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AMERICAN 'CULTURE' - AND ITS INFLUENCE Barnett Singer

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T is patronizing to refer to contemporary American culture as somehow a doubtful entity, but perhaps the problem is the word 'culture' itself. Would 'mindset' do better? Maybe. However, we will stick with 'culture', identifying some salient aspects of it in today's US, which for good and/or ill, seem to exert great influence in the wider world. American 'culture' has been inextricably bound up this election year with the searing, super-reported Obama-Clinton flght for the Democratic nomination, followed by Obama's increasingly bitter joust with Sen. McCain. One aspect of American 'culture' dealt with below, a huge penchant for nostalgia, was seen in an attempt to make Obama another JEK of fresh mien and views, and his wife a second Jackie - all made more poignant by Teddy Kennedy's sudden struggle for survival. There was also an attempt to show in the pro-Hillary coalition a lineage harking back to Franklin D. Roosevelt. On the other side, there was Republican concem for maintenance of a Reaganite legacy (few wanting out loud to protect George W. Bush's). So let us identify one prevailing theme in today's America as a 'culture of nostalgia'. The US housing market or auto industry may have experienced signiflcant downturns, but this nostalgia boom shows no signs of abating. Starting with popular music: in American restaurants or supermarkets, 'oldie-goldies' became an omnipresent aural plague at least a decade ago, and remain so, even as these tunes get played into repetitive rubble (or 'rubbish'?). Once they still seemed new, when nostalgia itself was fresh and bracing. This looking backward first surfaced after the explosive late 1960s took rock toward comparative old age. It wasn't quite used up, given that it still had a contemporary run to go in the '70s via James Taylor and Elton John, and through Carole King and the Carpenters to the Aussie Bee Gees, and the Eagles. Nevertheless, nostalgia did get feet in the door during that last decade of viable, new AM music. A sense of exhaustion with the present, and need to regain a warmer, fuzzier past was seen in Don McLean's Bye Bye Miss American Pie, dealing with a vanished period of white buck shoes and dances in the gym and clean-cut football games. It was also seen in the popularity of Sir Elton's Crocodile Rock and Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. And in the Lucas/Coppola film, American Graffiti (1973), featuring a young Richard Dreyfuss as the bookish high schooler, Ron Howard and Cindy Williams before their TV spin-offs, Happy Days and Laverne and Shirley; and many then-stirring oldies from the '50s. Today these tunes have become super-jejune, and American Graffiti now virtually unwatchable. On current American TV Perry Mason, Leave it Beaver, and / Love Lucy from the '50s, and re-runs from later decades {Hawaii 5-0 of the '70s, Matlock

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and Murder She Wrote from the '80s, etc.) still do big business, and people vote massively with their TV remotes. Many are obviously comforted by the old suits and dresses, and slower, more ponderous ways. A somewhat more high-minded contingent likes the nostalgia of 'Britcoms' on American public TV, where they, too, have the comforting feeling of avoiding manic commercials and ephemeral fare on other channels. In movies shown on American television the same holds true. The Turner network sans commercials features old films drawn from different decades, preceding our own apparently more deplorable present. So one day it can be Cagney or Bogie from the brown '40s; the next, a now ailing Paul Newman or Liz Taylor from the technicolour '50s; the next Kramer vs. Kramer on '70s divorce; and so on. Other channels emphatically with today's semi-epileptic adverts also feature old films, particularly around Christmas, where one is sure to get Bing Crosby and Rosemary Clooney, or Home Alone circa 1990. Not to mention the old James Bond films, or a Robin Williams vehicle, Mrs. Doubtfire, played again and again in all seasons. Nostalgia books? Going through the roof as well. There has been one on just about every ballplayer, team, and season of America's athletic golden era (1950s and '60s), and on the segregated earher decades, too. If you're a junkie for, say, Willie Mays, or football's Johnny Unitas (I recently read a bio of this great quarterback from gritty Lithuanian background, but with quintessential American name and comportment of his time), why, you can get it! You can be débordél By a period when athletes played their hearts out for peanuts in every game, and in some cases, became crippled in the process, while contemporary greats, such as baseball's pitcher extraordinaire, Roger Clemens, and his batting counterpart, Barry Bonds, have been tarnished by a media and Congress-driven steroids scandal. Old movie stars similarly appeal by contrast to today's, who seem regularly to be in recovery, or holding forth on politics (again, much exacerbated this election year!). In sum, one can be nostalgic round the clock . . . Is this 'world we have lost' and want damnably to recover syndrome being seen abroad? When we talk 'abroad', I know France best, and recall recently having sweet tarts and coffee for breakfast at a patisserie, and hearing oldies on the radio, both French ones (Johnny Hallyday, Aznavour et al.) and English or American ones. But you know the French: even their oldies stations have relatively cultured announcers, and good choices of material. However, their media also managed to throw dirt on someone who should be an authentic contemporary hero. Lance Armstrong, preferring nostalgie for their own five-time Tour de France winners of yore, Jacques Anquetil and Bernard Hinault. There must be retrospective longing in Britain, too, for the golden era of Stanley Matthews and of Manchester United, intensified when a David Beckham jumped for money first to Real Madrid, then to the L.A. Galaxy.

