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Bibbity's avatar

America is a 3rd world shithole full of Christian fundamentalists and everyone is 1 medical bill away from financial ruin. Screw this place. I'm out. Maybe don't build your entire culture around money.

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Noam D. Plumb's avatar

Have you considered that at least some of us who have not fled to Europe in search of such necessities as café society and the agreeably bohemian lifestyle that permits one to muse in wicker chairs with an interlocutor or two over a white marble table and cups of espresso, al fresco, about the legacy of Adorno or the latest rumblings raised by an article in one of the tabloids (LRB, NYRB: perhaps the title would give too much dignity to TNY)—have you considered that some of us have declined to do so not because New York is the place where “it” happens, but rather, perhaps, because of our cognizance of the duties we owe to this republic? To the support of our republic, in which the fate and fortunes of mankind are so deeply bound up? That, I think, is a perfectly good reason to tolerate the indignities of the American city. I half wonder whether you, like a Copley or a Henry James, would have fled with waving handkerchief to London when it was the preeminent fount of cultural production;—oh, what SOCIETY is to be had in the Athenaeum Club, what scrumptious repartee to be consumed at the table of Monckton Milnes—oh how thrilling it is for one to find oneself at the summit of that Parnassus from the snowy caps of which issue forth the great river of Culture, flowing slowly down to grace the gaping and parched mouths of the profanum vulgus—insert further tedium. James, at least, was justly rebuked by many of his American peers; Wharton observed tartly, and quite rightly, that “all for a mouthful of drivel he left us”. You, on the other hand, would face no such rebuke from the avowedly detached and aloof classes of today, who are much too good, too wise, too knowing for such quaint and small-minded attachments. Were the center for “all that” to go back to the other side of the Atlantic, and were you to consequently abandon America for Berlin, or some such other putatively hip place congenial to the urbane personality—who would even think twice? After all, WE know better now than to believe in such bumptious things as duties—as shared lives, shared fortunes, and shared and sacred honor—instead, a smirk, a look down into the cocktail glass, and “the world is very complicated, you know, and…” Surely one may expatriate oneself for a time without being a turncoat, and indeed one may do so in the service of one’s country. But you of course are thinking only of pleasure. In any case: Europe is a cultural backwater to be sure; but our glory is not our comparative sophistication. It is the fact that the basis of our whole society is a shared belief in certain principles, which many other societies may avow; but in no other society do such beliefs constitute the very foundation of their collective identity and sense of a shared destiny. Beware the murky radiance of “culture”.

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