The symbol of Coca-Cola shall stand over all.Īnother America is suggested by Robert Frank in his brilliant collection of photographs, The Americans. "Americanization" is the terrible fate which is befalling Europe as it produces an efficient industrial civilization. "America" stands for gadgetry, rootlessness, in the tyranny of mass-produced kitsch. More recently, the fashionable stereotype has been almost completely negative. Dickens' vision of revolutionists devoted to freedom and slavery is accurate Blake's prophetic image of a liberating nation is too. When it comes to stereotypes of America, there is even more complexity, for all of them are partially true, even though many of them express polar opposites. To be sure, people and things are frozen, plucked out of time and history in the process, but there is always a wisdom at the center of the distortion. By thirty, we discover the other side of the coin: that the stereotype is a way of saying a half-truth. At twenty, most of us have painfully learned that stereotypes are a way of lying, of expressing the sprawl of reality, the contradictions of experience.
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