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Nostalgia has normally been with us in most areas, but I want to point to five other aspects of contemporary American life in this election year.

The Culture of Paranoia
Here is another major part of today's American 'culture'. The historian, Richard Hofstadter, once wrote a book on The Paranoid Style in American Politics and Other Essays, but he didn't know the half of it! Today there are more chips on American shoulders than you can find to mingle with weekend dips. On TV many sitcoms feature uppity young people who take umbrage at pretty well everything. But perhaps the paranoia has some justification, for everyone in America is now held to have potential feet of clay, everyone possessed potentially of some flaw that vitiates an entire career or series of laboured-over aspirations. In the past, too, we now have Jeffersons, Jacksons, or Lincolns emphatically presented with all the warts. In Britain, even an A.J.P. Taylor or G.M. Trevelyan must have had something wrong - a penchant perhaps for biting shillings or shooting squirrels - that could suddenly make their marvellous books no longer worth reading! Needless to say, all this puts a crimp in the creation of originality, and of authentic character. These days in America, people are afraid someone, anyone will be aggrieved, with the lawsuit menace aggravating the situation, and becoming an increasing vogue abroad, too. This highly charged political season has seen much occult influence alleged, especially in Sen. Obama's case (Rev. Wright, Ayers et al.). The TV media people are not helping, and if one flips channels away from politics, one finds more paranoia, for example, in weird, doper shows, where the good need abnormal powers to see via some innate ray-gun vision through outer hulks, piercing to inevitably thieving hearts beneath. If one goes to today's movies for soothing - for instance, to the Oscar-winning No Country for Old Men - the same kinds of themes prevail. Who can you trust? Psychopathic creeps, potential or actual, abound! To be sure, there are regional variations in America - with the Northeast probably leading the way in surly, at best neutral, wariness, and the more laid-back South or West more open. However, the theme is everywhere, and a sad one, and I've seen the British pick up some of this in their own life and media.

The Culture of Loquacity
Here I refer to an obvious, contemporary American trend of endless blather, not least on syndicated talk radio shows that for now are dominated by conservatives, though there have been attempts to limit their free speech. Better and fairer to allow those who are super-repetitive simply to fatigue listeners on their own - Rush Limbaugh being one; to a degree, Sean Hannity,

