What? You mean arts funding, venue management and promotion of tradarts and musical education receives so much Bush administration backing and dosh that everything in the US tradition is hunky-dory?

I'd say (in my limited experience) that while the Lincoln Center was very nice, I didn't notice that it was replicated anywhere else and it's a VERY BIG country. Come to think of it, other than in one or two pockets of Virginia, Kentucky and Georgia, I didn't come across any sort of music that's not available absolutely anywhere else in the world, by which I mean, obviously, a steady diet of globalised corporate Uncle Sam pop.

In Woodstock there were serried ranks on the village green of Dylan wannabe clones complete with Woody hats and harmonica harnesses all singing Like A Rolling Stone in unison. Maybe by now some of them have learned American Pie too. And Springsteen's greatest hits. So, yes, I can see why you're telling me I'm quite wrong and the US tradition is in no need of a similar shake-up such as I envisage for England. Our emigrants took their music across the Atlantic but now we've got it back on the Songlinks CD. You don't want it any longer, any more than you welcome local or regional musics, cajun, conjunto, musics of immigrant communities or Native American culture. No, of course not. Not when you have Ms Clinton singing The Star Spangled Banner on YouTube.