Design commentary as propaganda

[imomus]

It may well be because I came to it immediately after listening to a podcast on socialism by Tony Benn and reading an article by the author of Why Do People Hate America?, but the fascinating 1958 design film "The American Look" struck me as outrageous peacetime propaganda -- a highly selective arrangement of the tools of a culture in order to show that culture in the best possible light. (Click the picture to watch the whole 28 minute film.)



"The American Look (A Tribute to the Men and Women who Design)" was financed by Chevrolet, and a chunk of it showcases the design of their 1959 Impala model at the General Motors Technical Center in Warren, Michigan. But it could just as well have been financed by the government, so relentlessly does it harp on the themes of freedom and individualism. "By the way things look as well as the way they perform," crows the narrator over a relentlessly triumphalist orchestral score, "our homes acquire new grace, new glamour, new accomodations expressing not only the American love of beauty but also the basic freedom of the American people which is the freedom of individual choice."

Oddly enough, though, the film calls to mind nothing so much as the North Korean propaganda movies that were showing at Christian Kracht's booklaunch. And, just as insecurity lay behind the confident, Utopian tone of those films, so it underpins this American film too. Certainly the late 1950s was a time of optimism, affluence and consumerist expansion in the US, a time still bathed in the glow of the military victories of World War II. But there's something uneasy in the film's harping on the essential Americanness of Modernist design, when so much of the architecture and furniture design on display here looks more Scandinavian or German. Only the grotesque, elongated, decorative and gothic Impala looks like a truly American design, and it strikes a very different note to the restrained, sparse and spare Modernist designs. (Better suited, in fact, to Postmodernism -- which raises the question of whether pomo came along simply because Modernism wasn't essentially American enough.)

The Impala's Space Age streamlining points to another insecurity, one I outlined in my AIGA Voice article Creativity and the Sputnik Shock. The central thesis of this film -- the idea that good design goes hand-in-hand with American "freedom of individual choice" -- was at that very moment being disproved by the success of the Soviet space program. On October 4, 1957 the communists had successfully launched the first satellite into Earth orbit. America reeled, throughout the late 50s, with a keen sense of its own educational, technical and creative inadequacy. As a result, money was poured into creativity research -- and into design and lifestyle propaganda like this film.

All propaganda, no matter how Utopian, optimistic, and triumphalist, raises fears; all that's left unsaid seems to gather just outside the frame, a threatening black cloud. In my case, when I watch "The American Look", I don't just worry about the people excluded from the ideal scenarios depicted. I also wonder whether all design writing -- and I've done my share -- isn't just a more subtle version of this kind of propaganda. Just like the film, we design writers like to point to the "ever-improving good taste" of the public. We like to select only the most advanced and beautiful designs and suggest that, soon, they'll predominate. And we like to evoke futuristic scenarios like the ones in the final shots of this film, in which rocket cars and dome houses dominate the landscape. Yet fifty years after this film was made, mock-Colonial and faux-rustic farmhouse styles are more likely to define the American design landscape than bubble jets and space craft. Put it down to "the freedom of individual choice", perhaps.

Comments

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

It occurred to me that some of what I'd written might seem, and maybe is, inconsistent, so I just thought I'd like to clear up a few points.

I think that the problem with my original comment was that I used the word 'hate'. I was taking my cue from the title of the book mentioned, Why Do People Hate America?. I was not attempting to say that people should hate America. I understand hate, but I don't advocate it, in the same way, for instance that I feel that I understand the motivation for the events of 9/11 in the US and 7/7 here in Britain, but would not condone the acts. I'm no saint, either, and no stranger to hate, but I realise it's not the most constructive thing in the world.

Also, I kind of implied that I agreed with everything you said, but... In fact, there were some things I did not agree with. I don't agree that criticism of America is like throwing tomatoes at the most popular cheerleader out of spite. It can be that, but your statement suggests America is beyond reproach, which I don't believe it to be. Your comments could be construed as saying, "You only hate us because we're better than you, you have no right to criticise." I'm not sure if that was your intention, but if it was, that is precisely what annoys people about America, the attitude that America is right by definition, which does seem at least prevalent enough to have a strong influence in politics.

Americanisation often comes from within, but not always. Commodore Perry and his black ships, knocking on Japan's door at Uraga Bay did not come from within. Whether you would call it Americanisation or not, America's unprovoked invasion of Iraq is another example of enforced American influence that does not come from within. And yes, the British are involved, too, and no, I don't support the British troops, either.

I also find it a little disingenuous to equate something like 'America', which is a nation and a political entity, with something like 'blacks', which is a racial group spread around the globe in many different countries. Such an equation also implies that there is no history and no power relationships between groups. What I do agree with is that, in a certain sense 'America' is a fiction, and to talk about that fiction as if it's real and has certain fixed characteristics, can be highly misleading. People are individuals, yes. But the fiction called America certainly has influence in the world, especially when there are many people devoted to that fiction, and it's legitimate, I think, to criticise the thing called 'America'.

