[lbo-talk] I love America (was Britain's conservative mayor backs Barack)

James Heartfield Heartfield at blueyonder.co.uk
Wed Oct 22 12:11:34 PDT 2008


Doug asked why I shared London Mayor Boris Johnson's view that the United States were the last best hope of the world.

Well, not wishing to get too tied up in rhetoric, let me qualify that I love Europe and Britain, and China, too.

But it is hard to get away from the fact that a lot of the best things in the world have come from the US for at least the last fifty years.

Like the civil rights movement, Thelonius Monk, the internet, and windows, David Mamet, Philip Roth, feminism, consumer capitalism (bearing in mind that European capitalism was premised upon holding consumption down until Roosevelt taught us otherwise), the New Left, Buckminster Fuller, Jane Jacobs, the motor car, the conveyor belt, Hollywood, most of the best Science Fiction, Art Spiegelman, fertilisers and the green revolution, Susan Sontag, Nicholson Baker, Coppola, Spike Jonze, Philip Glass, NASA, Bayard Rustin and Nina Simone (though she could not stay there), Thomas Edison and Norbert Wiener, Nathaniel West, Peggy Guggenheim, Dorothy Parker, most of the innovations in plastics, and so the list goes on and on.

And of course, that is just to note those intellectual workers whose efforts on the part of humanity carry a name tag. How much greater is the contribution of the largest working class in the world: still making something like a quarter of the world's manufacturing value added, I think; people whose grandparents kept us Europeans from the abyss in 1946, when Americans produced a majority of the world's output. Indeed I do love America, whatever differences I might have with its foreign policy, or opinions I might have about how its society might be better organised.



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