> >One might add that the finest products of American culture have also
> >attracted and moved masses of people around the world, from Poe and
> >Whitman, Melville and Hawthorne, in the 19th century,
Well, my generation has heard of those folks - my students, full of brains and all sorts of cultural capital - haven't.
> >to Dreiser, Fitzgerald, Richard Wright and others in the 20th.
Mebbe the Great Gatsby (coz Robbie Redford was in it when he was still a hunk), but this is stretching a point.
> >Nor should one entirely forget the influence of American music, popular and
> >otherwise.
Nor should one pretend one can't pogo to a bit of Ramones or cringe before a Cage onslaught and still not loathe the American nation state's sway in the world.
> >All this of course is a closed book to the smug middle class
> >philistine and snob, satisfied to make use of words and phrases that
> >come most easily to hand.
Slapping it on with too broad a brush, for mine. See below.
> I pretty much agree with all that.
Mebbe. But it's not all as meaningful as all that.
> The implication is that it's not the European
> masses that are anti-American; they're all going to Hollywood movies
> and listening to hip-hop.
Globalisation in its '90s guise has fragmented as much as it has integrated - impoverished and endangered as much as it has enriched and secured. Those within the loop are better off than those outside the loop (globalisation not having uniform effects over space, race, class, religion and culture), and my guess is the 'smug' boojies (is 'compradors' too strong?) are more pro-American than most of those rapping Arnie fans. I talked politics for three weeks in Turkey in April, and heard nothing but genuine fear and seething loathing (albeit, importantly, the critiques are of US institutions and finance, not Joe- Sixpack). And you should stand around in the uni quadrangle here for half an hour, come to that - loads of baseball-cap-sporting, Bruce-Willis-doting, Doggie-Dog bopping 'chooks-home-to-roost' advocates (again, taking no joy in the suffering of the WTC innocents; don't get me wrong). They don't make the connections you think are there to be made, Doug. I don't either, mind.
America has taken no pains on behalf of its image for a while now (you might remember me going on about same here and on PEN-L ever since NoviSad, the UN snubs, the repudiation of Kyoto, ABM, small-arms, etc etc, nil-consultation bombings above the Iraqi exclusion line etc etc). And all Americans are gonna have to live with what the beltway elites have wrought. The fact is, the head prefect is gonna be resented, and if there's something wrong with the system that put him there, and if he visibly takes undiplomatically selfish steps to keep himself there, he's gonna be blamed personally. Nation States aren't persons, so real persons cop it in their role as ascribed, if unwitting, stand- ins.
I say again, Oz ain't been any better, it's just irrelevant - er, I hope ...
Cheers, Rob.
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