Also, I spoke of 'letting off steam'. I think that's slightly innacurate, actually, as it implies saying things you don't really mean. What I should have said is that it's fine just to talk about these things, rather than never going near them. Some of the talk will, in fact, be letting of steam. Some of it will be mere observation. Some of it will be questioning. None of it will represent absolute truth. There are always other ways to look at things, and it's important to keep that in mind.

I think those are the main points I wanted to clear up.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

>>I don't agree that criticism of America is like throwing tomatoes at the most popular cheerleader out of spite. It can be that, but your statement suggests America is beyond reproach, which I don't believe it to be. Your comments could be construed as saying, "You only hate us because we're better than you, you have no right to criticise." I'm not sure if that was your intention, but if it was, that is precisely what annoys people about America, the attitude that America is right by definition, which does seem at least prevalent enough to have a strong influence in politics.<<


Perhaps I presume too much that people understand my position, so I suppose I must point out that your characterization above is not an accurate reflection of my views. I in no way think that "America" is beyond reproach. I'm a fairly Left-of-center Green, and I'm very critical of the current Administration and of much of American corporate activity. Do I think America is "better than" all other nations? Not at all. Nor do I think that America is "right by definition". But I think that America as a place to live is superior to most nations; certainly better than Russia and the former USSR, and better far than China.

The trouble Nick gets into again and again when he gets into political posts is that he tries to characterize "Americans" and "America", neither of which can be pinned down the way he thinks. Our government is largely corrupt and sometimes evil. But "America" as a nation? I defy you to name another nation its size or larger who has done more good in the 20th century. And as for China and Russia -- I defy you to find any nation their size who has done more harm in that same time. How much time does Nick spend criticizing either of them? Yet where is the American Stalin or Mao? The Germans had Hitler (for which they've been absolved), and the Japanese murdered at least 10 million Chinese and Korean civilians in the '30s and '40s (perhaps as many as 30 million), yet we aren't constantly seeing anti-Japanese tirades from anyone but the Chinese and Koreans.

The other pervasive lie is that "Americans" can be categorized as this or that. Is anyone really still ignorant to the fact that the US is by far the most diverse nation on earth? How can one say that Americans are represented by any convenient "type" when one remembers that the majority of American voters voted against Bush?

As Sir Michael Howard wrote, "Anti-Americanism combines the nastiest elements of the right and left". There's a pervasive current of it among some Britons, especially among Leftie intellectuals such as Nick, and it's almost never challenged by those of us on the Left. Ironically, the title "Why do they hate America?" was originally a very different essay in the London Times (http://www.loyno.edu/~wagues/9-11_appleyard.html) by the British author (and former London Times editor) Bryan Appleyard, a few weeks after 9/11. In it, he wrote the following:

"Let us ponder exactly what the Americans did in that most awful of all centuries, the 20th. They saved Europe from barbarism in two world wars. After the second world war they rebuilt the continent from the ashes. They confronted and peacefully defeated Soviet communism, the most murderous system ever devised by man, and thereby enforced the slow dismantling - we hope - of Chinese communism, the second most murderous. America, primarily, ejected Iraq from Kuwait and helped us to eject Argentina from the Falklands. America stopped the slaughter in the Balkans while the Europeans dithered. Now let us ponder exactly what the Americans are. America is free, very democratic and hugely successful. Americans speak our language and a dozen or so Americans write it much, much better than any of us. Americans make extremely good films and the cultivation and style of their best television programmes expose the vulgarity of the best of ours. Almost all the best universities in the world are American and, as a result, American intellectual life is the most vibrant and cultivated in the world."

Of course, this was written before Bush got us into another stupid war, but the core of it remains true -- self-evident, even -- to most reasoning people.

[qscrisp.livejournal.com]

Thanks for your reply. I don't want to get tedious, but I will make another reply, too.

I read the essay to which you posted a link. I have to say that I don't agree with a lot of it, but it would take too long for me to go through it point by point. One thing it does highlight is how nebulous the whole issue is, although I'm not sure if it was the author's intention to highlight this. I agree that anti-Americanism can be extreme, irrational and reflex, and I don't actually consider myself anti-American. I'm not. To be 'anti-American' even seems non-sensical to me. I suppose I feel ambivalent towards America, but my desire, for instance, to move to America earlier this year was partly out of a simple attraction to the country similar to that expressed by the author's daughter. This doesn't stop me recoiling from certain behaviours, actions and attitudes and commenting on them.

I don't expect all I say to go unchallenged, and you're right to pick me up on my comments if you feel the need to, but I don't think your response is the only response that can be made. I think that I am, broadly speaking, something of a misanthrope, and this is how I tend to achieve an egalitarian view of humans. One people is more or less as bad as another, but in different ways. And for the most part what we can do is talk about those different ways in which we are bad. It's not that I never see the good in anything, but somehow the good always seems more nebulous, or perhaps makes less impression when I do talk about it. On this occasion I happened to be talking about the negative side of America, which is, I believe, very real. On other occasions I have expressed more positive ideas. And, for what it's worth, I do think America makes a better superpower than, for instance, China, as it currently exists, ever would. But I don't feel the need, every time I write about something, to carefully balance the bad with the good. I might feel a need to be more balanced - certainly more balanced than the author of that article - if I was writing an essay or something like that, but not making a quick comment on a blog post.

