The Hill News

The problem with globalization, aside from megalomania, is that it stretches the culture to its thinnest and brings it to its maximum least potential: everyone a John Lennon, everyone a Marx, everyone an Oprah, everyone an Obama. Then it snaps. What you had at the beginning was Lord Nelson. What you get at the end is "American Idol." At the beginning you get Jefferson. At the end you get Joe Biden.

In England’s case, which is our case as well, it took the tribe around the world and actually well into the universe. Then it snaps, and there is nothing left. We as a species are biochemical and cannot live on soaring rhetoric and political abstraction: We need a place on the earth among people like ourselves. As the greatest living American novelist, Lee Smith’s, character Grace says, we need place: Place tells us who we are.

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