. They are not supermen."

"All through your Army careers, you men have bitched about what you call "chicken **** drilling". That, like everything else in this Army, has a definite purpose. That purpose is alertness. Alertness must be bred into every soldier. I don't give a **** for a man who's not always on his toes. You men are veterans or you wouldn't be here. You are ready for what's to come. A man must be alert at all times if he expects to stay alive. If you're not alert, sometime, a German son-of-an-*******-***** is going to sneak up behind you and beat you to death with a sockful of ****!"

"There are four hundred neatly marked graves somewhere in Sicily, all because one man went to sleep on the job. But they are German graves, because we caught the bastard asleep before they did."

"An Army is a team. It lives, sleeps, eats, and fights as a team. This individual heroic stuff is pure horse ****. The bilious bastards who write that kind of stuff for the Saturday Evening Post don't know any more about real fighting under fire than they know about ****ing!"

"We have the finest food, the finest equipment, the best spirit, and the best men in the world. Why, by God, I actually pity those poor sons-of-******* we're going up against. By God, I do."

"My men don't surrender, and I don't want to hear of any soldier under my command being captured unless he has been hit. Even if you are hit, you can still fight back. That's not just bull **** either. The kind of man that I want in my command is just like the lieutenant in Libya, who, with a Luger against his chest, jerked off his helmet, swept the gun aside with one hand, and busted the hell out of the Kraut with his helmet. Then he jumped on the gun and went out and killed another German before they knew what the hell was coming off. And, all of that time, this man had a bullet through a lung. There was a real man!"

"All of the real heroes are not storybook combat fighters, either. Every single man in this Army plays a vital role. Don't ever let up. Don't ever think that your job is unimportant. Every man has a job to do and he must do it. Every man is a vital link in the great chain. What if every truck driver suddenly decided that he didn't like the whine of those shells overhead, turned yellow, and jumped headlong into a ditch? The cowardly bastard could say, 'Hell, they won't miss me, just one man in thousands.' But, what if every man thought that way? Where in the hell would we be now? What would our country, our loved ones, our homes, even the world, be like? No, Goddamnit, Americans don't think like that. Every man does his job. Every man serves the whole. Every department, every unit, is important in the vast scheme of this war. The ordnance men are needed to supply the guns and machinery of war to keep us rolling. The Quartermaster is needed to bring up food and clothes because where we are going there isn't a hell of a lot to steal. Every last man on K.P. has a job to do, even the one who heats our water to keep us from getting the 'G.I. ****s'. Each man must not think only of himself, but also of his buddy fighting beside him. We don't want yellow cowards in this Army. They should be killed off like rats. If not, they will go home after this war and breed more cowards. The brave men will breed more brave men.

Kill off the Goddamned cowards and we will have a nation of brave men. One of the bravest men that I ever saw was a fellow on top of a telegraph pole in the midst of a furious fire fight in Tunisia. I stopped and asked what the hell he was doing up there at a time like that. He answered, 'Fixing the wire, Sir.' I asked, 'Isn't that a little unhealthy right about now?' He answered, 'Yes Sir, but the Goddamned wire has to be fixed.' I asked, 'Don't those planes strafing the road bother you?' And he answered, 'No, Sir, but you sure as hell do!' Now, there was a real man. A real soldier. There was a man who devoted all he had to his duty, no matter how seemingly insignificant his duty might appear at the time, no matter how great the odds. And you should have seen those trucks on the road to Tunisia. Those drivers were magnificent. All day and all night they rolled over those son-of-a-bitching roads, never stopping, never faltering from their course, with shells bursting all around them all of the time. We got through on good old American guts.

Many of those men drove for over forty consecutive hours. These men weren't combat men, but they were soldiers with a job to do. They did it, and in one hell of a way they did it. They were part of a team. Without team effort, without them, the fight would have been lost. All of the links in the chain pulled together and the chain became unbreakable." "Don't forget, you men don't know that I'm here. No mention of that fact is to be made in any letters. The world is not supposed to know what the hell happened to me.

I'm not supposed to be commanding this Army. I'm not even supposed to be here in England. Let the first bastards to find out be the Goddamned Germans. Some day I want to see them raise up on their ****-soaked hind legs and howl, 'Jesus Christ, it's the Goddamned Third Army again and that son-of-a-****ing-***** Patton'.

We want to get the hell over there. The quicker we clean up this Goddamned mess, the quicker we can take a little jaunt against the purple pissing Japs and clean out their nest, too. Before the Goddamned Marines get all of the credit."

