How American Cool Dies |
How American Cool Dies
By Henrik Sunde Wilberg
Dr. Wilberg is a Norwegian-born academic who lives in Ohio. He writes about American style and culture.
I was raised in Norway, but my academic career brought me to the middle of America — Chicago, Minneapolis, Kansas City, then Cincinnati — where I’ve lived and taught for over a decade. The historian Eric Hobsbawm noted that, in the postwar era, everyone inhabited two countries: his own and the United States. This was certainly the case in my family. In the depths of one Norwegian winter in the 1960s, a Mormon missionary gifted my father the Doors’ debut album mere weeks after its U.S. release. That gift revolutionized the local music scene. My uncle, a committed Maoist who detested American capitalism, postponed his university education to work his way to New York City on an ocean liner. Later in life, he maintained a staggering collection of classic western films. Despite his politics, he was a tireless accumulator of American cultural capital, typical of the generation the filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard called “the children of Marx and Coca-Cola.”
This was a form of strategic ambivalence that encouraged cultural consumption while keeping a distance from American empire. In the 1980s and ’90s, U.S. cultural exports continued to flow overseas, but American influence was becoming........