It is almost certainly accurate to say that in both the U.S. and Britain there is roughly the same ratio of reasonably educated, cosmopolitan people to dull, parochial ones (the kind some pedants still call “philistines”).  Hugely disparate population sizes aside, there is probably an even richer variety of cultural activity in the U.S., which is, after all, one of the most ethnically, geographically, politically, and socially heterogeneous countries on earth.  We haven’t been a backwater colony for a long time, and all one needs to do to silence any haters is point to someone like Emily Dickinson or Miles Davis.  Sure, American culture exports a lot of shit.  So does any culture.  The British are the reason we have reality TV.

So why do many Americans, myself included, continue to assume, almost instinctually, that British people are somehow wittier and more articulate and better educated than we are?  This is especially true of our reactions to English emigres, but Irish and Scottish accents are also redolent of cool.  What is it about the national accent that seems posh (to use some British slang), even when it comes to dialects that in England are associated with the lower classes?  Why does a vulgar dumbass like Simon Cowell have any cultural cachet?

Apparently this stereotype irks Britons, too, at least according to Andrew Sullivan, the (British-born) philosophy PhD who edits the great Daily Dish and writes for a ton of American and European outlets.  However, he also argues that there’s some useful truth to the whole thing: impolite English outsiders have historically provided critical, alternative views of U.S. culture.  Go here to see what he has to say.  It’s a Times (of London) weekend commentary bit, which means it’s short enough to read while you eat a cup of yogurt or smoke a cigarette.

-TGR

Jill Lepore teaches American history at Harvard and frequently contributes to The New Yorker, among other magazines.  She’s a witty, deeply learned, but accessible writer and thinker, and her newest essay is a history of a particular kind of political language: allusions and appeals to the “original” intents / ideas of the men pop culture calls the Founding Fathers.  One might think that conservatives are the ones who tend to use this rhetoric, but as Lepore shows it has actually been a tool for abolitionists, gun nuts, antiwar activists, white supremacists, black civil rights warriors, Howard Zinn, Richard Nixon, and now, most loudly, that gang of older, affluent whites led by Glenn Beck and Sarah Palin (among others) which calls itself The Tea Party.  (You know, they’re the ones who hate high taxes and so despise Barack Obama because he cut taxes by $300 billion during his first year in office.)  Lepore’s approach and general attitude toward various movements in past and present U.S. politics is good-humored; nonetheless, she emphasizes that while there have been plenty of annoying, self-righteous “originalists” on the American left, the right is where you go to find truly batshit, destructive appeals to the Fathers:

Originalism in the courts is certainly a matter for debate. Jurisprudence stands on precedent, on the stability of the laws. But originalism has long since reached beyond the courts. Set loose in the culture, it looks like history but it’s not. It is to history what astrology is to astronomy, what alchemy is to chemistry, what creationism is to evolution. The history that Tea Partiers want to go back to is as much a fiction as the Lost Cause of the Confederacy.

A lot of this stuff is founded on those old American pastimes, anti-intellectualism and historical ignorance–Gore Vidal is right to call us “The United States of Amnesia.”  Lepore, however, argues that there is within this a more particular problem: few of us listen much to professional historians.  TV has no use for them.  Rarely does someone who isn’t a Washington, D.C.-based journalist get interviewed on MSNBC or CNN or wherever.  The declining role of historians as public intellectuals

left a great deal of room for a lot of other people to get into the history business. Today’s reactionary history of early America, reductive, unitary, and, finally, dangerously anti-pluralist, ignores slavery and compresses a quarter century of political contest into “the founding,” as if the ideas contained in Thomas Paine’s “Common Sense,” severing the bonds of empire, were no different from those in the Constitution, establishing a strong central government. “Who’s your favorite Founder?” Beck asked Palin in January. “Um, you know, well,” she said. “All of them.”

The essay is compelling.  You can read it here.

-TGR