Wells Baum is a Futurist, Creator, and Music Explorer. Always connecting the dots on screen.
![all creatures [great and small] by allcreatures](http://24.media.tumblr.com/avatar_827f13ebf9f5_40.gif){kind=avatar}
Police, Financial District, NYC
i showed my mom the new music video i directed (while standing on the couch)
“American participants are exceptional even within the unusual population of Westerners—outliers among outliers.”
Get weird or go home. Normal is boring.
In the words of the philosopher Dr. Seuss, “We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love.”
Weirdness, Americanness.
Creativity generates culture.
The primary reason the United States is the world’s cultural hegemon is because it has a diverse population in which to mash unique ideas. Combine this recipe on top of plentiful tools for experimentation, production and distribution supported by established marketing practices to help spread the word. Taken together, these elements are what political scientist Joseph Nye coined American soft power.
Global culture and American culture are often considered the same thing. From music to business, America is constantly pushing new stuff in which people assimilate. Even imports into America like Psy’s “Gangnam Style” get recasted as American and spit back out into the world. What is Korean pop is also American pop. America is the remix nation.
But even remixes get stodgy; the hodgepodge won’t last forever unless America’s traditional economic and military powers remain.
By the time it leaves our shores, US popular culture has been ‘pretested’ in a heterogeneous public – a huge internal market with hybrid tastes and a tradition of juxtaposition and recombining disparate elements, melting them down into a Hollywood melange.
The markets crashed, unemployment is stagnant, we’re losing our primacy to China, and tomorrow is fickle, just like the destructive surprise of Hurricane Sandy.
America appears to be in the dump. People are living in a constant state of uncertainty and worry.
But we must get used to the turmoil and simply grind it out, even though the future tells us we’ll inevitably move back to second or third best.
The same implosion happened to other hegemons of world order, the Byzantines, the Romans, and the British. What goes up must come down, no matter how hard we proclaim that our run of dominance is different. China’s global lead will be unique too.
America will remain the freest country in the world by social, economic, and political standards. The American Dream is still a reality. And Hollywood will continue to spread American ideals using soft power.
Success or failure, this is not the time for Americans to develop a mediocrity complex. We’re lucky to have an inspirational leader in place. It’s time to toughen up and get it done, like we always have.
Now this should be the US Men’s Soccer Jersey.
