Salman Rushdie hears America singing

A Vanity Fair excerpt  from A.A. Gill's new book, "To America with Love":

One of the most embarrassing things I've ever done in public was to appear---against all judgment---in a debate at the Hay Literary Festival in the mid-90s, speaking in defense of the motion that American culture should be resisted. Along with me on this cretin's errand was the historian Norman Stone. I can't remember what I said---I've erased it. It had no weight or consequence.

On the other side, the right side, were Adam Gopnik, from the New Yorker, and Salman Rushdie. After we'd proposed the damn motion, Rushdie leaned in to the microphone, paused for a moment, regarding the packed theater from those half-closed eyes, and said, soft and clear, "Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby/Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe/Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby/Be-bop-a-lula, I don't mean maybe/Be-bop-a-lula, she's my baby love."

It was the triumph of the sublime. The bookish audience burst into applause and cheered. It was all over, bar some dry coughing. American didn't bypass or escape civilization. It did something far more profound, far cleverer: it simply changed what civilization could be. It set aside the canon of rote, the long chain letter of drawing-room, bon mot received aesthetics. It was offered a new, neoclassical, reconditioned, reupholstered start, a second verse to an old song, and it just took a look at the view and felt the beat of this vast nation and went for the sublime.