Monday, August 03, 2009

Subculture

A slur intended to cause those who hear or read it to conflate lack of access to media representation with marginality, extremism, and insignificance. Middle class customs, for example, are the idiosyncratic province of a select minority, no less so than punk, hobo, or trucker customs are; but because every billboard and sitcom bustles with idealized protrayals of middle class characters, many accept the insane idea that middle class norms are "normal" and all others are sub-normal. In fact, every sub-section of a given culture is a subculture just as every variant of English is a dialect, just as Puerto Rican immigrants don't have any more of an accent than the white newscasters on prime time television do. Seeing any one cultural group as being the "mainstream," or for that matter rejecting some other cultural group as fanatical or inconsequentially peripheral, is chauvinistic and superstitious at best.

Rolling Thunder #1 (Summer 2005)

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