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Julian Cope presents Head Heritage

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Any American Prog Experts?
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IanB
IanB
6761 posts

Edited Dec 04, 2008, 13:47
Re: Prog, Marx and Elitism
Dec 04, 2008, 07:54
Not bunkish at all and I need a tongue in cheek smiley.

I take your point about Obama but the trend (and Palin is the epitome of this) appears to be that Republican candidates (post Nixon) succeed on a dumb-and-insular-as-I-want-to-be ticket. As if consipicuous intelligence is somehow suspicious. That's how it has appeared from here since the demise of Jimmy Carter.

I actually thnk that the US has produced far more thinkers, authors and composers of genuine interest in the 20th century than England has managed. We would have been incapable of making the leap to the moon. Intellectually incapable. We wouldn't have had the collective imagination. We would never have produced a Bucky Fuller - they would have been laughed out of town and never survived their first bankrupcy.

We're pretty good at angst and shame and guilt on the one hand and also a romantisicm of the countryside and love of golden age nostalgia on the other. A nostalgia that looks back 500 years through a warm mist (not a mere 50) while conveniently glossing over the real meaning of all our grotesque fuck ups. We celebrate Elizabeth but choose not to remember the successes of Empire lest we remember the failures. And being British we worry about it in a way that the French and Belgians appear not to.

Englishness - the love that dare not speak its name for fear of upsetting someone, somewhere, sometime.

Anyway. I think you are right on all your points.

BTW I meant to ask, does the ethnicity thing explain the relative success of PFM in the US. Was their US audience largely second and third generation Italian? In the same way that people lap up the likes of Celtic Women today?
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