American cultural production was reliable, robust, effective, and above all, optimistic and friendly “Death to America” may have held in Tehran, but with its bacon-cheeseburgers and Charlie’s Angels reruns, the US was welcome in the corner of West London one half of us grew up in. It was for connoisseurs, we consoled ourselves, compared to the “right stuff” coming out of The States: The Space Shuttle, Rocky, Eddie Murphy, The Cannonball Run and lots and lots of music. British culture, however arresting, felt intrinsically local and unhygienic. It seemed as though the world spoke American and not English. America has never been an ignorable presence in the world, but in the early 80s it was still deep in the process of proving itself, and demonstrating across every cultural sphere why it deserved to have a century named after it. Both of these relationships were complicated. For one of us America was The Promised Land, for the other home.
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