You are absolutely right. American culture is very insular. One thing that irks me is cruises. People get on these big boats with all the trappings of American life and culture, sail around, get off at some port, go to all the tourist traps, get back on the boat, and start over. Then they think they've been somewhere.

>>Hi all
>>
>>I half-jokingly think I've stumbled on to proof of the decline of civilization. According to some it'll all be over December 2012.
>>
>>Creativity seems to be going away. Everything seems to be a rehashing of something from before. Sampling music, Terminator the TV Series and now a new Knight Rider series. Cmon people. Do something new!
>
>Western neck of the wood is not the whole of the civilization. Even the "the end is near" is a typical in-joke of the western cultural circle; the unwillingness to step out of the circle is not. A joke, I mean.
>
>So yes, the ideas circulating show a good degree of inbreeding. There are many reasons for that, but the main three can be listed as follows:
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>- we have always enjoyed repeating our own stuff
>- we have never liked other stuff
>- if we take to trying out some of the rest of the world stuff today, tomorrow there'll be another suggestion to do so and we'd soon be flooded with those
>
>Hollywood and TV networks are largely to blame for this - they'll reduce anything to "boy meets girl" and will greatly discourage anything really new, because they wouldn't know how to spin it, how to sell it, and "who would ever want to watch {new idea here}". So they repack the same stuff over and over.
>
>Just for kicks, for the people in "this part of the world", it would be nice if you could count, somehow, how many
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>- foreign movies have you seen
>- foreign movies have you seen where you actually heard people speak their language all the time and the language wasn't English
>- foreign movies have you seen that didn't belong to Western cultural circle (Australia and NZ count as West)
>
>Now repeat the above count for:
>- musicals
>- theater plays
>- police serials
>- rock concerts
>- historic serials (bet some didn't know these existed)
>- SF anything (movies, books by foreign authors, cartoons)