Hi Brad,
Thanks for your post. I'm working on my return but it
will be a little while. As for monoculture I would say that
it is not so much that they had corn soup but that the
culture of McDonald's may or may not be close to the
Japanese and the issue is whether the Japanese can
absorb McDonalds and allow it to be a flower on the
Japanese trunk or whether it is toxic to the whole.
I suspect that the Japanese are flexible enough to make
a McDonald's "Japanese" and still enjoy their own
considerable appetite for their own fast food.
But I don't know the answer to that. The Japanese in
music are kind of like the Italians. They have the same
intensity and belief in their own answers as the bel
canto has in its. Also like the Italians they have a
rather bad history with the giants next door. We
could relate the rape of Nanking to the Roman
Church's relationship with the Albagensians when
real travel became efficient and safe enough for the
Pope's Armies to control the minds of what are
now the French. Ultimately the French culture
triumphed and Roman Catholicism in France is
French and not Italian. However, they still don't
tolerate Christian diversity very well, or so my
Baptist Missionary cousins tell me.
McDonald's in France is another issue. The French
cuisine has begun to heal my daughter along with
the Doctor's herbs which are coordinated with her
diet. He is a five star french chef himself. McDonald's
and all fast food is totally at odds with the French
methods of food combining and with what they call
"eating to live" rather than "living to eat". ( They have
the same attitude about work.) He is teaching her to
"eat to live" so that she is watchful of whether the chemistry
of the nutrients work together or not. He says most of
this fast food is like pissing into your gas tank on your
car.
And yet that is exactly the food that American
Private Enterprise sells our schools. It would be more
easy if my daughter were orthodox Jewish and ate only
kosher food than eating lots of vegetables with the
proper relationship to carbohydrates, etc.. in her current
"fast food" school.
The TV actress Suzanne Summers has written a
couple of books about food combining that she
learned in France after the standard gym health
food diet went to her stomach once she past fifty,
and wouldn't go away. Food combining became
necessary if she was to continue to work as an
actress. They wouldn't hire her with the weight gain.
But most of all the diet just makes you feel better.
Now the issue for McDonald's is not does it taste good
and is it easy but does it work in your fast paced life
of "living to work" in this world, as the energy supply,
or does it just gum up the works. Like the cigarette
manufacturers of a generation ago using Doctors to
sell poison, the fast food entrepreneurs are trying to get
our children hooked early by selling in the schools under
the old fashioned "American diet" rules. A diet that I
met once again in the hospital but is generally discredited.
Not by the scientists but by the HIV community that has
had to eat properly to live longer once they got the bug.
This is like the MDs who claimed that Alexander and
other somatic methods were fads until their million dollar
athlete customers began to break down more quickly than
the ones trained by practitioners who worked with dancers.
Suddenly you met all of the MDs at Pilates and in the
Alexander Center. They had to change because their
million dollar athletes sued a couple of them for
incompetence.
I found that the great American diet was alive and well
the other day with my dietition at the hospital. The
turning point for me was when my company was doing
some very complicated rehearsals. At five o:clock they
all took a short break and went to McDonalds in order to
be back rehearsing at six. It was strange, they simply
couldn't do the work after eating there. After that they
brought their own food. The clincher was when I had
a wonderful rehearsal with a Bach cantata and the
Long Island Baroque Ensemble. Took a liesurely burger
at the local fast food restaurant and had NO voice when
I returned. Something in it caused my cords to swell.
It was the first and last time that I ever did that. Well I
guess you have to beware if you are going to be a buyer
in this barbaric free market society.
Brad McCormick, Ed.D. wrote:
May I for once be openly cynical?
Christoph Reuss wrote:
On Sat, 24 Jul 1999, Keith Hudson wrote:
For better or for worse, we recreate society much as it was before whenever
we have passed through technological/economic change. OK, we might well
lose picturesque customs and metaphors (such as 7 or 70 different names of
snow -- and it's important for scholarly reasons that records are kept of
these), but we recreate new ones which are equivalent.
[snip]
The above notion that "picturesque customs" come and go, and always did so,
ignores what's fundamentally new in the current
