7 Things to Celebrate About America This 4th of July

One of the most embarrassing things I've ever done in public was to appear--against all judgment--in a debate at the Hay Literary Festival in the mid-90s, speaking in defense of the motion that American culture should be resisted.
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Adapted from "To America with Love" by A. A. Gill, © 2011 by A. A. Gill. Originally published in Great Britain in 2012 by Weidenfeld & Nicholson; to be published in the U.S. July 9, 2013 by Simon & Schuster, Inc.

One of the most embarrassing things I've ever done in public was to appear--against all judgment--in a debate at the Hay Literary Festival in the mid-90s, speaking in defense of the motion that American culture should be resisted. Along with me on this cretin's errand was the historian Norman Stone. I can't remember what I said--I've erased it. It had no weight or consequence. On the other side, the right side, were Adam Gopnik, from The New Yorker, and Salman Rushdie. After we'd proposed the damn motion, Rushdie leaned in to the microphone, paused for a moment, regarding the packed theater from those half-closed eyes, and said, soft and clear, "Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby, / Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe. / Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby, / Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe. / Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby love."

It was the triumph of the sublime. The bookish audience burst into applause and cheered. It was all over, bar some dry coughing. America didn't bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be. It set aside the canon of rote, the long chain letter of drawing-room, bon-mot received aesthetics. It was offered a new, neoclassical, reconditioned, reupholstered start, a second verse to an old song, and it just took a look at the view and felt the beat of this vast nation and went for the sublime.

There is in Europe another popular snobbery, about the parochialism of America, the unsophistication of its taste, the limit of its inquiry. This, we're told, is proved by "how few Americans travel abroad." Apparently, so we're told, only 35 percent of Americans have passports. Whenever I hear this, I always think, My good golly gosh, really? That many? Why would you go anywhere else? There is so much of America to wonder at. So much that is the miracle of a newly minted civilization. And anyway, European kids only get passports because they all want to go to New York.

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