Since there are so many regions, it's difficult to pinpoint American cultural traits. What makes it even more challenging is the fact that Generation Y idealizes traditionally non-American values. John Wayne and Robert Redford generally exemplify the traditional male American model. Assertive, confident, hard-working, and willing to laugh (despite often dire circumstances), their characters showed Americans what to aspire for (saying hello to your neighbors). Of course, the translation of values is rarely perfect; assertive can become belligerent (GIVE ME MY GODDAMN FOOD), confident shifts to arrogant (foreigners are worse than me in every possible way), hard-working means work-obsessed, and willing to laugh can turn into either 1) too stupid to do anything but laugh or 2) despair.
Our generation prefers men to be less traditionally Amerimasculine (the values in the above paragraph) and "unique." We do not idealize the hard-working; we prefer those who got rich quick. Our heroes are Chris Moneymaker (the amateur poker champ) and reality TV instacelebs. Apparently - I have not seen this poll with my eyes, and God only knows if I can trust the radio - a majority of Americans in my generation said that the most important thing to them was fame. We reject 9 to 5's and middle class jobs as boring, below us, and So Yesterday. Sites like MySpace allow us to cast ourselves in whatever unique sense we want, trendy people desperately argue that "they were doing this before..." and YouTube and blogs let us present ourselves to the world as non-TV instacelebs using any persona we choose. We want to be famous and have exciting, unique jobs, but we want them now. We don't like the idea of putting in 1 second of "9-5 drudgery." We rail against the idea of middle class suburbia (even though we grew up in it). In this way, we're also a hyperimage based culture. It's all about being famous, having people notice you, standing out, appearing to be cool. Eye contact is going out of style like small pox, assertive is suddenly scary, and people hate - HATE - the idea that someone can insult/laugh about their opinions (just read all of the hate mail for somethingawful.com's Your Band Sucks segment). Our new values are being "different," getting noticed, accepting relativism, and above all else, "not selling out" (to the Man, the record label, or really anything). I'm not exactly sure why, but we also love acting sad/whiny; my guess is that it's another way to get noticed.
It makes me wonder how Americans will be perceived around the world 15-20 years from now. Following the Great War, Americans - I think - were stereotyped with the traditional values; currently, we have the bad version of the traditional values. Who knows what we'll be known for in the future?