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though a more upright character, another. They tnake their points, but they make them again tomorrow, and the day after, and und so weiter. This theme and variation approach sometimes goes far too lean on the variation part, and garmlous repetition has become the rule. On television, too, there are multi-guest talk shows where 'experts' fight each other, shark-like, for the mike. While they scream for attention in survival of the loudest contests, listeners can develop high blood pressure attacks simply trying to gain some painless edification! Such programmes featuring verbal food fights show no signs of going away, and the style is growing abroad, too. However, when British Parliamentary sessions are aired by C-SPAN in the States, at least higher food-fighting standards seem evident, and no one can forget Mr Blair popping up like a sprightly Jack in the Box to confront the Right Honourable Mr So and So on health care or Iraq - none better, more polished in that regard. On this side of the ocean politics in the media is increasingly prey to this empty loquacity, to helter-skelter 'sound bites', nasty, off the top epithets, and the like. Should one take refuge in, say, the weather channel? There too longwindedness is the mle, and I've watched French météo channels that ape the American ones, which launched a trend of divagating endlessly (armed with satellite diagrams) about rain in the south, fair skies to the north, etc. The talk both on these national weather channels, and on local newscasts (with weather 'on the tens') never flags, and you see these climaticfilibusterersgrow almost cheerful when they have actual tomado damage to report! There is similar frantic prolixity on sports talk programmes, relating not only to events like the Super Bowl, but to inflated salary demands or athletes' excesses at nightclubs, cum plentiful phone-ins from fans round the country wishing to put in their two cents worth. For along with prolixity among media elites, this dial-in phenomenon reflects what sociologist Edward Shils once called a growing 'participatory delirium'. Not, however, on ballfields or tennis courts; rather, on talk or chat-nets ... Indeed, loquacity is also encouraged by the system of on-line email or of Amazon reviews (and of course there are French and British Amazons, not to mention Yahoos, etc.). Younger generations, who blessedly are writing more via email or blogs than previously - perhaps to become poor men's Horace Walpoles - are also less pleasingly wordy in actual speech, buttressing cellphone conversations by frequent arch support-type 'likes' ('like, I'll see them tonight, and like, I'm not sure when they'll arrive, but, like, I'll get the pizza ...'). There are also plentiful conversational 'you knows', which still do well even in Yale or Princetonian brogues ('the arrival of, you know, high culture in Spain was accompanied by, a sort of, you know, effiorescence of . . . ' ) . In fact, I've noticed Brits on the airwaves sadly imitating this vogue, and French verbality once revealing that jewel of a language, now, too, seems

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to require the buttress of Anglo-solecisms, and just language of a more mdimentary kind than should be showcased. French was always synonymous with elegance, and some of the great Paris newspapers still retain a fair amount of it; but there is also a thickening cloud of cloddishness that seems to have come over via Amérique and its movies, TV programmes, and the like, especially among the young.

The Culture of Ahistoricism
Yes, American nostalgia is thriving, but tme historical sense? That (despite the History Channel, and other popular modes) seems in short supply today. Too many appear to see history as fairy tales with no application to us, or perhaps akin to Voltaire's celebrated pack of lies played on the dead. History might be fun or diverting, but it doesn't touch me . . . However, it obviously does have rough laws, remaining an inexorable guide to our present and future; and without echoing yet again the clever philosophical George Santayana, it needs to be heeded. No one in governmental or journalistic positions of influence can afford to ignore it, yet many do. Does the average American, even in the chattering classes, still feel the severe threat that was presented by Hitler, the Japanese, and World War II generally? Or of Russia's Communist empire during the Cold War, whence so many were grateful to exit in 1989? Does the average Briton feel remotely as much as the generation of, say, Selwyn Lloyd and Suez, the perilousness of 1940, and the unalloyed grandeur of Sir Winston? And of the British people and empire in that dedicated, protracted struggle for survival? Does the average young French person relate to what brave, thoughtful men like Hélie de Saint Marc went through in the Resistance and in Buchenwald, then in the perilous north of Vietnam, not to mention the ensuing, searing conflict in Algeria during the 1950s? Does the average young Israeli today feel what the Sharons or Meirs went through to make and hold onto that country? My own visit there in 2002 revealed a growing disconnect from this arduous past. Yet historical sense should remain a key part of wisdom for professors, politicians, and media people. Too often, however, that history is now petite histoire - little scandals, little occurrences in 1827 or 1997, village gossip and the like that are considered somehow important. In a twentieth century world history course I gave through the '90s, I would often ask in discussion sections, as we debated historical disasters of the week: could something like these Stalinist, Nazi, or Khmer Rouge horrors occur on our side of the Atlantic? Oh no! was the mostly inevitable reply; and I was branded a rank pessimist for scenting something like a 9/11 on the horizon, even as students considered America impregnable, while I liked to remind them that this superpower couldn't even keep

