Frank, your negativity towards the entire postwar masculine meaning *American* tendency, I think I don't approve. That's an important tradition and honestly it's great.
"}I didn\u2019t mean to imply that the name \u201cAmerican tendency\u201d itself is \u201cbad\u201d or anything like that, more that the emphasis on it stands in contrast with a wider and inarguable impression that the last thirty years or so has been one giant round of whitewashing, one giant white wash where \u201cthe U.S.A.\u201d is simply the new whiteness rather than the old one.
I do think the trend of depicting\u00a0\u201cthe U.S.A.\u201d as the present and different vernaculars as past is not a good one (I am speaking now as someone who is less of a kid in his youth than I am now). \u00a0It creates an impression of this giant shifting fabric rather than a sense of a continuity across a long period, like the way everyone talks about the first half of the 19th century as though it never happened. \u00a0"America!\u201d was the dominant American cultural image in my high school years, which was, of course, in a way just the beginning:\u00a0\u201cAmerica!\u201d is one of those catchphrases that evokes a whole jumble of American pasts and fads and meanings, not just one uniform one, and it doesn\u2019t feel very right to say,\u00a0\u201cAmerica!\u201d is always a\u00a0\u201cthis was the widespread view at one time, and only people who are relatively modern (modern Americans) would talk this way.\u201d
(It\u2019s a shame, too, that this is the kind of linguistic goop people are trapped on, the kind of linguistic trippy talk that turns the listener into the sort of \u201cpedant\u201d they don\u2019t want to be, who is apparently \u201cwhy this didn\u2019t exist in the past is secondary to who is doing the presenting,\u201d who wants to precisely put a maximum distance between themselves and the listener and thus read themselves as being \u201clike you.\u201d \u00a0This has nothing to do with making sense. \u00a0People are dicks.)