American export: Pop culture

By Dave Churchill (Contact) | The Daily Journal

Published Friday, July 13, 2007

Journal publisher Dave Churchill is on vacation. This column originally ran in August of 2005.

We were among the earliest of the dinner crowd, so the little restaurant was quiet. Between our own bursts of conversation we could hear the sound system piping in a radio station playing Top 40 tunes from the ‘70s and ‘80s.

Those were the songs of my younger days and, while they ought to be soothing, they are so overplayed — the Fleetwood Mac standbys, Stones classics, Styx synthesnooze — that hearing them tends to make me want to hit myself in the head with a brick.

I was just working up a witty comment to that effect, when the oddity struck me. We were seven time zones from home trying to get some exposure to other countries and peoples, but still besieged by bad American music.

The reality is that if you’re an American traveling abroad in this hemisphere, you are never far from your own culture.

Love “Everybody Loves Raymond?” It’s almost as hard to avoid the show in Europe as it is in the United States. You’ll have to do your own translation, but if — like many Americans — you’ve seen every episode five times, you already know the punch lines.

Check out the movie listings on basic cable in rural France and the American offerings are nearly as pervasive as the homegrown variety.

And the celebrity pages of the tabloid newspapers seldom miss a day’s reporting on some American movie star. While we were in Europe this summer, some actor was having an affair with his kids’ nanny. It was big news on the gossip pages there.

It is easy to see how some people begin to dislike and resent our country. We seem to be a machine built to pump out American entertainment, American gossip, American music and beliefs. A person who is German or French or Italian or Russian might well come to resent that cultural dominance.

What makes the phenomenon even more interesting is that it is a one-way street. When was the last time you saw an Italian sitcom dubbed into English and broadcast on mainstream American television? Probably never.

Same goes for music, magazines, just about any aspect of culture except perhaps for the classics like opera. Even British works are few and far between, despite the lack of language barriers.

It is also interesting that even as our friends overseas complain about this American cultural domination, they listen to the music and watch the television programs.

Lots of them also speak English and it is not unusual to meet people who speak three languages — although English seems to often be the second language. One of our friends in France speaks English, Spanish and a little German. Another has English, German and a little Spanish. Others we know who don’t profess to speak English actually understand quite a bit of it — perhaps absorbed from all those American songs on the radio?

English is so pervasive among those who work in the service sector that we took it for granted during our recent trip that any rental car clerk, airline worker, hotel desk clerk or shopkeeper would be able to communicate with us in our own language. We were seldom proven wrong.

One effect of this phenomenon was, at first, to make me feel hopelessly arrogant — almost a caricature of a blundering American tourist. Then I began to feel like a dope, surrounded by people who easily and naturally communicated across two or more language platforms, people who truly were prepared to be world citizens.

Again, it becomes easy to see why some people aren’t in love with America. There’s nothing wrong with exporting some culture, but when it’s a one-way street, when nothing goes the other direction, it is bound to stir resentment.

One can only speculate how much deeper the irritation might run in places like Pakistan, India, China and North Korea.

Suggesting any means for change — or whether any change is really needed — is beyond my scope and knowledge. But clearly there is room for understanding when we see those news clips or read those stories that suggest our country isn’t universally popular.