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Washington near the White House safe at night! I didn't wish to be proven correct; who wants such horrors to reach my daughter's and son-in-law's and new granddaughter's protected enclave in the San Francisco Bay area? I would hope that Britons and Europeans might be better than Americans at applying historical wisdom to their present and future; but again, it seems that even there such problems exist. I do know - and am probably being cliched in repeating what many realize - that Sir Winston would not have been the politician and war leader he was without his acute, detailed sense of the long past. I wish I could be so persuaded by today's world leaders. I also wonder whether all students gaining degrees from, say, today's Cornell or Harvard can feel even the era of tweeds and teas circa 1954 on sylvan paths they now traverse mainly in grunge. Can they actually feel the past, near and far, or are we simply creating bureaucrats manquésl Can they feel the law of revolutions that sooner or later, and in varying degrees, devolve into comparative rackets, whether we are speaking of the English Civil War, the Chinese Revolution, and yes, that exciting revolution in mores of the late '60s in America, still much with us in its effects?

The Culture of Haste
Snippetitis, as I call it, is first and foremost encouraged by one of the most deleterious technological innovations in human history, the TV remote that became standard in America from the late '70s. This legal drug encourages us all to flip and flip, in order presumably to find something better. As does technological progeny of the great Jobs or Gates - the computer and its intemet revolution. Get what you want now! Get something else, too and with faster and faster 'hookups'. The result is both haste and insatiability joined at the hip. Along with that, we have of course had a fast food revolution for some time, another unsought byproduct of, in this case. President Eisenhower's military-conceived freeway system. Today's Burger Kings or Taco Bells even with better salads and less transfat - still sell immense quantities of, well, fast food. Get it fast, eat it fast, leave fast . . . And the trend is alive and growing even in the gastronomical paradise of Erance, and obviously in many other countries. In Paris, I had started to be used to 'McDo's', but Pizza Huts, Kentucky Fried Chickens, and the rest? In any case, hurry, hurry, hurry is now the rule, complete with 'road rage', in some cases. Hurry where? I sometimes want to ask people. But this penchant for alacrity is one reason for a current parenting crisis in the States, particularly in the go/go Northeast (again, versus a more relaxed South or West). One often sees mothers admonishing their kids in stores to rush — and for what? I feel like telling them that one key to good parenting is the motto 'never hurry' - to which might be added 'never worry'. The two (hurry

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and worry) seem to go together, like ham and eggs, and we are raising as a result, many stress cases on this side of the Atlantic. Can ye olde Britain, Italy, or Germany be far behind? They had better be!

The Culture of Appeasement
Finally there is the American culture of what we now call political correctness, but do little about - and it, too, is running the proverbial table. The French also speak of being politiquement correct, or having a 'wooden tongue' - i.e., not speaking out, and simply letting the water lap higher and higher, prohibitions of thought, word, and deed neurotically worsening, and provoking little resistance. (How will we do when we have to resist barbarians on the order of Nazis?) Call it the culture of fear, if you will. However, I myself am loathe to embrace such themes here, and also afraid to sound overiy loquacious, ahistorical, hasty, or nostalgic! So basta on these American themes (to be revisited hopefully in a more positive light some other time) . . .

Barnett Singer is Associate Professor of History at Brock University in Ontario, Canada. He is the author of several books on French themes ranging from a biography of Brigitte Bardot to his most recent work, Maxime Weygand: A Biography of the French General in Two Worid Wars, published 15 July 2008.

ROBIN FINDLAY
We regret to announce the death of our long-time colleague and friend, Robin Findlay. After many years of experience in journalism, culminating in his post as Night Editor of the Daily Mail, Robin Findlay agreed to become one of our Editorial Advisors. For many years he also served as Business Manager of Contemporary Review. We mourn the loss of his wise counsel and send our sympathy to his family.