Author
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Topic: The old world alienated by the new
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clockwork
rabble-rouser
Babbler # 690
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posted 06 March 2003 11:16 PM
quote: The Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun, who spent two miserable periods in the American Midwest in the eighteen-eighties—working as, among other things, farmhand, store clerk, railroad laborer, itinerant lecturer, and (more congenially) church secretary—treated the street parades of veterans “with tiny flags in their hats and brass medals on their chests marching in step to the hundreds of penny whistles they are blowing” as if the events were curiously remote tribal rituals. The fact that streetcars were forbidden to interrupt the parades and that no one could absent himself without incurring civic disgrace both interested and unsettled Hamsun. Something ominous seemed to be hatching in America: a strapping child-monster whose runaway physical growth would never be matched by moral or cultural maturity. Hamsun gave lectures about his stays in the United States at the University of Copenhagen, and then made them into a book, “The Cultural Life of Modern America,” that was largely devoted to asserting its nonexistence. Emerson? A dealer in glib generalizations. Whitman? A hot gush of misdirected fervor. For Hamsun, America was, above all, bluster wrapped up in dollar bills. “It is incredible how naively cocksure Americans are in their belief that they can whip any enemy whatsoever,” he wrote. “There is no end to their patriotism; it is a patriotism that never flinches, and it is just as loudmouthed as it is vehement.”
THE UNLOVED AMERICAN
From: Pokaroo! | Registered: May 2001
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