If 'modern' is just a fancy word for contemporary, then "academically", postmodern means nothing more profound than 'the future'

Rome in 30 BC was thought of as 'modern' to its contemporary residents, who felt they knew it quite well, but they if they thought at all of post modern Rome, say circa 313 AD, it  remained simply as something unknown and existing 'in the future'.

So those much use terms 'modern' and 'post modern' really tells us nothing about what might be potentially very different about these two Romes, simply that one existed earlier and the other later.


But when we say that New York City in 1940 existed in an era that exalted a universal and eternal monoculture while NYC in 2016  now exalted something completely the opposite : a diverse universe of many many different cultures (an era of polyculture), we have now revealed a huge difference between those two dates.

My book is all about global culture flipping 180 degrees, beginning in the period 1940-1946, as its ruling conceit,  MO-noculturalism, decidedly goes PO-lyculturalist.

The idea of Monoculturalism ("survival of only the fit") as a way to control the world, not the Axis armies, was what was truly defeated in WWII .

75 years on, its time we finally admitted it ...

modernization is mongrelization is unconscious involuntary syncretism

Modernity , I always insist, was the self-conscious (hence the capital "M") and panicky response of the global educated middle class to the insistent , insidious, unconscious, involuntary, syncretism and mongrelization of modernization (hence the small letter "m").

The faster the lingo of the Jewish-Negro-Italian crooners seduced its way inside their children's psyche via Tin Pan Alley sheet music and records (and later via the radio and the movies) the faster their parents passed Jim Crow segregation laws against Negroes within and against darkish Immigrants without.

The Whiteys claimed - at the time - that they feared a day when the dark, red and yellow races took over completely and nothing of the white culture would remain.

I personally doubt that any of them believed that, even back then.

What they feared more - because they saw it happening daily - was the increasing miscegenation of both their culture and of the culture of the foreign seeming Negroes & Immigrants into something new : a syncretization of all cultures.

As in laying down Negro rhythms and ostinatos over European harmony and instrumentation.

If this process happened fastest in big cities, the bigger the better, we needn't struggle to suggest why.

In an isolated Mid West small town with just one strong radio signal on the dial, that station played whatever the advertisers among the small town power elites wanted - the German-oriented classic music styles familiar from their parents' original North West European cultures.

But in big city Memphis, every child with access to the family radio when Ma and Pa was out, could twist the dial and pick up sounds from the local black station - by sheer accident - and then get hooked on its infectious vigour and sass.

The term 'modernization' refers to the technology of the new go-anywhere -and-everywhere pipelines of for-profit communication and transportation.

By contrast, the term 'mongrelization' refers to the two way content that filled that go anywhere pipeline.....