The Cultural Cold War

the Soviets could at least claim some prowess. So we get the Boston Symphony Orchestra making European tours to promote a notion of the US as a home of culture, and squabbles about the possible political motivation behind defining Abstract Expressionism as a new American art movement. But the high Soviet culture of the Bolshoi ballet and so forth was, appropriately for a society whose cultural highlight was queueing for hours to see the embalmed remains of the Great Leader, nothing more than the make-up on a corpse. The true health of a society is measured by its popular culture. In the Soviet Union there wasn’t any: in the US there was an explosion of music, film, literature, that went joyfully on its way regardless of the CIA or the government or anyone else. Jerry Lee Lewis vs Shostakovitch? No contest.