Ah well, Amos, you are such a representative, so you are counter-evidence in person, to which I bow, confuted but not repentant. I am second to none in my admiration for American culture in many of its manifestations, from Governor Winthrop (a relative) to Willie Nelson. I spent my formative years in American schools being indoctrinated into Yankee mythology, the Constitution, the freeing of the West from those pesky Mexicans and Indians, and so on: I have even been known on occasion to recite the Gettysburg Address (especially at Gettysburg). Neverthless, I stick to my guns (and where better to stick to guns than back in the U.S.A., as Chuck Berry would say?)

I was making a point about the wellsprings of a nation's mythology and its storytelling. In traditional cultures these are the absolute most important things: the place of elders, storytellers, is central. What stories do we tell, and how do we tell them? These seem to me to have been captured in our time by very important forces which are now warping (or LEJ may be right, simply reinforcing) threads in the basic fabric of modern culture, and most immediately in the U.S. (though certainly not excluding elsewhere). These include: the definition of the human, the role and place of autonomy, the nature of the social and the community, political choice, the sources of and the roots of historical reference, how one sees, interprets meaning. In spite of the best efforts of the marginal poets, historians, writers, artists, etc., and the near-magical wonders of science, technology, and medicine (America is well ahead of everybody else in the world), the fact remains that even educated people watch on average 2-3 hours of television a day (and these are adults). Give me 2-3 hours of anyone's time every day for 30 years, and you can keep the opera. Especially when there is no strong counterculture the rest of the time. What there is of deep culture (whatever that is) seems to me to be on the whole reactive to this immense power, fluttering its little wings against the hurricane.
Still, what makes America so interesting (and my little country as well, the country of McLuhan) is that it is all so "in your face" that it also has the most interesting critics and interpreters of mass culture. Yet overall, I fear you are whistling in the brightness.

yours, Peter T.