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Joshua Doležal's avatar

Fascinating, Sam, and a reminder of how little one really knows as an outsider. I'm most perplexed by the appeal of the alternate models you describe, and the notion that somehow a dictatorship is more nimble. In responding to what, exactly?

You're focusing here mainly on your students who seem just as ignorant as U.S. students of the historical norms being broken in the Trump presidency, the downfall of a media system that has long been trusted (perhaps naively after the advent of cable TV) as a watchdog of sorts, rising income inequality, etc. Is that a generational thing? Surely people your age or older have deeper historical memories.

When I taught and lived in Uruguay in 2000, my cowboy boots were a big hit, and some local musicians adopted me in their rock n roll band. But the major cultural influences were all coastal, and I think people didn't really know what to do with me as a working class Joe with ties to the Mountain West, Midwest, and Southeast. I made one good friend who was deeply interested in politics and enjoyed drinking yerba mate and whiskey, but a lot of the local culture seemed shallow to me. Perhaps because it was, like American culture, fairly new -- post WWII -- and European influenced.

I remember thinking at the time that even my native state, Montana, had deeper cultural roots in some ways than Uruguay. I'd often felt that few people, other than indigenous communities, had any real nativistic claim on Montana. Everyone, a few generations back, came from somewhere else. But by my childhood in the late 70s and 80s, there were some fourth and fifth-generation Montanans. Not so much in Uruguay.

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David Roberts's avatar

This reminds me of the famed DFW graduation speech. You've removed yourself from the water that we all swim in over here. It's good to get your perspective. As a cultural export, rap would not have occurred to me.

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