I read a quote by an international leader whose name I've long forgotten. He called America the "great anti-culture." As I sat on the train yesterday, I thought about his statement while forced to listen to a woman detail the experience of her friend the stripper at a club the last night. The woman was crude and her language made me squirm almost as much as the stripper had during the described lap dance.
I felt imposed upon. I was forced to listen to this. And then I thought about the many nations we have invaded with our anti-culture and forced to listen to our crude tails of irresponsible sex and wanton greed. We've invaded their homes without pausing to ask permission...attacked at the youngest element to ensure "brand loyalty" and "maximum impressionability." We replaced their music with our technological noise; their dancing with our rampant sexuality; their community with our "mass communication"; their identity with our peer pressure. We blast our television and its advertising on every airwave. The Internet is riddled with our insistence that the whole world buy more and more and more of our experience. And the part of us we push on other cultures? It's not the kind America, the good America, the family-values America. We push our worst America - full of irresponsibility, risky behavior, lawlessness, and base language.
We're wrong. Just as wrong as that woman was to force her night on the rest of us. We didn't begrudge her or judge her friend - we just wanted the freedom NOT to relive an event we'd never chosen.
I am often amazed by the bigotry practiced by the so-called "ideal" set in society. I was recently in a situation full of upscale and admired adults where I was the only religious person in the group. I was ridiculed, mocked, and derided at least daily. They were "disgusted" by my bigotry - though it wasn't me who judged any of them. They pressured and fixed "mixed" drinks to trick me into drinking alcohol I didn't want to take. They told me I'd never find happiness if I chose my path. They pointed to the media - that HBO has prostitutes having sex in prime time and pornography is seen as something fun to do at a dinner party and they claimed this is what America is - and so I was just old-fashioned and ridiculous. In time, I started to cave and once they had "won", the whole group was gone. They weren't trying to help me acclimate - just validate themselves. They created a moral and ethical crisis in my life for very little more than their own ego. I was mocked as much for becoming like them as I had been for remaining distinct. In the end, I put myself back together (It's interesting to note that while this group remained awful, my church group showed up and said little more than "whoever you choose to be we want you to be happy with it" while they helped me) and learned a valuable lesson....anyone selling something is just trying to help themselves.
There's a parallel here with the way the U.S. functions in the world. We take our ideas to every corner of the world and convince the rest of the world "if they want to be rich and happy like the U.S." then they have to buy every bit of propaganda and product we force into their world. And many, many, many people fall into the same trap that caught me. In the end, they have loads of product they never asked to own and very little of the promised freedom and happiness we pretended came in the package.
An excellent example of this came in the 1970s when Nestle sent boxes of infant formula to 3rd world nations. Their advertising campaign claimed that the U.S. had stopped breastfeeding and was using formula and their babies weren't dying. Nestle neglected to mention that we also had vaccinations and safe water in the U.S. Millions of women stopped breastfeeding and used the free product. Then the bill came...and millions of children suffered the consequence of Nestles push to "Americanize" infant feeding. I went to one of these countries a few years ago. And I heard the propaganda repeated back to me when I met women who refused to breastfeed their infants and preferred to mix 1/2-strength formula and watch their babies grow ill - because "this is how American women feed their babies. Given that breastfeeding rates are now back above 50% in the U.S., the propaganda is false - but permeating. Our desire to sell our culture and our product has cost thousands, if not millions, of lives in the developing world.
This is the way we practice imperialism in the world - taking over product by product and many people resent our approach. They should. We're wrong. The rest of the world has reason to hate us. I may not always agree with the method of protest, but I can't fault the reasoning. It is simply wrong to force ideals on other people, especially on children, for the simple purpose of "improving quartile gains."
Many people insist that Big Business will take responsibility for itself and should be left to practice anywhere, anyway. When we look around and see the environmental and financial damage that the greed of business has created recently, I would imagine people would begin to grow uncomfortable with the idea of free reign, irresponsible business. And then I would hope that the people could see that even the Middle East has a point - America should mind its own business.