"Sure, we want to go home. We want this war over with. The quickest way to get it over with is to go get the bastards who started it. The quicker they are whipped, the quicker we can go home. The shortest way home is through Berlin and Tokyo. And when we get to Berlin, I am personally going to shoot that paper hanging son-of-a-***** Hitler. Just like I'd shoot a snake!"

"When a man is lying in a shell hole, if he just stays there all day, a German will get to him eventually. The hell with that idea. The hell with taking it. My men don't dig foxholes. I don't want them to. Foxholes only slow up an offensive. Keep moving. And don't give the enemy time to dig one either. We'll win this war, but we'll win it only by fighting and by showing the Germans that we've got more guts than they have; or ever will have.

We're not going to just shoot the sons-of-*******, we're going to rip out their living Goddamned guts and use them to grease the treads of our tanks. We're going to murder those lousy Hun **** suckers by the bushel-****ing-basket."

"War is a bloody, killing business. You've got to spill their blood, or they will spill yours. Rip them up the belly. Shoot them in the guts. When shells are hitting all around you and you wipe the dirt off your face and realize that instead of dirt it's the blood and guts of what once was your best friend beside you, you'll know what to do!"

"I don't want to get any messages saying, 'I am holding my position.' We are not holding a Goddamned thing. Let the Germans do that. We are advancing constantly and we are not interested in holding onto anything, except the enemy's balls.

We are going to twist his balls and kick the living **** out of him all of the time. Our basic plan of operation is to advance and to keep on advancing regardless of whether we have to go over, under, or through the enemy. We are going to go through him like crap through a goose; like **** through a tin horn!"

"From time to time there will be some complaints that we are pushing our people too hard. I don't give a good Goddamn about such complaints. I believe in the old and sound rule that an ounce of sweat will save a gallon of blood. The harder WE push, the more Germans we will kill. The more Germans we kill, the fewer of our men will be killed. Pushing means fewer casualties. I want you all to remember that."

"There is one great thing that you men will all be able to say after this war is over and you are home once again. You may be thankful that twenty years from now when you are sitting by the fireplace with your grandson on your knee and he asks you what you did in the great World War II, you WON'T have to cough, shift him to the other knee and say, 'Well, your Granddaddy shoveled **** in Louisiana.' No, Sir, you can look him straight in the eye and say, 'Son, your Granddaddy rode with the Great Third Army and a Son-of-a-Goddamned-***** named Georgie Patton!'"

"That is all."

From: Patton's speech to 3rd Army
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Old 02-07-2009, 05:46 AM
 
Location: Hong Kong
339 posts, read 1,169,296 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by CHICAGOLAND92 View Post
America is easily one of the most diverse nations in the world. From Germans to Nigerians, we seem to have a little bit of everything. Immigrants from around the world have retained their culture, while contributing to ours.

I believe this question comes from my lack of traveling abroad (yet), but what exactly is American culture? For example, how can one tell when someone is from the US? What qualities, mannerisms, etc let one know that a person is from America? What makes us different from people in Canada or the U.K.?
I'll comment from the POV of a non-American who has encountered many americans both abroad and in the US of course:

I don't want to confuse culture with the American mindset. To me, culture varies greatly depending on which part of the country you are in. I was totally amazed by the diversity. I had envisioned one great big monoculture. Wrong. There is no one culture.

As for the american mindset, I'll try to sum up what stood out to me...a tendency to dichotomise everything (you see this most prominently in politics of course), very polite, emphasis on manners and small talk, generous to strangers, gregarious, quantity over quality, meritocracy (you deserve what you get), confrontational, a tendency to take things literally (sarcasm and irony doesn't always go down so well I learned).

How can you spot an american abroad? My observations of americans abroad...talk quite loudly, tend to be sensibly well-dressed and well groomed, often in expensive sports/leisure-wear or labels, always wear clean white sports shoes with blue jeans or shorts, older americans also dress in pressed chinos, polo shirts and outdoor vests, like wearing bum-bags and day packs (fanny packs...that expression always has me in fits of laughter!!) Of course, there's always the home state t-shirt which is a pre-requisite for travel. In Hong Kong, they're the ones still holding the door open while everyone else stampedes through without so much as a glance backwards! (That's the politeness thing) I can almost always pick an american 100% of the time before they open their mouths.
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Old 02-07-2009, 06:53 AM
 
Location: Dorchester
2,605 posts, read 4,844,527 times
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Quote:
Originally Posted by Newarkbomb View Post
Well who's the idiots to name them the Native americans.. because what you said is new to me, thanks.

But it's not easy to describe American Culture since there is no true American ethnicity.
What makes an ethnicity.
Generate a list of ethnic traits and I guarantee America has an entry.

Music: Check
Food: Check
History: Check
Art: Check
etc......................

The problem is that we have many cultures.
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