I don't really get it. The country that loves guns, seems to want to enter every war, huge porn industry, capitalist, highly strung people etc. etc. I mean there are many other countries that I would expect to have as a high a percentage of religious people, but they often don't. Scandinavian countries spring to mind. I don't suppose it does the US much harm as a country but having lived there and expecerienced the culture (or lack of it) it still strikes me as odd that so many people claim to be deeply religious.
Tell you what: pick any cultural category and I'll demonstrate USA's cultural dominance over the UK over the past 100 years: movies, food, classical music, architecture, literature. About the only area you guys have a fighting chance is rock/pop music (an American invention, btw). So go watch some Bennie Hill and eat your Shepherd Pie, you backwoods hick.
I'm not sure you'd win that argument with regard to classical music (orchestras, perhaps, but not necessarily composers) or literature.
Gosh I wonder if the fact America was settled by Pilgrims, Puritans, Quakers, Catholics, various anabaptists, and all sorts of people for religious reasons might have something to do with it? As my Reformation history professor used to say: "After 1650 Europe had no religious wars because they sent all the kooks to the New World".
Over the past hundred years, England can't even approach American literary accomplishments. Oh yeah, and T.S. Eliot is ours.
Is this World Rivalries? My bad. I fogot that Americans can't stand any criticiism even when it wasn't intentional Thank-you for pointing out that I should have added illusions of grandeur and lack of humilty. I suppose now that mr. "I'm the boss around here" Gringo Texas has waded in with his disapproval of this thread it will turn into some pointless US v The World argument when all I wanted was a serious debate.
Anthologies of modern British literature often include Joyce, Yeats, Shaw, and Eliot, because English contributions to the canon were pretty thin gruel in the 20th century. America absolutely made the most important contributions to world literature in the first half of the 20th century, and Latin America dominated in the second half. As to why America is so religious, it's because the religions that the sects of Christianity that have exploded over here are those that make the fewest demands on the worshipper and that emphasize the sins outside of the church more than those inside it. (I'm obviously simplifying the situation quite a bit.) Gay marriage, Hollywood excess, and the so-called "war against Christmas" play better in Peoria than charity does.
Nonsense, I didn't object to your characterizations of our corporate capitalistic or religious or pornographic fervor, because there's truth in it. But the idea we lack culture is a stereotype tossed around by ignorant Europeans trying to make themselves feel better.
I suppose we shouldn't threadjack this into a literature or classical music thread, so I'll save my rebuttals and/or concessions for the appropriate venue.
Nothing could be easier. The simple fact that something ridiculous like 80% of the population have never actually left the country. How can you possibly have any idea about the world if you've only seen it on TV.
I'm in the mood for a good thread-jacking. Tell you what: I'll take literature, and Gringo can take film, and we'll compare the contributions of the US and the UK for the 20th century. I've got a meeting now. More later.
I'll bite: I think the US is so religious because we're the undisputed masters of taking the path of least resistance. Take it at face value or assign your own value to that statement.
You really are aggressive aren't you. You totally took my words as a direct assault on your country. Read what I said "culture (or lack of it)", does that mean that everyone I met in America is an uncultured fool. Not really. Though I lived in Indiana and Kentucky and *most* of the people I met there would fall into that category. Not really a criticism of them, all nice folks, but if you tried to have a conversation about a good book you often get a confusded look.
Wasn't the Jacobite rebellion in scotland post 1650? One could argue that was more a political uprising, though it pretty much split on religious lines. But maybe europeans finally realized that. Princes, kings, and troublemakers used religious fervor and differences to stir up trouble, kill loads of people, create misery, but basically just to further their own petty aims of power. So europeans frowned down upon religious fervors which caused so much death and destruction. Americans got rid of princes and kings instead, and kept the religious fervor. Actually, religion was used as a social identity for bonding, as loads of different cultures came into intimate contact with each other. Maybe if there were some really bloody religious wars in america (starting just before next Christmas?), more americans would switch to decaf like the europeans did.
Massachusetts Bay Colony, perhaps, but not necessarily "America". The Spanish and French peoples originally settling along the Gulf Coast and up the Mississippi, which were later integrated into the US, certainly weren't religious zealots different from the average Catholics in the Old World. The Virginia Company settlers were more interested in economic gain than religious ends (though the original leadership imposed strict religious rules upon the populace in an effort to maintain a semblance of control, those rules didn't last all that long).
Fair enough, and no American would dispute that, culturally speaking, the lowest common denominator is lower than many of would like. But in my time in England, I met plenty of Brits who had never left the country, even though it's much easier and cheaper to get to The Netherlands or France from the UK than it is from Indiana. But in terms of cultural contributions, England has rested on its laurels for the past 100 years, producing novelist after novelist and poet after poet who consider Englishness to be stupefyingly interesting subject matter. There's a reason so many of your Booker Prizes keep going to South Africans, Indians, and persons from second-generation immigrant families. England has produced not one interesting poet since Phillip Larkin (who is himself hardly canon material). Not one! In the first 50 years of the 20th century, America gave the world TS Eliot, Ezra Pound (the inventor of modernism, IMO), Robert Frost, William Carlos Williams, Wallace Stevens, H.D., William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. England produced Auden.
There's a reason that England was known as the "land without music" by continental Europeans for pretty much all of the 18th and 19th centuries.
I sympathize. I encountered similar confusion when expounding on the strictly modernist foundation of Godard's work while traipsing around Liverpool. Of course, given the disadvantaged literary mileu from which you've had to arise, a good part of the confusion may have been due to your definition of a "good book."
A friend of mine in the Committee on Social Thought took a class on Proust from him and (if memory serves me right) thought that he was a fairly poor teacher as well. I'm embarrassed to admit that I've only read sections of his novels published in The New Yorker. I should read him sometime. Ever cross paths with Mark Strand?