In 2000, Tom Wolfe wrote "Hooking Up: What Life Was Like at the Turn of the Second Millennium: An American's World":

By the year 2000, the term "working class" had fallen into disuse in the United States, and "proletariat" was so obsolete it was known only to a few bitter old Marxist academics with wire hair sprouting out of their ears. The average electrician, air-conditioning mechanic, or burglar-alarm repairman lived a life that would have made the Sun King blink. He spent his vacations in Puerto Vallarta, Barbados, or St. Kitts. Before dinner he would be out on the terrace of some resort hotel with his third wife, wearing his Ricky Martin cane-cutter shirt open down to the sternum, the better to allow his gold chains to twinkle in his chest hairs. The two of them would have just ordered a round of Quibel sparkling water, from the state of West Virginia, because by 2000 the once-favored European sparkling waters Perrier and San Pellegrino seemed so tacky.

European labels no longer held even the slightest snob appeal except among people known as "intellectuals," whom we will visit in a moment. Our typical mechanic or tradesman took it for granted that things European were second-rate. Aside from three German luxury automobiles—the Mercedes-Benz, the BMW, and the Audi—he regarded European-manufactured goods as mediocre to shoddy. On his trips abroad, our electrician, like any American businessman, would go to superhuman lengths to avoid being treated in European hospitals, which struck him as little better than those in the Third World. He considered European hygiene so primitive that to receive an injection in a European clinic voluntarily was sheer madness.

the thing is so good it is almost not American.

And this bit of smug, preening bullshit from TNR’s Leon Wieseltier is precisely what is wrong with the American academy today.

Consider what Wieseltier is actually saying here: If something reaches a pinnacle of quality, then it cannot be American. It must be un-American because, as everybody he knows, reads, or speaks with is aware, America can only produce crap. So a fictional television “study” of a mob of neurotics clustered around sociopaths and psychopaths engaged in a murderous criminal enterprise is “art” so “good,” it must be “not American.”