I am in a cab whiz-banging from the airport into downtown Bangkok, and it’s a real white-knuckler. I peek at the speedometer and try to convert 127 kilometers into miles per hour. I reach for the seat belt, but there isn’t one. I feel like an arrow shot from somebody else’s bow.
As we approach the city, the traffic (the world’s worst, average speed 5 miles an hour) congeals, then thickens malignantly and finally stops.
We stop for a traffic light. A red Daihatusu makes a move to squeeze in front of us, and my driver pulls forward to block the intruder. Like all cab drivers, he is as territorial as any lion on the Serengeti. I roll down the window and peer into a haze of uncombusted petrol; the air smells like the inside of a crankcase. Two young Thai boys, wearing Mohawk haircuts and Guns N’ Roses T-shirts, are standing in front of a Pizza Hut, bartering with tourists in English over pirated music cassettes. Paula Abdul is going for $1. Across the street, there’s a long line waiting to get into the latest Rambo epic.
Then I spot it. A boy, maybe 13, is wearing a sweatshirt that says in an arch of green letters, Lindenhurst High School. That’s my high school, on Long Island, whence I graduated decades ago. I leap from the cab, run after the kid, tap him on the shoulder and gush, “Where’d you get that shirt?” He looks at me blankly. Desperately I look around for someone to help me over the language barrier. But bystanders are eyeing me suspiciously.
Over the last several years, it has been my good fortune to travel through much of the world, and two things have become inescapably clear to me: First, that the global-village forecast just 30 years ago by Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan is already here and, second, that the vehicle that brought it here is the United States of America.
The world has literally become a Mickey Mouse operation. For all its industrial problems, the USA reigns supreme as an exporter of music, film, television, sports, food and hundreds of consumer products ranging from Levis to Pampers to Barbie Dolls. America, winner of the Cold War, is now that Great Communicator, world role model, global disc jockey. The process has been dubbed “Coca-Colonization” by essayist Pico Iyer.
Indeed, Coca-Cola earns more money in Japan than it does in the U.S. And when French farmers protested a farm agreement between the U.S. and the European Community, they not only trashed the American Embassy, they shut down a Coca-Cola plant near Paris. “Coca-Cola is the biggest symbol of an America that wants to extend its hegemony more and more,” spat an outraged Herve Morizet of the National Center for Young Farmers.
What’s the New World Order? It’s for a Big Mac and a Pan Pizza. The world’s busiest McDonald’s seats 900 diners in Moscow. Nearly three out of four people who watched the last two Super Bowls on television did so outside the United States. America produces only 10 percent of the world’s feature-length films, but they account for 65 percent of the global box office receipts. And every week some 200 million Chinese watch Mee-La-Shoo-Mickey Mouse, the world’s best-known American.
The sun never sets on the American popular culture empire. I visited a Burger King in Kuala Lumpur, a Pizza Hut on Fiji and a McDonald’s in Buenos Aires. I turned on my hotel television in Taipei to find Geraldo interviewing Elvis impersonators. When American Christmas specials appeared on Ethiopian television, there was a rush to find Christmas trees.
This vast commercial empire transcends all politics. In the Philippines, nationalists may have thrown out the U.S. Navy, but President Fidel Ramos used “La Bamba” and “When the Saints Go Marching In” as music for his campaign rallies. Third World protesters burn U.S. flags to protest American policies while wearing Nikes and Levis. Former Viet Cong soldiers now stand in line wearing New York Yankees baseball caps waiting to see movies like “Platoon.”
Thus we have a global village linked not by political ideals but by Madonna and McDonald’s. What this all means is open to considerable debate. Ben J. Wattenberg, the writer and a fellow of the American Enterprise Institute, a Washington-based research center, says this is nothing less than “the most important thing now going on in the world.” Others have their doubts and cite long-term damage to America’s image.
Adios, frijoles; hola, Big Mac and Whopper. All over the world, kids who grew up on rice, beans and fresh vegetables are turning to burgers, fries and greasy chicken. Most of the big American fast-food chains earn just under half of their total revenues from overseas markets. Of the 193 new restaurants opened by McDonald’s last year, 143 were outside the U.S. The Golden Arches now stretch from Moscow to Manila-some 13,000 stores in 63 nations. In addition to the familiar fast-food giants, America has sent overseas 100-flavor ice-cream chains and chocolate-cookie boutiques.
