Sugrue: things I learnt about America

I learned that though the fabric of the United States was woven by predominantly white males, there is a real depth to American Literature. I learned that because a racist, totalizing, system has been the prevailing one driving our country towards modernization, a large minority has come to embody that ideal. Just look to immigration laws, gay marriage laws, abortion laws, for evidence...Yet this blog is not a totally pessimistic one. While the State, the muscle, of the United States has always delivered a select white protestant community towards preeminence, literature and art are the undercurrents that account for the sweeping liberal changes of the 1960's and 70's, ones which though founded in the Nation, came to effect the State as well. This class has taught me that there is a resin, a salt of the earth, of the American spirit which exists. I have been reinvigorated by the works of Whitman, Emerson, and Thoreau; inclusive edicts which created the ethos, the zietgiest, of American Individualism. Though this individualism may have fallen prey to, and been contorted by, the quagmire of post-modernism, a look back to art, American art nonetheless, is a certainly refreshing answer to many of our modern problems.