I agree with your assessment of the European superiority complex. Not that I totally agree with the complex, but I also dont disagree! :)
Certainly Americans are a loud and rather tacky bunch. Most Americans do, IMHO, lack a refined sense of "taste." This may very well be because America has lacked an aristocracy in the form of Europe, an aristocracy which has always been the arbiters of good Taste. Europe is still very class (or caste) oriented, and I have read plenty of the English sense of "where one belongs." No doubt without the notorious Robber Barons of the 19th and 20th centuries, America would be hopelessly classless. Its ironic that the "new riches" who were reviled and precipitated the Sherman Antitrust Act were the very ones whose philanthropy almost singlehandedly built an American infrastructure of culture. Without these Darwinist Predators of Society as they were percieved, the University of Chicago, for example, would probably be a community college ;)
But, I have to disagree with you on the point of literature. America has produced well enough and of quality to stand beside Europe in prose and poetry, my opinion as always! And who can argue the place of Broadway in world theatricals? |
