American culture is our civilizational treasure. It represents our common memory and our collective memory as a people. Its what makes us sing and laugh. It’s how we tell stories and write songs. Americans created the greatest popular music the world has ever heard, from jazz to the blues to country and rock and roll. Americans made movies that swept the entire planet, from the golden age of Hollywood to ET and Star Wars. We made the best cartoons, from Bugs Bunny and Roadrunner and the rest of Loony Tunes to the Simpsons and South Park. We produced and read the 20th century’s most-imitated novelists, from Hemingway and Faulkner to Kerouac to Pynchon and DeLillo, to Robert Stone and Cormac McCarthy. We are the nation of Melville, Whitman, Emerson, Dickenson and Poe. And guess what? Almost none of it is taught in our schools. Americans produced one of the world’s great popular cultures, and we are failing entirely to transmit it. Nations that destroy their own cultural memory cease to exist as nations. Instead, they become blind, deaf and dumb. Which one suspects is the point.