Following America’s presidential election, and the Battle for America strand at the Battle of Ideas festival in London on 1-2 November, Culture Wars is exploring the past, present and future of the USA by bringing together new and old reviews of books, films and more.

Europeans sometimes disdain the USA as the land of soulless materialism, religious fundamentalism, chronic obesity and high school shootings. But is there still something in the American idea to inspire the rest of the world in the 21st century? Does President-elect Obama represent a new dawn for the USA?

Sound bites from a revolution

A New World: A Life of Thomas Paine, Shakespeare’s Globe, London

Although we follow Paine through the upheaval of two revolutions, however, seeing him succeed and fail in his struggle to influence their direction, and meet some great historical actors along the way (Jefferson, Danton, Burke), we leave the play surprisingly ignorant of the content of his arguments

They’re kids! They tell people!

Columbine, by Dave Cullen (Old Street Publishing)

An interview with Dave Cullen, author of a definitive new account of the 1999 Columbine High School massacre, exploring what really happened, the role of the media in perpetuating myths, and the peculiar truth about psychopathy, terrorism and self-aggrandizing violence.

Jazz and the myth of authenticity

Really the Blues, by Mezz Mezzrow

The counterculture never did have any time for aspiration. Jazz, for some, may have been a form of cultural slumming, but for many blacks, working at monotonous, low-paid jobs and paying high rents to live in overcrowded apartment buildings, the music and its performers offered a glimpse of a better life that was demonstrably within the grasp of black Americans. Music was one arena in which blacks could be seen to excel.

The politics of rap in a changing America

Somebody Scream! Rap Music's Rise to Prominence in the Aftershock of Black Power, by Marcus Reeves (Faber)

To the extent that rap substituted for the Black Power movement, it must be judged a failure as a political movement. Marx’s famous aphorism about the first time tragedy, second time farce, is relevant here. While Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, and Panthers leaders like Huey P Newton and Bobby Seale mixed canniness at exploiting media image with organising on the ground, Public Enemy, or Kanye West, epitomised the former with nary a trace of the latter.

Obama Poetry: the Politician as Muse

Seen through the poems, President Obama is emphatically not a blank screen. He has come to represent the possibility of American redemption, the possibility of reclaiming the moral high ground— and he is valued by people, and poets, as a way to elevate their own views by associating them with him.

Changing cultural paradigm

Subcultural pluralism and the new social order: the end of the culture war and the dawn of a new American society

America is no longer the ‘melting pot’: it no longer assimilates minority groups into the majority culture. Instead of a homogeneous cultural majority imposing Western values on ethnic minorities, we now have heterogeneous cultural pluralism developing through acculturation.

Night waiting for dawn

Dr Atomic, English National Opera, Coliseum, London

The music continues to be glorious. The staging is evocative, the visuals epic. But there is no suspense. We know the end of this story, after all. We know it will detonate, there will not be a chain reaction that ignites the atmosphere, Oppenheimer will live to doubt his decisions.

Marines make do

Generation Kill, directed by Susanna White and Simon Cellan Jones / produced and written by David Simon, Ed Burns et al (HBO)

What would it be like to find yourself in a humvee in the desert in the middle of Operation Iraqi Freedom, surrounded by grunts who speak in an impenetrable military argot littered with code words and acronyms, and who don’t know what’s going on anyway? It would be confusing, that’s what. Welcome to Generation Kill.

I’m not an Arab - get me out of here!

Uncultured Wars, Arabs, Muslims and the Poverty of Liberal Thought, by Steven Salaita (Zed Books)

Salaita gives an analysis in terms of institutionalised racism, showing how it fosters domestic legitimacy for aggressive interference in the Middle East whilst underpinning the stranglehold of ‘white liberals’ on what it means to be progressive, mainstream and American. Underneath, this is a humanist argument with Enlightenment roots, though one with an interesting twist.

In hopeless emptiness

Revolutionary Road (2008), directed by Sam Mendes

The problem is that the Wheelers are an empty shell, remnants of a meaningful past of which they have no recollection. Their fight then is useless from the very outset, for it lacks any foundation.

The rise and fall of an agent of change

Milk (2008), directed by Gus Van Sant

The film unpicks the complex dynamic in the American political system that lead both to the rise and the inevitable fall of this charismatic agent of change. It is laden with the complexity of social dynamics within modern society through its depiction of a tragic inevitability.

All hail the President of the World?

US election blog - part seven

Obama managed some genuinely inspiring lines about the productivity of American workers and the inventiveness of American minds, but in the short term at least it is the borrowing power of the American state that he’ll be drawing on in a bid to recover the US economy, and by extension the world economy.

Gosh-darnit!

The Wrecking Crew: The American Right and the Lust for Power, by Thomas Frank (Harvill Secker)

Perhaps the most important problem with this book is that it has been overtaken by events. Not only the election but the recession exposed the hollowness of supposed economic libertarianism. Like the anxious pronouncements of fellow liberals before Obama’s election, this book now appears shrill and off-target.

New Cultural Paradigm: Community Art at the End of the Culture War

As the inauguration of President Obama marks the end of an era, what next for the arts?

Mass culture is now composed of an array of equally entitled subcultures connected through a ubiquitous techno-social environment of camera phones, social networking on the internet and cable television channels dedicated to specific audiences.

Power, politics and race

Street Fight (2005), directed by Marshall Curry

This may be Curry’s first feature-length documentary, but his handling of this ugliness is just as it should be. No dogmatic, Michael Moore-style commentary here; his effective interview technique and subtle editing allow the Newark electorate to speak through the film with an analysis of the situation that is succinct and enlightened.