Contributor PerspectivesSep 13, 2018 | 09:00 GMT
America the Old-Fashioned: How Clinging to the Past Propelled the U.S. Forward
When I was a boy growing up in England 50 years ago, the United States stood for everything modern. Americans, we learned from comic books, movies and TV shows, lived in skyscrapers, watched something called cable television, and cooked their dinners in microwave ovens. They flew around in airplanes, effortlessly drove from sea to shining sea on interstate highways and were about to put a man on the moon. They ran their wars with computers, and, apart from when they were busy protesting against those wars, lived lives of freedom, ease and sex.
I knew when I was eight that I wanted to go there. But when I actually did, in the 1980s, I found -- surprise, surprise -- that it was not exactly what I had expected. I settled in Chicago, one of the world's great cities; yet much of what I saw seemed distinctly old-fashioned to an immigrant from
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