Well, I tried, but people seem to have tossed it aside for "All America Has Is Pop Culture" "All America Has Is Fat Corporatism" blah blah blah.
Oh, yeah. You were trying to get us to discuss regional culture, right? I wasn't interested in discussing that at first because I already knew about regional culture, but since we seem to be coming up with nothing but cliches when talking about national culture, let's go ahead.
Let's see... we all know about rednecks from listening to Jeff Foxworthy. They're the uneducated trailer-park dwellers who don't speak well, but are very good at inventing practical solutions that most people find disgusting/crude, which proves they definitely have some form of intelligence.
I probably have a few in my family, because I've found myself doing things like this:
1. Used blank sheets of notebook paper to blow my nose because I didn't have any Kleenex (which prompted a teacher to RUN to me with a box of it once, LOL).
2. Ate my lunch out of the tray with my fingers while standing over a trash can, just washing them afterwards, because our lunch period was too short given the length of the line for me to eat properly if I didn't want to be late.
3. Picked grime out of my fingernails using the tip of a disposable Bic mechanical pencil that had run out of lead.
4. My mom and I use an old exercise bike we got at a garage sale as an alarm clock stand (seat), hat/coat rack (handlebars), cooking timer, temporary magazine rack (odd frame partition between seat and wheel), and sharpening wheel (unusually thick and hard metal wheel and pedals).
5. Our apartment isn't well insulated, so during the winter, we hang a blanket over the downstairs entrance to the stairwell in order to impede the warm air from rising upstairs, which usually leaves the downstairs extremely cold and upstairs too warm. We also figured out how to use masking tape as makeshift weatherstripping on the doors and windows during the winter.
Well, that's how Southern culture has affected me, anyway. It's made my mind better at finding ways to do without things or convince myself I don't need them, than finding ways to get or accomplish things. I know a lot of people who grew up in the South who think the same way, and struggle with the same mentality, which is why I provided an example. The advantage is that you don't have ridiculous expectations of life and are unlikely to waste resources, but the disadvantage is that your capacity for more refined senses and tastes are dulled, and you may find yourself extremely pessimistic and/or confused about what's achievable.
Let's go on to Texas culture. This is where things start to get interesting for me, the state level. Texas culture seems to place an exceptional value on independence and individualism... more so than the REST of the U.S., if you can believe that. One of the side effects of this, is that I grew up believing that using connections to people, or otherwise taking unnecessary help to get ahead or improve my lot was something of a disgusting behavior, and that the only appropriate way to do things was to achieve them on your own (or with just the help of your immediate family). Texas also has an unusual break with Southern culture, in that Texans tend to believe in doing everything "big," particularly personal success. I think it's been partially influenced by the "Big Oil" culture here. Texas as a whole also seems to have some Spanish and Mexican influences due to the border with Mexico, obviously. Many unusual Texan styles are influenced by Mexican ones. There's also a strong emphasis on the "Old West" way of doing things. Particular regions (especially rural ones) tend to be strongly influenced by the wealthiest people in them (Doug Dimmadome is an extreme parody of this tendency, as well as Texans).
That's Texas as a whole, though. Now, Dallas is a little different, and I'm kind of thankful I grew up here rather than out in some other part of Texas. I was sheltered from some of the worst of Texas culture for most of my childhood, although I saw it later. Dallas seems to lean slightly further left politically than many other cities in Texas, and I would say that aside from Houston, it's the only halfway civilized place in Texas.
The main reason, as far as I can tell, is because Dallas has two airports, plays host to people from several other cities, and thus resembles a more typical urban area/city in some ways, due to the fact that an unusual proportion of the people here are from other regions, or are used to seeing people from other regions. Our public transportation system has poor coverage, but its been improving/expanding lately, and most cities here don't have one at all. In fact, it's the exposure to other cultures I got through the business, education, and technology-oriented people here, particularly from Asian, European, and even Eastern and Western US cultures, that first caused me to question the way typical Texans did things. There also seems to be a bit more support for and awareness of the Arts here than in most parts of Texas, though I'm not as certain of that.
So, hopefully I've illustrated how much difference a region, a state, or even a particular city, can make.
