Monoculture has always been a dirty word by those who are involved in it's establishment.
In our race to move the American food supply almost wholly to soy and corn we've forgotten what it means to have a diverse food supply that's readily available to the poor and lower-middle class. I am not referring to so-called food deserts which are ill-defined, horrid constructs of the grocery industry who really just want to get around land-use restrictions allowing them to sell alcohol and tobacco products closer to schools and churches than previously allowed.
Current monoculture, as defined by New Urbanist and eco-mentalist types, is any culture that deviates from their urban ideal of elbow to asshole living conditions with high rises, even higher retail prices and even higher still rents which are designed to keep out the riff-raff.
Monoculture can also take on an aesthetic tone. Your ideal McMansion is suddenly a shining beacon of misguided monoculture that must be washed away under the monoculture of bungalows and 'historical structures' that must be maintained and 'restored' to a modern version of their original glory despite it being very cost prohibitive to do so.
From a values and morals perspective the best line I've seen recently was that "the left has won the cultural wars and are now going around picking off the survivors." I believe it was Jon Gabriel who tweeted this out but if not I apologize to the author. The monoculture of ideas is sprouting faster than a high-yield corn field in today's America, moving one step short of the point where pitchforks and flaming torches are tools of the trade.
So in all facets of modern American life we are moving toward monoculturalism all the while bemoaning the sad legacy of monoculture. Through a joint-partnership between the government and media we are quashing the multi-cultural debate that ran through American society. As the media picks winners and losers in the marketplace of ideas it becomes increasingly obvious that having a dissenting view is no longer patriotic as it was during the Bush Presidency. Any dissent is now quickly moved to the extremist junk-pile where mass chastisement and exile from the public square are soon to come. If you're really unlucky there will be calls to take your career away as well. Soon any deviance from the monocultural doctrine will be treated as heresy and the unclean will be burned at the alter of inclusion and tolerance for all those except the intolerant.
In some cities (Houston being one of them) aesthetic monoculturism (as well as environmental monoculturism) is being promoted full bore. It's not enough to think that people have the right to bicycle, walk, ride the train to work while living in a New Urbanist approved Nirvana located close to markets where you can sip from the nectar of the local bee merchant while dining on dandelion salad harvested from what used to be the front lawns of horrid suburban homes and strip centers, you have to be desirous of that lifestyle yourself. Any deviance from the established culture marks one as either a murderer of Gaia (that should be arrested, for what it's worth) or someone so daft as that you breathe through your mouth and possibly emit as much methane as a cow from your rear-end.
The biggest problem that all of this presents is the death of open debate, of civility (which, some might argue, died in America long ago) and of individualism. After all, when there's only one accepted dogma, and that dogma works to destroy all opposing ideas, then there's really nothing to differentiate people or to cause them to strive for individual achievement.
It's trendy today to bemoan the lack of political accountability, to knock one party or the other for being either the voice of big government or the voice of big corporations. What we've failed to realize in all of this is that we truly are getting the government we've asked for, the government we deserve, and a government that's powerful enough to not only eliminate those things which we don't like but also one possessing the power to start eliminating those things we do.
In one of his many books British auto-journalist/humorist Jeremy Clarkson characterized the difference between America and Great Britain as follows: "In America, they see a man driving a Rolls Royce and think 'One day, I'll have one of those' while in Britain we see the same man and think 'One day, I'll have him out of that'." Instead of following the original goal of spreading our freedom and social mobility to the rest of the world we've done the opposite. We've become that which we used to mock, and we've done it willingly. That we don't realize what we've done is just a sign of how effective the government/media complex has been in stripping us of our freedoms.
We've demanded they do this to us.
