America is an already-sentimental nation whose culture displays the good and bad traits evoked by that term. So much of its great art – think Rockwell, Hopper, or even Springsteen and Tarantino – moves nimbly between the sublime and the kitsch, the high and low, the meaningful and the meaningless. So, too, does its politics. Kennedy became a greater president in death than he was in life thanks to a process of acute sentimentalisation around Jackie O and Camelot.
The cause of this is less clear. Perhaps Americans lack that foreboding sense of history (or class) that curtails European sensibilities. It nurtures optimism and a chance to find value in new kinds of aesthetic or life experience.
