Here on the Far Side, we refer to the “elite” or “powers that be” as Bumbledicks. We don’t want to ascribe any form of power or privilege to those bastids. I got the term from the great Preston Jones play “The Last Meeting of the Knights of the White Magnolia,” part of his Texas Trilogy. The character Horace Taylor uses the term to deride incompetence and stupidity, and it fits quite well in our context.
On the Far Side, we use terms like Bumbledick, Buckethead, Numbnut, Scientidiot, and GeezerMedia to avoid using their preferred monikers and to rob them of their power and Special Ness, as David Byrne put it in his brilliant film “True Stories”. We won’t buy into their “culture,” because they are trying desperately to replace our culture. And thereby hangs a tale.
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“Culture” is one of those things we all know when we see it, but often have a difficult time defining. This is due to the fact that the concept of “culture” is fluid and scalable. There are local, regional, national, and global cultures.
For instance, in my home town of Houston, Texas, no one pronounces the “H” at the beginning of proper names (city of Ewston). The road known as San Felipe is pronounced “san FILlipee,” and not “san fayLEEpay”. A native can instantly identify a Yankee by such tests.
In my home here in Jakarta, we speak a hybrid of English, Indonesian and Javanese. We celebrate Chinese New Year, Thanksgiving and Texas Independence Day. Mrs. FarSide is an outstanding creator of Indonesian cuisine, and I do a fair job with Western fare. We have our own unique culture within the confines of my house.
From Houston, we have the city culture, Texas culture, Merkin culture, Western culture, and global culture. We note that “culture” becomes increasing complex as we move up the scale.
Objectively, culture is defined as the language, customs, arts and crafts, costumes, cuisine, and general milieu of a self-identifying group. Culture is the glue that binds a group of people together and sets them apart from all others. Those things which identify us as Houstonians, Jakartans, Texans, Indonesians, Merkins, and humans are held to be precious and worth defending against invasive cultures at all scales.
The tourism industry is built on the desire to experience other cultures, though in reality it often involves experiencing one’s own culture in a foreign location, especialy if you’re Merkin. Merkin “Chinese food” is a derivative of many distinct cuisines, and in any case, it barely resembles the actual experience. A trip to parts of Scotland will baffle a Merkin tourist, who thought everyone spoke English “over there”. A rather sheltered friend of mine is currently travelling in Asia, and finding it a challenge to his pre-conceived ideas of the world.
Throughout Asia, what Merkins think of as toilet paper is most often found on the dinner table, and notably absent from the bathroom. It is replaced by a water sprayer, or ladle and bucket. Population density is exponentially higher in Asia, than even New York or Los Angeles. Jakarta is the size of Houston’s Inner Loop area, yet has 10 million people to Houston’s 1.5 million. What a Jakartan calls a house, I call a townhouse.
Idiomatic language is the most accessible aspect of culture. If I said, “He got a wild hare,” to an Asian, they’d be baffled. In the same way, if I pointed at a bump in the road and said, “Sleeping police,” to a Westerner, they’d be completely perplexed. It is the shared cultural context that makes those expressions meaningful.
In the broader sense, culture is the common experience and comfort zone of a group of people, who are uniquely adapted to their environment and whose traditions and tales serve to bind them to their past and guide them to their future. It is the expression of their collective experience and aesthetic, and the language by which all of it is passed on to new generations.
One of the most unique cultural experiences I’ve ever had was spending three weeks driving from Prague to Haarlem, a journey roughly equal to Houston to Amarillo. When I travel, I avoid big cities and major highways, preferring the unpackaged and unsterilized experience, far from the madding tourists.
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Along the way, I passed through four major language groups – Czech, Italian, German, and Dutch. Saying that, though, hardly describes hearing the dialects flow together, the architecture slowly evolve, the foods vary by region, the attitudes towards foreigners shift, public art and monuments change according to tastes and history, and of course alcoholic beverages. There is always a center or high culture, then a fringe that overlaps with the neighboring ones, so that it’s a seamless whole and yet absolutely distinct.
This is why the Bumbledicks, Bucketheads, Numbnuts, Scientidiots, and GeezerMedia are hellbent on destroying culture. They must pry us all apart, rip social cohesion to shreds, erase common history and traditions, and most importantly, tear the language out of our mouths.
The Bumbledicks don’t want an organic experiential culture. They want to supplant it with a cold manufactured culture that they dictate, because they can’t stand anything unique. They want a global McDonald’s where the Big Mac is the same anywhere they go.
These bastids want to install an artificial culture in us, overwriting our local, regional and national identities with their code for global control. Contrary to their bespoke agenda, they do not want “diversity” or “inclusion,” they want identical drones spouting identical slogans, wearing identical togs, and consuming bland political agitprop instead of high art and fine crafts of infinite variety and value.
