An interesting article at Reason about self-appointed arbiters of taste.
[Norman Mailer] was watching astronaut Alan B. Shepard walking on the moon in 1971, when Shepard suddenly took out a secretly stowed golf club and launched a drive at the lunar horizon. Mailer was spiritually mortified. Humankind should have been humbled, literally on its knees, as it entered the cathedral of the universe; instead it drove golf balls through its windows. Whats the matter with people? Give them infinity, and they make it a fairway.
I’ve thought for a long time now that most anti-Americanism is really aesthetic in nature.
(Hat tip: Language Hat)