In the opinion of foe and friend alike, America (the name under
which the United States of America, appropriating the
identifier of the two continents comprising the New World)
epitomizes many of the defining characteristics of today's
world: market oriented, technologically driven, living on
borrowed means (financial and natural resources), competitive to
the extreme of promoting adversarial relations, and submitting,
in the name of democracy and tolerance, to mediocrity,
demagoguery, and opportunism. Americans are seen as boastful,
boorish, unrealistic, naive, primitive, hypocritical, and
obsessed with money. Even to some of its most patriotic citizens,
the USA appears to be driven by political opportunism,
corruption, and bigotry. As still others perceive the USA, it is
captive to militarism and prey to the seductive moral poison of
its self-proclaimed supremacy. At times it looks like the more it
fails in some of its policies, the more it wants to hear
declarations of gratitude and hymns of glory, as in John Adams'
lines: "The eastern nations sink, their glory ends/ And empires
rise where sun descends." To the peoples just awaking from the
nightmare of communism, the American political slogans have a
familiar, though frightening, self-delusive ring.
On the other hand, Americans are credited with extraordinary
accomplishments in technology, science, medicine, the arts,
literature, sports, and entertainment. They are appreciated as
friendly, open, and tolerant. Their willingness to engage in
altruistic projects (programs for the poor and for children all
over the world), indeed free from discrimination, makes for a
good example to people of other nations. Patriotism does not
prevent Americans from being critical of their own country. To
the majority of the world, America represents a vivid model of
liberal democracy in action within a federation of states united
by a political system based on expectations of balance among
local, state, and federal functions.
Jean Jacques Servan-Schreiber once made headlines writing about
the American challenge (Le Défi Américain), more or less about
the danger of seeing the world Americanized. Downtown Frankfurt
(on the river Main) is called Mainhattan because its skyscrapers
recall those of the island between the Hudson and East Rivers.
The Disneyland near Paris, more of an import (the French
government wanted it badly) than an export product, was called a
"cultural Chernobyl." Tourists from all over the crumbled Soviet
Empire are no longer taken to Lenin's Mausoleum but to Moscow's
McDonald's. The Japanese, reluctant to import American-made cars
and supercomputers, or to open their markets to agricultural
goods (except marbled beef), will bend over backwards for
baseball. Add to all this the symbolism of blue jeans, Madonna
or Heavy Metal (as music or comic books), Coca-Cola, the
television series Dallas, the incessant chomping on chewing gum
and bubble-gum popping, Texan boots, and the world-wide sneaker
craze, and you have an image of the visible threat of
Americanization. But appearance is deceitful.
Taken out of their context, these and many other Americanized
aspects of daily life are only exotic phenomena, easy to
counteract, and indeed subject to counteraction. Italians
protested the culture of fast food near the Piazza d'Espagna in
Rome (where one fast food establishment rented space) by giving
out free spaghetti carbonara and pizza. (They were unaware of
the irony in this: the biggest exporter of pizza restaurants is
no longer Italy, but the USA.) The rightist Russian movement
protested McDonald's by touting national dishes, the good old
high-calorie menu of times when physical effort was much greater
than in our days (even in that part of the world). The Germans
push native Lederhosen and Dirndls over blue jeans. The German
unions protest attempts to address structural problems in their
economy through diminishing social benefits with a slogan that
echoes like a hollow threat: American conditions will be met by
a French response, by which they mean that strikes will paralyze
the country. The Japanese resisted the Disney temptation by
building their own lands of technological marvels. When an
athlete born in America, naturalized as Japanese, won the
traditional Sumo wrestling championship, the Japanese judges
decided that this would be his last chance, since the sport
requires, they stated, a spirituality (translated by demeanor)
that a foreign-born sportsman cannot have.
On closer examination, Americanization runs deeper than what any
assortment of objects, attitudes, values, and imitated behavior
tell us. It addresses the very core of human activity in today's
global community. It is easy to understand why America appears
to embody efficiency reached at the expense of many abandoned
values: respect for authority, for environment, for resources,
even human resources, and ultimately human values. The focus of
the practical experience through which American identity is
constituted is on limitless expectations regarding social
existence, standard of living, political action, economic
reward, even religious experience. Its encompassing obsession is
freedom, or at least the appearance of freedom. Whatever the
pragmatics affords becomes the new expectation and is projected
as the next necessity. The right to affluence, as relative as
affluence is in American society, is taken for granted, never
shadowed by the thought that one's wealth and well-being might
come at the expense of someone else's lack of opportunity.
Competitive, actually adversarial, considerations prevail, such
as those manifest in the morally dubious practices accepted by
the legal and political systems. "To the victor go the spoils"
is probably the most succinct description of what this means in
real life.
The American way of life has been a hope and promise for people
all over the world. The mixed feelings they have towards America
does not necessarily reflect this. The entire world is probably
driven by the desire for efficiency that makes such a standard
of living possible more than by the pressure to copy the American
style (of products, living, politics, behavior, etc.). This
desire corresponds to a pragmatics shaped by the global scale of
humankind, and by the contemporary dynamics of human
self-constitution. Each country faces the battle between
efficiency and culture (some going back thousands of years), in
contrast to the USA, whose culture is always in status nascendi.
The American anxiety over the current state of literacy is laden
with a nostalgia for a tradition never truly established and a
fear of a future never thought through. It is, consequently, of
more than documentary interest to understand how America
epitomizes a civilization that has made literacy obsolete.