From popular culture to values, Europe has no right to feel in any way superior to the US, says DAVID ADAMS
THE EXCITEMENT around the US presidential election has had me reflecting, not for the first time, on America, and just how much of an influence it has had on my life. I grew up on a steady diet of American films, books, comics, and, after we could afford a television set, American TV shows.
As a child, I listened avidly to Alistair Cooke's wonderful Letter from Americaon the wireless, and dreamt of one day visiting the places and the people that Cooke described so lovingly. Is there a male of my generation who can ever forget the (monochrome) televisual pleasures of Highway Patrol, Wagon Train, and 77 Sunset Strip? And who among us didn't wonder what on earth a zip code was, while cursing the fact that, as the dollar wasn't our currency, we couldn't send off for any of the exotic things, like X-Ray Specs and midget cameras, advertised in American comics.
But best of all for me was the music. When I first heard a Hank Williams record, at about eight years old, the hairs stood up on the back of my neck. A reaction that The Yellow Rose of Texasand A Pub with no Beerhad signally failed to excite (I later learned that the latter was in fact by an Australian, Slim Dusty).
I'd stumbled upon Your Cheating Heartwhile messing about with my sister's Dansette record player and disc collection, and was hooked on Williams from the first pain-soaked line.
The contribution of American artists to popular music is so enormous it is impossible to quantify. From Woody Guthrie to Bob Dylan and Bruce Springsteen, Buddy Holly to Simon and Garfunkel, Nina Simone to Janis Joplin, Phil Spector to Brian Wilson, Ray Charles to Stevie Wonder: the list goes on and on forever. Emmylou Harris could sing the alphabet and still break your heart.
And what about all those excellent American writers like Mark Twain, Scott Fitzgerald, Tennessee Williams and Gore Vidal? Again, the list is endless.
In one form or another, American popular culture has infiltrated and influenced virtually every part of my life. Maybe I'm a victim of US cultural imperialism. Who knows? Who cares? I certainly don't! I'm a willing victim. In fact, I'd happily recommend it to anyone.
In this part of the world, it is fashionable to denigrate America. To look down our noses and talk pompously of American aggression and greed, as though we in Europe are superior beings who have moved beyond such things. How soon we forget how very much more than music, films, bubblegum and burgers the people on this side of the Atlantic owe America. In the not too distant past, we owed her our freedom: after she intervened in two "world wars" to save Europe from the worst of itself.
We talk of the evil of institutionalised racism in America, as if it no longer exists in Europe. Who are we to point an accusing finger at anyone? The legacy of colonialism is no different in its painful outworking than the legacy of slavery. In the main Americans are proud of their history, and with due cause.
It is truly remarkable that the tiny populations of the original 13 British colonies of North America had among them at the one time so many men of genius - John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin and George Washington, to name but a few.
More remarkable still was the odds against these men coming together in common cause, and eventually winning independence from the then greatest power in the world. Those farsighted founding fathers, in their Declaration of Independence and Bill of Rights, designed and kick-started the most successful and enduring political and social experiment in the known history of mankind, and laid down a blueprint for our modern liberal democracies.
The inscription on the Statue of Liberty reads: "Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!" cries she With silent lips. "Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me; I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
And the "ancient lands" of "storied pomp" (and many others besides) took America at its word, and readily gave up those "tired", "poor" and "huddled masses" that were "yearning to breathe free".
From around the world, people flocked to the US, to enjoy freedoms and opportunities so long denied them in the lands of their birth (I'm thinking in particular of the Jewish peoples of eastern Europe). And from this mix of so many different religions, ethnicities, languages and cultures, the greatest nation on earth was formed. The miracle is that it managed to survive at all.
Here in Ireland, at different times in our history, people from the Protestant, Catholic and dissenter traditions fled to America, to escape religious, political and/or economic oppression at home.
We Irish, of all people, should be above knee-jerk anti-Americanism. But sadly, we're not.
To Senator Barack Obama, 44th president-elect of the USA, all best wishes. Too often, we forget the enormity of the debt we owe your great nation.