A Padi Home Companion

[EndtheMadnessNow]

Reader Note: “Padi” is the Javanese term for unharvested rice, or more broadly, a field of rice plants. English adopted (stole?) this word in the term “rice paddy”.

Culture is a slippery thing to define. It’s like trying to pick up a bar of soap in a hot bath: the firmer you grasp it, the farther it shoots across the room and lands in the cat’s litter. Ask ten academics to define culture and they’ll give you charts, diagrams, and six-syllable words ending in -ology, but the rest of us know culture when we see it: it’s what we cling to when the world starts wobbling like Aunt Tish’s lime Jell-O salad.

Culture is the way we do things around here. It’s our hymns and our swear words, our manners and our mischief, our recipes, and even the way we argue over politics without throwing mashed potatoes at one another—well, most of the time. It’s the stories we tell around kitchen tables long after the dishes are washed, and the ideas we pass down because someone told us once, “That’s just how it’s done,” and we never questioned it because questioning meant chores.

Some say culture is art and music, museums and ballet. And that’s true, of course. But it’s also Grammy’s crocheted toilet-paper cover, the one that looks like a headless Victorian doll with a skirt big enough to parachute from the roof. It’s the marching band playing slightly off-key at the homecoming parade, and the local theatre group’s attempt at Oklahoma! where half the cast forgot the words and the other half improvised. It’s beautiful because they meant well, and everybody clapped anyway because the cast were all somebody’s cousins.

Culture is what makes a society feel like home instead of an airport terminal. It’s the shared language that doesn’t need translation: the understanding that when someone says, “Come by anytime,” it means “call first and don’t stay long.” It’s what keeps a person rooted when the stock market tanks, the storms roll in, and politicians start making speeches that sound like folks who have never changed a tire in their lives.

And yes, culture fights back against chaos. When the world starts unraveling—wars, elections, teenagers—the choir still gathers on Sunday, the football team still plays on Friday night, and Mary Pickerig still hosts her annual cornbread-baking contest even though someone invariably sets off the smoke alarm and the fire department arrives just in time for coffee. When the sirens quiet down, the accordion player keeps going and everything feels briefly, blessedly normal.

Just look at food. Food is the great cultural glue, and sometimes the great cultural concussion. Every family has that one dish no outsider should ever be forced to witness. Somewhere in Minnesota, a church basement still serves a casserole made entirely of canned goods and fear. In every Indonesian kampung there’s sambal so fiery it will make a grown man re-evaluate his life choices and vow to live more honestly. And every Thanksgiving someone tries a new recipe and it ends in tears, recriminations, and three bottles of wine. Yet we keep doing it because food is how we say “I love you and I forgive you for that thing you said in 1998.”

Culture is also a matter of memory. It’s not just the traditions we treasure, but the people who carried them before us. When the old ones are gone and we inherit the carving knife and the recipes written in handwriting that would make a doctor proud, we suddenly understand: we’re the grown-ups now. We are the keepers of the sacred casserole dish. We’re the ones who make sure the stories aren’t lost, even the stories that stretch the truth like society-page gossip.

And culture changes, whether we like it or not. Nobody writes letters anymore; we send emojis that are supposed to express love, sympathy, or constipation—sometimes it’s hard to tell which. Instead of photo albums, we have phones full of blurry pictures we never look at. But despite all the solemn promises that the world is going to hell in a handbasket, every generation finds new ways to laugh, make music, fall in love, and embarrass itself publicly. Human beings simply refuse to quit being human.

Culture makes us argue, too. If you want to start a fistfight in a peaceful town, just ask who makes the best barbecue or whether pineapple belongs on pizza. (It does not. That’s not an opinion; that’s natural law.) Debating these things is part of staying civil. It’s when we stop arguing about trivial nonsense that we’re in real trouble. And the toilet paper goes over the top.

Of course, culture gets romanticized, like the good old days when children obeyed their parents, politicians were honest, and gasoline cost nineteen cents. Those days never existed, but we like to visit them in imagination because memory, like a cheap toupee, has a way of smoothing out the rough spots and adding a little illusion. We were never as noble as we say we were, but we were trying—mostly. Culture helps us remember that striving counts, even when we fall short.

But here’s the heart of it: culture is community. It’s knowing the neighbor who snow-blows your driveway because he wakes up early anyway. It’s people showing up with a casserole when you’re sick, or a bottle when you’re down. It’s laughter across the fence and borrowed tools that never get returned but nobody really minds. Culture is what keeps a society from becoming just a population.

In a world that seems to be constantly auditioning for the apocalypse, culture is the quiet reassurance that we’re not alone. As long as someone still sings in the choir, and the bowling team still meets on Thursday night, and children still giggle during the solemn part of the program, civilization will limp along just fine. Empires fall, economies collapse, and leaders let us down, but culture—real culture—stays put, like a stubborn old farmer who refuses to leave the porch during a storm because “it’ll blow over.”

And maybe that’s the most important thing to remember: culture is not something we inherit from geniuses or aristocrats or committees with government grants. It’s something we build every day through simple acts of decency, humor, curiosity, stubborn tradition, and love. It’s not marble monuments or symphonies—though those are nice. It’s passing the mashed potatoes and saying, “Here, have s’more.”

So here’s to culture: to the choirs and casseroles, the inside jokes we’ve told a thousand times, the stories retold until the truth is unrecognizable but the laughter is real. Here’s to the flawed, bewildered, hopeful human circus stumbling forward together.

And here’s to us, who keep the thing alive without even realizing it—just by showing up.

Because when all is said and done, culture is a long table with enough chairs for whoever walks through the door.

And the only real requirement is that you pass the gravy.

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Today’s topical cinematic foray is a (I think) little known indie joint called Dancer, Texas Pop. 81 (1998)(Watch here). Written and directed by Tim McCanlies, who did a number of slice-of-life flicks, this one follows some teenagers looking to escape small-town America after graduation, and how one week casts their fates. Lovely piece. Pair it up with Christopher Guest’s Waiting for Guffman (1996). If this doesn’t cheer you up, nothing will.