King Kriggle 1/21/10

Of the myriad of different topics discovered and spoken about this week in class the one that came to mind with relation to outside topics for me was Modernism and the ideas of Modernity. I was especially interested at the way it came to be so popular and the impact it had. Modernity, as explained in class, is the preoccupation with technology and the need and desire to share this with other cultures in an effort to unify the entire world and make one giant interconnected network. The people under this belief looked at their pasts, often coming out of traditional societies and economies, as worthless and nothing more than nostalgia. I found a very interesting correlation between this and a show that I currently watch called Generation Kill. This show follows a platoon of highly trained young marines as they invaded Iraq in 2003. In one scene a marine is talking about how he and his friends gave a bunch of young Iraqi boys a bunch of pornography magazines to “show them what they were fighting for” and shortly later their father came out in protest to this. In Muslim culture such things are forbidden and seen as defiling their culture, disrespectful to women, and against their religion. Whereas here in America an adult magazine is seen by some as entertainment. Well anyway it just so happens that the father came out with an RPG under his arm (which once again is not uncommon in Arab countries where a man without a gun is not seen as a man, it is nothing violent, it is just a culture difference and should be respected). Well the Americans, seeing this and thinking aggression from this more traditional society, lit him up with a Mark-19 (a 40mm automatic grenade launcher) and obviously killed the man. Later in the show one marine said to another “We will put a McDonald’s on every street corner in this country because it is good for them, even if we have to blow up the street corner and the one next to it first”. I found this to be in correlation with the Golden Arches Theory of Neutrality in economics (it has since been proven incorrect, but is still a good theory). This theory suggests that no country with a McDonalds ever attacked another country with a McDonalds in it. It was simply bad for business. Taking these two ideas to modernism you can see that it is a fight to modernize, and sometimes cultures and other peoples don’t want to be modernized but it is done “for their own good”. This is a sad fact, but a part of modernism. It seeks to root out and assimilate these otherwise traditional economies and societies and replace them with democracies that are technologically advanced and a lot of the time it simply doesn’t work. So much violence is used to accomplish these goals that the actual goal is often out of sight by the time the dust settles from the actual fight. Well, I thought it was an interesting correlation anyway and how modernism and modernity have tried to proliferate every aspect of the world thus far by any means possible.