McDonald’s is really on a roll in the not-so-Far East. Ever since the first McDonald’s appeared on Taiwan in 1984, that nation’s rice surplus has been growing. Japanese heading for the old ballgame are stopping at one of the nation’s 800 McDonald’s to down a couple of Teriyaki McBurgers. Instead of traditional rice dishes like Man Doo Duk Guk, South Korean kids are crazy for Dong Pak-Kentucky Fried Chicken.
In many Asian and Latin American cities, hanging out at the local American fast-food restaurant is part of the trendy youth lifestyle. Conspicuous consumption takes on a new meaning in Bangkok, where the McDonald’s restaurants have floor-to-ceiling windows-the better, I was advised by a local doctor, for the patrons to be seen. Unlike their U.S. counterparts, Dunkin’ Donut stores in Asia do the bulk of their business at night, where they are a gathering place for young professional men out to impress their dates.
To be sure, each American enterprise has a local touch. They put pineapple on the pizza at the Kuala Lumpur Pizza Hut, and the McDonald’s featured fried-egg sandwiches. Dunkin’ Donuts are filled with mangoes in Djakarta, and Burger King’s Whopper comes topped with shredded beets and a fried egg in Australia.
Meanwhile, Coke and Pepsi are slugging it out on the Serengeti Plain, in the deserts of the Middle East and in the tin-roofed kampungs of Malaysia.
I visited the Asiaworld Department Store in downtown Taipei, which has a Coca-Cola boutique with Norman Rockwell posters, stationery, lunchboxes, pens, pencils, looseleafs, address books, beach towels, totebags, clocks, sneakers, furniture, rafts, life preservers. All over Latin America, people are picking up the new 2-liter Coca-Cola when they go to the supermercados because the plastico retornable is mas conveniente.
From Togo to Tegucigalpa, people are doing the same thing: sitting in front of their televisions watching American programs and American commercials. There are now more than a billion television sets on Earth, 50 percent more than there were just five years ago. Television, the eternal rectangle, has uplinked and downsized the globe. Couch potatoes are sprouting up along the Amazon, the Nile and the Ganges.
Half of all the top television shows in Italy are American; Danes are regular watchers of “Cheers,” “Golden Girls,” “L.A. Law” and “Roseanne.” Only half of all Mexican households have a telephone, but nearly every one has a television. Argentina’s top-rated television show is “Los Simpsons.” MacGyver is a hero throughout much of Asia, and everybody in the world watches Cosby and “Dallas.”
They love Vanna White in Paris, where “La Roue de la Fortune” is a top show. Indeed, “Wheel of Fortune” has 15 foreign imitators, and actresses from all over the world are sent to Hollywood to learn to turn the cards just like Vanna.
Even local TV takes its cues from the Americans. The local news in Taipei is delivered by blow-dried mannequins who confuse the substantive with the merely photogenic. Just like the Americans on action news, they exchange quips, give the temperature at the airport (the last place anyone needs to know the temperature) and at the sign-off pound their stack of 8 1/2-by-11 papers endlessly into the table.
Also wrapped around the globe like an extension cord is MTV, which has become nothing less than the defining influence of a new international youth culture. These days a 17-year-old Malaysian has more in common with a 17-year-old Chilean than with a 40-year-old Malaysian. And while America may be getting older, not so the rest of the world; more than half of Asia’s population is under 24.
Unlike Detroit, Hollywood has found a product that neither the Japanese, the Germans nor anyone else seem to be able to make better-or at least any more popular. A recent worldwide survey of top films by the American Enterprise Institute showed that 76 percent of them were American. One advantage the Americans have is the massive English-speaking market throughout the world-giving them gigantic potential audiences compared to those, say, of a German or Swedish film company.
All five top box-office films in Switzerland recently were American. In 1990 “Pretty Woman” was the No. 1 film in Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Australia and Denmark, and Pico Iyer reports that before the movie “Coming to America” reached U.S. video stores, a pirated version was on sale in Bhutan.
American writers like Stephen King lead the best-seller lists in France, Germany and other countries. Flying the Dutch national airline, KLM, between Santiago and Rio, I was handed a copy of USA Today while in front of me a couple read Portuguese translations of Amy Tan and Tom Clancy.
