People have asked me what differences I notice between American culture and other cultures, or what changes I notice in American culture after spending years at a time away.
A major quirk of American culture--one I've observed evolving, really, even since my 20s--is the extent to which we "mug." We mug obsessively, absurdly.
We have become addicted, generally as a socioculture (not everyone, of course), to cartoonishly over-selling with all kinds of facial contortions and inflectional gymnastics whatever it is we're saying, no matter how mundane, quotidien or innocuous (punctuated with "like" as many times as it takes to convey, "But I don't mean it EXACTLY, only 'like kinda sorta,' just in case you think I'm coming on too strong"), often at a frenetically frequent shifting pace--as if a single sentence of, say, 25 words could contain five major and distinctly different emotional peak experiences. (No, life doesn't work that way, no matter how "Hollywood" you wish it was.)
Often there is this weird, to-the-side glance accompanying it, as if looking to some invisible advocate standing nearby to help get through it, like eye-whispering to an invisible friend, "Can you believe I have to go through this?"
All of this seems, to me, to proceed from a vast collective insecurity (read, FEAR) that we are going to be misinterpreted and there's going to be a traumatic explosion of some kind if we're taken wrong. The mugging has a deeply apologetic, obsequious edge to it, even a creepily cowering physical attitude attached to it, as if the person is begging forgiveness in advance for even existing.
More and more I see a corrosive, pernicious FEAR warping American powers of communication into something cartoonish, infantile, stunted. Worst of all, when adults no longer know any other way to express themselves and model nothing but this to their children, there is little hope of the children's ever breaking out of and beyond it.
Part and parcel of this, I'm utterly convinced, is our nearly complete loss of faith in the meaning of words. So we try to compensate with emoting, mugging, resorting to a virtual "sign languge of the face," as if to say, "You don't have to hear a word I'm saying, just look at me."
Perhaps the greatest fear of all is fear of precisely the mundane, quotidien and innocuous, the terror of finding one's own life is mundane, quotidien and innocuous. And so, like the characters in Alice's Wonderland racing to stay in the same place, people frenetically over-act their way through life's most generic communications scrambling to out-race the "quiet desperation" Thoreau spoke of. That's a race no one wins. Ever. Unless it's won by stopping and embracing the silence and solitude of one's terrifying, ostensible obscurity. The obscurity is both real and ostensible. The first must be embraced in order to uncover the meaning of the second.
