The Next American Century

It seems that Andres Martinez wrote a Time Magazine article with title as above that triggered an anti-American rant from Bee. What especially offends her about us is our attitude, I think, though for specifics she cites newspapers, roads, plumbing, windows, food, and oh yeah attitude. Not sure that we have a monopoly on that last.

OK, so the post provoked a bit of patriotic defensive ire, reminded me of a couple of unpleasant encounhters with Germans and Germany (they were very much the exception, btw), and got me thinking about centuries. It wouldn't be crazy to call the twentieth century an American century, but it is surely way too early to hand that title to us in this one.

I suspect that Bee makes too much of the independence of modern German popular culture. The Americans may be a minority on the charts, but even the German and Belgian are singing a mainly American genre. Bee writes a blog in English for cripes sake.

I don't think we are moving to a global America, but we do seem to be moving toward a more global culture. It will have elements of many societies, including a lot from America (most of which in turn come from Europe, Africa, and Asia).

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