Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 115

_Po£ularOiIture_as^el^^

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Long-term interests and values are reinforced by television series; and
when social ideals are "prophetically” proclaimed in widespread
consciousness-raising ways, it is by entertainment or sports figures
joining the cause, hosting a benefit, and so forth. At the same time,
paradoxically, secular culture is also reinforcing, if not reinventing,
tribalism. Besides the frightful ferocities of neighborhood racisms,
count here both disturbing and more hopeful effects currently
associated with the "culture of complaint," the "new separatism,"
and varied aspects of multiculturalism.
Finally, let us not forget the power-objects of our shared secular
culture. As "primitives" carried their magical mana-bearers in
pouches worn on their bodies, so do we postmodern sophisticates carry
the magical things without which, without whose powers, we cannot
function. . . our keys, our ATM and credit cards, our driver’s and other
licenses, our membership cards and other identifications, our makeup.
All these things we dare not "leave home without," these things we
hold close, in purses and bags, in wallets and pockets.
A Local Culture Today as Living Tribal Religion
Here 1 cannot speak for others, for those from other places, but
late in life I discovered that my own home town provides a living
tribal religion, right in the midst of modem life. "Way down
yonder," I found, is no mere metaphor of "tribal," but the real thing—
which 1 who grew up there had not realized. 1 had left home young,
eventually settling up north; "outgrown" my Roman Catholicism,
content to acknowledge my atheism while positively describing
myself as a humanist; and ended up in New Jersey near New York
City, learning such things as "you can't go home again."^
True, as my first marriage had nosedived into its terminal
bitterness, I had bought some LPs of good New Orleans jazz and blues,
and played them a lot. And yes, as part of post-divorce building of
complete family "on my side" for my daughter, 1 had visited back
home for the first time in years. But surely that had been about the
family, not the place! Oh, it had been touching to sit again in the
crotch of the huge, triple-trunked live oak out back, where as a kid 1
had taken refuge under the Spanish moss with Beau, my cocker
spaniel, to gaze out at the world. But surely that had been mere
sentiment! And true, after that trip, reflecting on my longtime lack of
any formalized religious observance, 1 had consciously realized that