Politics & Power Quote by Bryan Brown

A small linguistic gripe turns into a bigger, breezier surrender: cultural independence is nice in theory, but the tide of American influence is the weather. Bryan Brown isn’t staging a moral panic; he’s doing something more recognizably Australian in public life - rolling his eyes while admitting the obvious. The swap from "bum" to "butt" is deliberately petty, almost comic, and that’s the point. He chooses a harmless word change to stand in for the million subtler ways American media remakes the everyday: what kids quote, how they flirt, what sounds "normal" on TV.

The line "part of me says, oh that's a shame" signals a tug of nostalgia without turning it into grievance. Brown lets the lament exist, then immediately undercuts it with the sturdier claim: identity survives. "Aussie boys are still Aussie boys" isn’t analysis, it’s reassurance - the faith that slang can be imported without importing the whole worldview. It also carries a wink of machismo: the national character he’s defending is imagined as blokey, resilient, maybe a bit stubborn.

Context matters: for Australian actors of Brown’s generation, America isn’t abstract - it’s the gravitational center of the industry, the accent coach, the box office, the cultural exporter. His intent reads less like anti-Americanism and more like a negotiation strategy: accept the dominance, keep the local texture where you can, and trust that the core doesn’t vanish just because the vocabulary gets a new coat of paint.