As far as the British goes - well, we had to get it from somewhere. Perhaps in a few hundred years we'll catch up to them. ;)

The same with jazz and Western films, in that we had a little help there, too. Jazz wouldn't have been the same without Claude Debussy, and what would the Western genre have had to offer without Sergio Leone? No cultural form develops in a bell jar, isolated from outside influences. I've noticed that sometimes it's just as hard for many Americans to accept the idea of cultural evolution as it is for biological evolution. I wonder why. Probably a lack of research or rigorous scholarship!