Like Americans, people outside America want fun, want an emotional compensation for the utilitarianism and calculation that mark the rest of their lives.

Sure, I've often been misrepresented - anyone frequently quoted has this experience.

So American culture is itself a hybrid and lends itself to use in other people's hybrids.

American movies and music deliver themes of freedom, innocence, and power that appeal to others - partly because America itself was put together out of a multiplicity of national traditions.

I am concerned about how to reverse the process by which a fundamentalist right and a corporate elite were able to seize power in the United States.

I am a realist as well as an idealist, and I think that it is incumbent upon those of us in opposition to try to work within what are always arduous circumstances to stretch the limits of the possible.

Like Americans, people outside America want fun, want an emotional compensation for the utilitarianism and calculation that mark the rest of their lives.