Charles Kurult: Ethno-jingoist

Riding up to Huntington County last weekend I was listening to Charles Kurult's "on the road". A book on CD that was considerably shorter than I had hoped. The CD was largely a collection of TV pieces he had done, with a brief intro read by his brother. Charles travelled the country looking for human interest stories, things that demonstrated "all that was good in all of us". In many ways he was an ethnographer. Witness his story on the man in Big Fork, Montana, who builds birch bark canoes, by hand, with axe and maul and pocket knife, and teaches his grandchildren to do the same. Chester Cornett, only saner, the rugged individualist who helped define this country. Or the retired judge who goes fishing for tiny brook trout "not because I think that fishing is so very important, but because I suspect that most the affairs of man are equally unimportant".

The book starts out as human interest and quickly becomes ethnography—it's not a long way to fall really—but later, with the tri-fecta of freedom of religion and speech in 17th century Rhode Island, the story of the Declaration of independence, and the story of Henry Ford, does it make it's transition into pure jingoism. Right down to the musical interludes of "fanfare for the common man" and the national anthem.

Suddenly, public folklore made sense to me. Or rather, the rather alien concept of "why would a government fund such an obviously liberal and non-conformist, non-hegemenous organization". It's because it presents folklore that can be used in decidedly jingoist terms. Abrahams is wrong if he thinks that there are merely phantoms of Romantic Nationalism about, they are not just "phantoms", they are the backbone of our support. What sucks is that, though I am the cynical-boy about all this, I am also not the only one who things this way. Apparently this has been going on for some time.