“Play ball” is now a global cry. Get out your passports, fans, and fasten your seat belts-here comes jet-set baseball. They’re tying on the spikes from Australia to Zaire. It is estimated that 92 million people are playing organized baseball-and only about 19 million of them are Americans. Baseball is now the International Pastime.
Last year more than 200 million viewers in 20 nations watched the American “World” Series-including fans in the People’s Republic of China, where the play-by-play was dubbed in Mandarin. Little League had 2.5 million boys and girls from 33 nations playing baseball last year, making it the largest athletic organization in the history of the world. The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown is being flooded with overseas requests for information about baseball. And move over, Cooperstown-the World Baseball Hall of Fame was chartered in 1990. American major league scouts are now scouring the world for guys who can hit the ball a country kilometer.
Japan has had two top-level six-team professional baseball leagues since 1950, and last summer I went out to the old ballgame in Taipei and watched the Weichuan Dragons battle the Brother Hotel Elephants. It was the new Taiwan Professional Baseball League, and recently expanded from four to six teams. The expansion teams are the Jungo Bears and the China Times Eagles, each of whom plunked down $1.6 million to get in the league.
Baseball isn’t the only American game gone global. Some 300 million Chinese watched the 1992 Super Bowl, and in Japan, there are about 400 teams, ranging from high school to company squads, playing amefuto, as it is called in the Land of the Rising Pigskin. The NFL-sponsored World Football League, which included teams from the U.S. plus the London Monarchs, the Barcelona Dragons and the Frankfurt Galaxy, failed-but not in Europe. It will be back this year with a greater European presence.
National Basketball Association games are telecast to 90 nations, including Reykjavik, Iceland, where they love the Boston Celtics. Professional basketball is very big in Europe. Darryl Dawkins, who used to destroy backboards for the ’76ers, is playing for a team in Milan. Two regulation NBA games were played in Japan last year, and a multinational basketball league is starting up in Asia.
The freighter Aranui anchors off the island of Fatu Hiva well before dawn. From the deck, the sky is a vast dark lake pebbled with stars. There is a faint reek of diesel, and the odor of blossoms and citrus comes seaborne from the shore. For about an hour, the only sound is the lullaby of the waves surging up the beach and subsiding with a sigh. Then a dog barks, demanding the day.
Fatu Hiva is part of the Marquesas archipelago, which is the most remote-meaning farthest from any continent-island group in the world. It was Fatu Hiva where Thor Heyerdahl, the Norwegian explorer, came with his wife in 1936 seeking “a speck which the world had overlooked, a tiny free port of refuge from the iron grip of civilization.” They found that living in a state of nature is not easy and stayed only a year.
It’s easier today, for Fatu Hiva is no longer overlooked by the world. The 343-foot Aranui comes here once a month, the occasion for a holiday as families three generations deep gather to watch the unloading of the cargo. Since there are no docks on Fatu Hiva, the delivery is unfailingly exciting.
Everything is winched from the Aranui’s hold, often with a sweat-glazed, tattooed sailor riding atop the load, out over the water and then down onto 25-foot whaleboats. It takes about half a day to bring everything in. Coca-Cola and 7-Up. Pampers and Scott’s toilet tissue. Whirlpool refrigerators and GE microwaves. Marlboros and Luckies. Wrigley’s Spearmint and Hershey’s Kisses. No television signals reach here yet, but many people have televisions so they can play American videos, and this trip the Aranui brings some John Wayne epics and dozens of others.
Buying American products is one way to share in the American dream, a fact that is not lost on advertisers.
As Europe moves closer towards economic unity, advertisers are seeking universal themes that will work in all member nations. Italian motifs don’t necessarily work in Britain, and some French themes don’t play in Germany. But run America up the flagpole, and everybody salutes.
Advertisers have found that basic consumer desires, such as the desire for a more attractive complexion or a drier baby, are pretty universal, and so, with the aid of satellite-delivered television networks, dozens of companies now market to vast portions of the world as if these geographically diverse regions were a single market.
“Advertisers are playing a role very similar to the role of the church in the past,” says Stuart Ewen, professor at the City University of New York, who has studied the history of advertising. “Rather than being perceived as having another way of life, people in other countries, especially less-industrialized societies, are seen as people wanting to be ushered into the church. It’s very much a missionary thing.”
