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.....