A Quote by Melvyn Bragg
You ask 20 of your friends how English and American democracy came about. None of them would say that Anglicanism or Protestantism had anything to do with it. But it was crucial to it!
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Protestantism includes every type of religious thought and organization from 'high church' Anglicanism to high-principled Quakerism, from ecstatic Methodism to relentlessly intellectual Unitarism. Only slowly, and with many pangs is even Protestantism shaking off the religion about Christ.
The NFL has a hard cap, but if you ask 20 NFL experts who is going to win the Super Bowl this year, you might get 20 different answers. If you then asked 20 baseball experts who is going to represent the American League in the World Series, at least 90 percent of them would say the Yankees and the rest would say Seattle.
The English tourist in American literature wants above all things something different from what he has at home. For this reason the one American writer whom the English whole-heartedly admire is Walt Whitman. There, you will hear them say, is the real American undisguised. In the whole of English literature there is no figure which resembles his - among all our poetry none in the least comparable to Leaves of Grass
At some point my friends and I began to ask, how can a country that produced hippies and such cool people also fight a war and kill people and act cruelly? You would see American GMC trucks go by and soldiers reaching down to whack a girl riding a bicycle. They would yank at her hat and she would get thrown and she would die. You would see Americans do this and feel like they can do anything in our country. But then you'd take an English class with an American soldier from Ohio who seemed just as nice as anyone, yet he was a soldier too.
You are American, whether you profess Judaism, Catholicism, Protestantism, whether you adhere to Islam, or whether you believe in nothing at all. And you're as American as anybody else, whatever your religious beliefs. But try not to get caught up in media stereotypes of your neighbors and of your country. Think about people that you know and how they treat you. As you get to know someone, it matters not what religious background they have, or what their nationality is, or where they came from. And I think that's how Americans really do relate to each other on a personal level.
The keynote of American civilization is a sort of warm-hearted vulgarity. The Americans have none of the irony of the English, none of their cool poise, none of their manner. But they do have friendliness. Where an Englishman would give you his card, an American would very likely give you his shirt.
How would you like your child in kindergarten through 12th grade attending classes with kids who can't read, write, speak or understand English -- or American education values? Furthermore, how would you feel if those students felt zero investment in education, in English and the American way? How would you like your child's education dumbed down to that of a classroom from the Third World? Guess what? Today, if you're a parent of a child in thousands of classrooms across America, that's what's happening to your children with your tax dollars.
How, then,' I hear you ask, 'shall I attain my end, whether it be Christian love, socialism, or American democracy?' Your Christian love and your socialism and your American democracy are what you do each day, your manner of thinking each hour, of embracing your life companion and loving your child; they are your attitude of social responsibility towards your work, and your determination not to become like the crushers of life you so hate.
Imagine yourself at your funeral. Ask yourself what you want your family and friends to say about you. How will you be remembered and what impact will you have had on other people's lives? How did you make the world a better place?
In the 80s, in the cover band I was in, we'd slip in original material. If you didn't say anything about it, people just didn't care. Sometimes they'd ask where that came from and you'd tell them, but you still had to play a bunch of Willie, Waylon, and Merle.
Of course there's some things that I would have liked to have... none of my friends growing up had their father in the house. None of 'em. We had uncles and stuff like that, but nobody had a father in the house, none of my friends.
The one thing that was nice about being an only child is that my friends' parents would always ask me whether I would want any other brothers and sisters? My mom wasn't able to have any more children, and they didn't know that, but I would always say that I can have friends over, and whenever I get sick of them, I can just send them home.
I just read an article about how young American males feel uncomfortable appearing naked in front of each other in locker rooms. That was never the case when I was young. We were naked in the Army all the time. And neither actor in Call Me by Your Name appears fully naked. I think there might have been clauses in their contracts that ensured there would be no nudity. When I wrote the script, there was plenty of nudity. But the English just had none of the same squeamishness about it.
It is not strange that some of our revoltes preach trial marriage: for the only safe way to marry them at all would be on trial. Until you had definitely experienced all the human situations with them, you would have no means of knowing how, in any given situation, they would behave. They might conform about evening-dress, and throw plates between courses; they might be charming to your friends, and ask the waiter to sit down and finish dinner with you. Or they might in all things, little and big, be irreproachable. The point is that you would never know.
There was this conflict within me because so many people would come up to me to ask for prayers for all sorts of things, and 50% would be about money like, 'How can I pay for the tuition fee of my kids?' And I could only pray for them. I had no advice to give them because I didn't know anything about money.
'Animal House' was my first movie, so I didn't have anything to compare it to. I was a sight gag more than anything else. So I can't say it was one of those things where your life changes. When the movie came out, I had to ask for the night off at the bar.
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