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?

Republican presidential failures

Frost/Nixon (2008), directed by Ron Howard

Nixon jeopardised the entire system through a crime he refused to admit, and got away with a pardon for all his actions by the president who replaced him. For Frost this was entertainment, as it gave him a chance to play a cat and mouse game in television close-up.

McCain and Obama: whipping who-knows-what?

US election blog - part three

McCain’s choice of the words ‘you-know-what’ might indicate more than coyness. For all the candidates’ eagerness to have out a vigorous debate, it is still not clear exactly what is at stake in the campaign. McCain’s and Obama’s tentative strategies for dealing with the financial crisis resemble competing brands rather than representing competing worldviews.

The domestic limits to American international leadership after Bush

A Battle in Print essay from the Battle of Ideas 2008

What both Republicans and Democrats fail to grasp is that international legitimacy of the kind that caused the West to accept American leadership after World War Two must derive, ultimately, from domestic politics. International legitimacy cannot be restored solely through actions in the international sphere.

In control of the narrative

Now or Later, Royal Court, London

Eddie Redmayne as John is almost too perfect a poster-boy for liberal sensibilities. Pretty, pouting, petulant and fiercely intelligent, he comes across as a kind of idealised Democrat Hamlet.

Taking a break from politics to fix capitalism?

US election blog - part two

To the extent that the banking crisis has become an election issue, it concerns the generic character traits of the candidates, and their perceived ability to handle ‘a crisis’, not any political differences in terms of ‘this crisis’.

The scene is set: the phony culture war election

US election blog - part one

While the red-blue divide is still conventionally seen as a sublimated or distorted form of the left-right divide, it is becoming increasingly apparent that ‘culture’, or more accurately lifestyle, is all that’s left.

Cops and dealers (and The Wire)

Gang Leader for a Day, by Sudhir Venkatesh, Cop in the Hood, by Peter Moskos, Homicide, by David Simon

Venkatesh and Moskos both put themselves at the centre of their respective narratives, and thus make much more of the cultural gulf between cops and dealers on one hand, and academics and writers on the other.

Bark without bite

Sharp Teeth, by Toby Barlow (Vintage)

It can only be assumed that, much like the story, the dogs merely ran around chasing each other’s tails until they collapsed with a worn out thud.

Dinner with America

A reading of ‘Dinner with America’ by Rajni Shah, Pinter Building, Queen Mary University, London; 29 March 2008.

The fuel for both this individualism-for-liberty and individualism-for-consumption is neither liberty, nor capitalism – nor even a shabby looking American dream. Instead, it’s desire.

Wrestling with angels

The Terror Dream, by Susan Faludi (Atlantic Books)

In considering how America might understand itself more honestly, Faludi goes back to the genesis of anxieties about terror in Puritan New England, and makes a qualified but unexpected and thought-provoking defence of the Puritan ethic and its possibilities.

What Bush supporters?

The Big Sort: Why the Clustering of Like-Minded America Is Tearing Us Apart, by Bill Bishop (Houghton Mifflin Company)

Bishop’s exposition of liberal churches, blaring out Sting instead of hymns, filled with Wiccans and ‘neo-pagan’ pastors who feel that ‘the church needs to birthed within …indigenous cultures and take on that indigenous expression,’ is, if you’ll pardon the pun, a revelation.

Back to the future?

The Return of History and the End of Dreams, by Robert Kagan (Atlantic Books)

Kagan fails to engage with the world as it is today, preferring instead to go back to the future and to imagine that the template of 19th century Europe or the Cold War can be a guide for today

Zombies-in-waiting

What Orwell Didn't Know: Propaganda and the New Face of American Politics, edited by András Szántó

Szántó believes that the power of PR and imaging ensures that citizens’ emotions and opinions are shaped without them being able to react. It is a kind of Soma, that we are not aware we are digesting. The goal, he concludes, is not control the public by political means, but rather to ‘seduce them’.

Variations on an immigrant theme

Away by Amy Bloom

The immigrant story is an established trope in American literature, but Amy Bloom does something subtly different.

From Anarchy to Grace

Against the Day, by Thomas Pynchon

Someplace around page 822, the rhythm of the close-printed pages having taken over like the rocking of a train along the new-laid tracks going ever westward, as if the weighty tome itself was quite literally pulling her into the future hour by hour, week by week, the reviewer felt the thick texture of the writing start to smother her, like layers of felt, impregnated with exotic perfume by the yabanci kelimeler and ausländischer Ausdrucker slipped self-consciously between the voluptuous swathes of storyline, and wondered whether all this logodaedaly was anything more than an elaborate joke.