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PaperclipPerfector  8mo ago (text post)   27786 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of September 18, 2023

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Personally, I think both options are death. The fact of the matter is, as you correctly observe, Street Rods are an artifact from a very specific time and place, with conditions that are long since gone. And were they to choose "diversity", it would just lead to them getting chased out of their own hobby even sooner. Probably nearly instantly. Better to let them keep it to themselves until the last member dies, than have them suffer the heartbreak of having their hobby stolen from them, and themselves alienate from it, and then they die. Possibly sooner than they would have as a result of their devastating loss of community.

I agree, and this is something I've been thinking about for a while in terms of our larger culture. In the presence of any sort of incentives for growth or change, it's not clear how anyone or anything can meaningfully survive without first paying a huge one-time cost to conquer everything around it, then kill itself to some degree by removing its own ability to grow and change.

I agree wholeheartedly. I don't view it as an easy choice. I don't think the Street Rodders owe it to the universe to endure Bad Bunny blaring from trunk mounted subwoofers to keep the show going a few more years, but the way I felt extinction coming, walking around that show looking at the visceral consequences of the choices made brought that to the front of my mind.

On the flip side, look at professional sports. Obviously my generation doesn't care as much about Mantle and Dimaggio and Berra, Derek Jeter and Jorge Posada and Andy Pettite were the Yankees of my youth. But because the Yankees and MLB and older fans at the Yankees Fan Club maintained that continuity and tradition, while also respecting the new players, and passed down the stories, Mantle and Dimaggio and Berra mean a lot to me, and signed photos of all three hang over my bar in my basement. Across sports you see the same thing: football fans of historic English clubs or NBA fans or NFL fans they all love to count up championships won before they were alive and brag about their team. If you continue to bring in the new generation and teach them the tradition, there is a path toward respecting the past while continuing to incorporate the new and grow.

I'm not sure which is the right choice and which the wrong one. Whether it's better to burn out or to fade away. But the choice feels so visceral.

Personally, I think both options are death.

The list of options that are not death, when looking beyond the short-term, is, in fact, blank.

They should found some preservation society, possibly a museum. It might not be curated and staffed from people cut from the same cloth, but antiquarians would see value here.

I doubt it.

I visited my hometown last weekend to meet a friend at a board game tavern. Across the street was the local museum. When I was a kid, they had some arrangement where you could donate, and they'd engrave your name on a brick. There was one there with my grandfather's name on it which I had wanted to find.

Or at least there was. At some point they had renovated it into some god awful post modern monstrosity and thrown them all away.

It also used to be a civil war museum, and it's been completely repurposed away from that as well.

If they had repurposed the museum into a board game tavern, there might be a clear-cut case that progress had been made. As it is, you describe and ebb and flow of human existence that is more melancholy and bittersweet.

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