Some American advertisers don’t even bother to dub their spots in the local language, figuring that English is understood in many places, and even if it’s not, it carries a certain snob appeal.
In fact, the sun never sets on the English language. With 700 million people using it, English ranks second only to Chinese in number of speakers, but it is spoken commonly in more countries than any other language. Indeed, the number of non-native users of the English language now outnumber those who were born into it.
Singapore’s information minister, George Yeo, has complained of a “disturbing trend” of Singaporeans speaking English at home. “Some young Singaporeans from English-speaking homes are more familiar with Hollywood and Walt Disney than they are with the stories in Xi and Ji or the Ramayana,” Yeo said, referring to Asian literary masterpieces.
I have just flown over the Rift Valley, where Darwinists believe mankind began at least 2.7 million years ago, and now I sit in an outdoor restaurant in a small market town near Nairobi, sampling grilled wildebeest and smoked impala with my Kenyan host.
Around us, the market throbs like a helicopter. It is a thicket of humanity, and everyone is talking earnestly, rapidly, as though if they stop for an instant, they will crumble to dust in the red-clay ground. The cacophony is like an overpopulated marsh. We are interrupted by a young boy, who seems to have stepped off a page of National Geographic. He extends toward me a woodcarving of a tribal mask.
“He wants to trade you,” says my companion.
“What does he want?”
He talks to the boy in Swahili and then answers: “He wants anything from America. A T-shirt, a cassette, a baseball cap. As long as it’s from America.” In my bag, I find a gray sweatshirt that says “New York Giants.” His eyes widen in appreciation, and we make a deal.
“Our young people are absolutely daft about America,” says my host, a Kenyan of English ancestry. “It is said that Kenyan children hope for two things-to go to heaven and to go to America.”
Scholars at a 1992 conference on “The New Global Popular Culture” sponsored by the American Enterprise Institute disagreed extensively over the impact of the American influence abroad.
AEI’s Wattenberg said America is operating “the most potent cultural imperium in history.
“And that,” he added, “is why America is not in decline, and why America is still No. 1. Over the centuries, great global powers have been great because they have influenced the world. National greatness is about influence. We don’t recall Rome because it had a positive merchandise balance of trade . . . . We remember Rome because two millennia later we speak its language and follow its law. America belongs in that select company of cultures that have forever transformed the world.”
Joseph Duffy, president of American University, told the conference: “From Olympia Dukakis to Paula Abdul, from Woody Allen to John Updike, from Gloria Estefan to Phil Donohue and from Garrison Keillor to Yo Yo Ma, our American culture is bone and blood of the songs and dramas of every people on Earth. . . . We are bringing people around the world a distant but familiar echo of the music that was played at their great grandparents’ weddings.”
But other scholars saw danger in some of our cultural exports. Walter Berns, an AEI fellow and a professor at Georgetown University, viewed rock music, Hollywood films and other popular entertainment exported by the U.S. as corrupting influences that damage the societies receiving them and tarnish America’s image.
“Popular culture provides entertainment, sometimes quite wonderful entertainment,” Berns said. “But while it may, at its worst, debase its consumers, it cannot ever elevate. That is not its mission.”
Judge Robert H. Bork: “When we look at the Hollywood elite-those carrying the banner of American life around the world-we find a set of standards that are grossly at odds not only with traditional values but with those of the majority of Americans today.”
Most of the scholars agreed, however, that American culture has undermined dictatorships all over the world. Irving Kristol, a conservative scholar, said it has a “wonderfully corrosive effect on all totalitarian and strongly authoritarian regimes.”
“The spirit of this culture is profoundly individualist, almost anarchic in fact, and crosses the grain of all collectivist societies. The spirit of this culture is also profoundly hedonistic, placing the emphasis on individual appetites and desires as self-defined and, therefore, hostile to any authoritative, political definition of `needs’ that takes priority over individually defined appetites and desires.”
As far as Americans are concerned, one thing is for sure: Getting away from it all will never be the same. For no matter where one goes, no matter what precautions one must take-patches against seasickness, chloroquinine pills against malaria-there is no escaping the United States of America. Those who travel in pursuit of diversity keep running smack into the omnipresence of our own culture, and so much of the romance of world travel has vanished.
Oh, the Thai kid in the Lindenhurst High School sweatshirt in Bangkok? Before I could detain him further, he ducked into a movie theater. It was showing “Terminator II.”
