Use in Popular Culture
The melting pot remains a stock phrase in American political and cultural dialogue. The general perception of its process and effects can be summed up in "The Great American Melting Pot" song from Schoolhouse Rock!.
In 1969 the song "Melting Pot" was released by the UK band Blue Mink and charted at #3 in the UK Singles Chart. The lyrics espouse how the world should become one big melting pot where different races and religions are to be mixed, 'churning out coffee coloured people by the score' referring to the possible pigmentation of children after such racial mixing.
On The Colbert Report, an alternative to the melting pot culture was posed on The Word called "Lunchables," where separate cultures "co-exist" by being entirely separate and maintaining no contact or involvement (see also NIMBY).
Read more about this topic: Melting Pot
Famous quotes containing the words popular culture, popular and/or culture:
“Popular culture is seductive; high culture is imperious.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“Both gossip and joking are intrinsically valuable activities. Both are essentially social activities that strengthen interpersonal bonds—we do not tell jokes and gossip to ourselves. As popular activities that evade social restrictions, they often refer to topics that are inaccessible to serious public discussion. Gossip and joking often appear together: when we gossip we usually tell jokes and when we are joking we often gossip as well.”
—Aaron Ben-Ze’Ev, Israeli philosopher. “The Vindication of Gossip,” Good Gossip, University Press of Kansas (1994)
“When we want culture more than potatoes, and illumination more than sugar-plums, then the great resources of a world are taxed and drawn out, and the result, or staple production, is, not slaves, nor operatives, but men,—those rare fruits called heroes, saints, poets, philosophers, and redeemers.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)