Let's Go Jankes.

Since its inception American culture has been regarded as inferior to the European. Early in Chapter 4, Paul Starr takes some time to sketch the legal scene surrounding American publishing and its competition from foreign reprints noting that, " as late as 1820, British reprints still accounted for 70 percent of all titles published" (122). He represents this as a anomaly; despite a burgeoning newspaper business and an incredibly advanced postal system, American "literature" or any type of high-culture remains inert. Despite this representation of culture, Starr fails to mention any of the legal repercussions of this practice besides a gloss of the "courtesy of trade" and built in price-competition. This is really just a nice way of saying that the United States was a pirate nation.

In fact, one of the most famous symbols of American cultural imperialism, the New York Yankees logo, and the related national nickname derives from this thievery. Matt Mason explains in his 2008 book The Pirate's Dilemma that "American were so well known as bootleggers, Europeans began referring to them with the Dutch word 'Janke', then slang for pirate, which is today pronounced 'Yankee'" (Mason, 36). American lawless is well-documented, including by the copyright guru Lawrence Lessig, but it appears in a much more American-friendly view from Starr. It's ironic that this interconnection problematizes low-brow culture, a facet that I think is worth exploring, and it discussed at length by Starr himself.

It is no wonder that American "literature" as such had a hard-time developing when "American editions [of British works] sold at a quarter of the British price and in much larger quantities" (123). Art became a market like any other even from the beginning of American cultural production. As flawed as a system as European patronage of the arts was, there was a period of time where art was detached from the economic that seems to have never been possible for America. The New York Yankees logo can be purchased world-wide, on the the bridges of Venice, Canal Street, or even the fjords of Norway even though the sport they represent is only played in one country, but how man. American "high" culture with its intrinsic economic quality splintered into diverse markets without ever completely divesting itself of its European roots, a trope we will see throughout American literature: Whitman's desire for an American kind of poem, the Lost Generation's exile in Paris, and even foreign language requirements in Literature PhD programs. American culture could never be European high brow, it became its own lowbrow.

This economic wedge in culture could be one of the reasons why America has such a hard time understanding culture as intrinsically valuable. Starr explains the ambiguity in terms of the Bill of Rights protection of copyright as the protection of the Progress of science and the useful Arts" (115). Culture, let alone the study of it, is struggling to be deemed useful, with the exception of the global industries of Hollywood and American sport leagues. Mason goes on to argue that the failure to honor foreign copyright is one of the reasons why American could embrace the idea of revolution, citing Doron S. Ben-Atar, "Lax enforcement of the intellectual property laws was the primary engine of the American economic miracle" (Mason,36).

American piracy helped create the desire and production of low-brow culture. Since European works were cheaper, there was limited need for American authorship. And, by the time it did come around, American had already embraced the nature of the market so fully, that good culture was sellable culture, or, should we say, the useful art of Industry.