Gahan Wilson's America [antikvár]

IntroductionThere's no satisfactory way to explain the United States or even to describe it since it's so big it goes out of sight in all directions, and the parts in any given view reliably contradict one another. Strangers to our shores have explained bits and pieces brilliantly, but our vastness and confusion usually baffle them in the end, or at least wear them out.Native-born citizens fare little better since any one of us must view the nation from our own particular local perspective and it has been shown many times over that, say, a Midwesterner's, Southerner's, and New Englander's separate versions of Chillicothe, not to mention their pronunciations of it, will strike a Southern Californian as hopelessly inept individually and irreconcilable as a reasonable survey. And when that Southern Californian attempts to advance his or her own supposedly more accurate version of the matter, it will draw the same healthy reaction of superficially tolerant skepticism and underlying general lack of respect as was given the others' previous accounts.Some say this wide variety in point of view may be diminishing and that we may be blanding out like the cheeses in a supermarket. They claim that we are all striving for indistinguishability and that we may soon be as hard to tell apart as so many sitcoms. While 1 will grudgingly admit this does seem (I won't go further than seem) to be happening to some of our population, it is equally obvious that there is also very visibly afoot a spreading, gutsy kind of counterrevolution in which increasing numbers of Americans are striking out in an uncountable number of directions exploring, sometime successfully, sometimes not so successfully, both newsometimes freshly invented for the purposeand sometimes oldoccasionally downright ancientways to blossom individually.