Jabster, America is a young country. Very young. Infantile, in fact. So young, as was illustrated yesterday, does not even have a handle on morality, because everything we do is simply awesome in every overwhelming sense of the word. Enfant terrible, I think the technical term is.
At work we had a half dozen or so Turkish exchange students, and I got to talking to one of them. He made the observation that America has no signature cuisine, we have everyone else's (and there is in fact a fantastic Turkish restaurant down the street); he said "if someone wants to know Turkish cuisine, we say 'kebab', but you do not know what to say." Most of the visual art we revere comes from somewhere else. All our homegrown musical traditions are very young.
Youth and a lack of homogeneity contributes to the continual resistance to becoming a unified culture. For my part, I don't think that is at all a bad thing.
