“Dixon was alive again. Consciousness was upon him before he could get out of the way; not for him the slow, gracious wandering from the halls of sleep, but a summary, forcible ejection. He lay sprawled, too wicked to move, spewed up like a broken spider-crab on the tarry shingle of the morning. The light did him harm, but not as much as looking at things did; he resolved, having done it once, never to move his eyeballs again. A dusty thudding in his head made the scene before him beat like a pulse. His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.”

Kingsley Amis, Lucky Jim, 1954.

The US flag, apparently.

As you know, today is the anniversary of when the USA finally decided that it could get things at least as wrong as if not more so than its incumbent overlord and therefore declared independence from the unreasonable Brits and in so doing launched itself on its own trajectory towards being a global power and attaining unpopularity, universal opprobrium and all else that goes with the responsibility of being, for the second half of the twentieth century and perhaps some of this one, primus inter pares in the world order. Poor old—well, quite young, actually, certainly compared with the likes of China and India—America, although I daresay it is quite broad-shouldered enough to accept what critics from abroad may have to say about its successes and failures.

How the US flag should've looked

Even before I became involved romantically with someone from the country, I was always an admirer of many aspects of American culture. In spite of its being the only country in the world not only to mispronounce but also to misspell the word aluminium, it can boast of many tremendous cultural achievements that have left their mark globally. The ambition of its musicians and writers has always impressed me. Whereas Kingsley Amis, probably my favourite British writer, gets more meaning and humour in to a single sentence than most writers manage in a page, his plots tend to be fairly narrow in their ambition. In contrast, American writers such as Steinbeck, Twain and Vonnegut had the confidence, seemingly borne at least partly from the geographical scale and scope of their country’s landscape, to tackle and paint upon an incredibly ambitious and broad literary canvas. That confidence and ambition is a quality that in my experience Americans tend to exhibit more readily than most in whatever they do.  And as for American music, I’ve always thought that while Britain is almost the musical equal of its trans-Atlanic, ex-dominion, America has the edge owing to—how can I put it?—well … Bob Dylan.

Happy independence day Bob (and the rest of you recalcitrants).