Capitol Hill Blue Forums Misc. Topics Ain't This America What is distinctive about American art and letters

Well, you are getting warmer. I like to take accepted "wisdom" and stand it on its head. The fact that it most often makes as much --- or as little --- sense as its opposite shows how incorrectly framed our ideas usually are.

My "mindset," as you call it, is to take unquestioned assumptions and question them. If I can make people feel like fools for swallowing so much nonsense, that is all to the good. It is a sound pedagogical method --- at least in the United States, where people are so used to being flattered, not to mention flattering themselves.

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Emma, I shall most graciously concede that your son's claim to fame is worthy of some passing consideration so long as you and he are not so gauche as to assume that this implies a real talent for things artistic, whether written or visual. You must remember the limitations inherent in the American character, American society and American education, and that he has hit the trifecta.

Given your son's limits as a result of his misfortune to be an American rather than the scion of a civilized nation, please understand that he will never be able to write some subtle, extended metaphor such as a sublime word-craftsman like Nabokov would bring forth, or the complex nuancing of the tortured soul that would spring from the brow of a Tolstoy or a Proust or a Joyce. He must, alas, be content with short, rudely-energetic bursts of words that would splatter from the pen of someone like Hemingway, the exemplar of the bloated, drunk and violent culture that is the real America.

Nor should you consider his photography to be real art, for it is mere technology, and any culture - even a pedestrian one like that of America - is capable of reproducing it as it lacks the soul of true art that is exclusively the birthright of those blessed to have been born and intellectually nurtured in some less toxic cultural womb. Therefore, when he - without imagination or real appreciation of truth and beauty - points and clicks at some dull American face that is unanimated by any true sense of taste or refinement, remember that it is not really art, it is just a subtle and extended metaphor of American rape of the world of true civilization and refinement.

Moreover, Emma's son, or anyone else, if they take to heart the truths you have imparted, has some hope of escaping the handicap and darkness of being born American, and entering the sunlit uplands of true civilization, where they may achieve the chief end of a human being: to glorify Beauty, and enjoy it forever.

you are full of yourself .

It seems some residual of numan's american heritage remains. You can take the american out of america... etc

That is a perceptive remark. Yes, some of my Americanness remains; it is my handicap and my cross to bear. I take some comfort that it may serve as a warning to others to flee from the infection of things American.

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In any case, you have clearly gained our rapt attention.

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von Braun understood very well that you need to flatter Americans outrageously if you are to get anywhere in the United States.