To give an example of a different response to negative generalisations, my own tendency is not to take them to heart. As an example, I am friends with a Japanese girl here, and once she told me that British people seem nice at first, but underneath they're all monsters. I didn't feel she'd said something terrible or that there was a need to persuade her otherwise. That was simply something she wished to express at that moment. I believe I asked her why she thought that, and said that maybe she was right. I know that she wasn't referring to me. It seemed too bland and obvious to say, "But some British people are nice." It even seemed pointless to do so. I had no desire to pitch against her remark all the things I had disliked about Japan. Besides which, she lives in Britain and has said a number of times that she prefers it here to Japan. Life is not simple, and though such remarks can never come near to encapsulating some great overarching truth, I don't personally feel the need to whitewash them on that account. Also, my own remarks, while perhaps a little crude, were at least more specific than the example I've just given.

Well, I'm sure that I haven't covered everything, and that I probably can't, but if you feel the need to pick me up on anything else, feel free.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

Oh, I don't agree with everything Bryan Appleyard wrote in that essay either, but I think he makes some very valid points about America's stature in the world, and about some of the motivations for people's criticisms of it.

The reason that I took Nick to task for his comments is due to a pattern or America-bashing that he's displayed over the course of many different entries. It's pretty much the same every time -- to play "find anything that can be construed as negative about the US, and play it up as if it were symptomatic of America and Americans". His rhetoric is too revealing, with choices of words like "outrageous" and "inadequacy" -- very loaded terms.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Brian Appleyard is not only against communism, he's against science (http://www.acampbell.ukfsn.org/bookreviews/r/appleyard.html).

[bricology.livejournal.com]

C'mon, Nick. Is that the best you can do? An association fallacy? Shall I respond in kind by dismissing the author of the book review you link to because he's a practicing homeopath, and homeopathy is likewise "against science"? Do you really believe that the substance of my objection to your entry hinges upon Bryan Appleyard's views of science? If so, just strike that portion of my post and try again. I'll even distill it for you, in case you want to respond here:

1. What is "outrageous" about "The American Look"? How is it any different from a product advertisement or a national pavilion's film at a World's Fair? If the film had been from say, the 1940 MoMA "Organic Design" exhibition or the 1950 "Good Design" show, and had used the same nationalist hyperbole, would you still be "outraged"?

2. The US was ahead of the USSR in every significant way, in the space race. The US was not suffering from insecurity or inadequacy in space. This is a fact. True, some in the media and the government tried to stir up public fears, so as to keep the money flowing to the space program, but the fears were unfounded.

Wikipedia states that in 1955, "when the Soviets read that the American Project Vanguard had two satellite designs, a small one which was just to see if they could get something into orbit, the Soviets decided to have what translates as the 'Simplest Satellite' too, one which was one centimeter larger in diameter, and much heavier, than Vanguard's 'real' satellite."

3. You claim that the Modernist designs shown in that film are more German or Scandinavian. Are you aware of the many significant American Modernist designers of that era? Do you think that Charles Eames, George Nelson, Florence Knoll, Russel Wright, Walter Dorwin Teague, Norman Bel Geddes, Paul McCobb, Henry Dreyfuss and dozens of other American Modernist designers of that time -- are somehow less significant to Modernism than their German and Scandinavian counterparts? And what do you make of the fact that so many of those foreign counterparts chose to emigrate to the US?


This whole issue has gone on far longer than it should've. I don't like being combative about these things, but I really wish you'd give the "outraged by America" think a rest. It's so overdone in the media, and it doesn't inform or even surprise anyone anymore. Be angry at the Bush Administration, be indignant at American corporations (I won't disagree on either count). But please -- enough with saying that America and Americans "are" this or that thing, as if such finite classifications were possible. You might as well criticize randomly generated numbers.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

I do insist on believing that the US has a culture, and isn't just "randomly generated numbers". It's problematical, because it's a culture which is in your face wherever you are, and which proposes itself immodestly as a model for all human life. Last night I went to my local video shop here in Berlin. Because it's a prolatarian (but not immigrant) one, it stocks almost exclusively American movies dubbed into German. I picked the "best" one I could find, which was "Fargo" by the Coen Brothers, who I knew to be intelligent auteur types. Or thought I did.

Alas, Fargo was just a slightly more quirky version of your stereotypical US movie. Not just in the colour of the lighting, the decor, the editing and so on, but in the concentration on policemen and women, the conception of human nature, the emphasis on murder and money, the scenes of sickening violence (which had Hisae moaning in discomfort) and so on. This, alas, happens so often when one turns to "exceptional" American filmmakers. They tend to be expressing the same themes, filming the same habitus from a slightly different angle. It's cultural, and it's because Americans "are" this or that thing. And I do believe that guilt is a factor in changing what Americans are, and what Americanized people are. There needs to be guilt.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

Mediocre American movies = proof of America's vices. Who can argue with such logic?

*sigh*

If you're going to use the mediocrity and violence of movies as the standard, you might honestly admit that a higher percentage of Japanese films than American involve rather perverse examples of violence. Have you seen "Ichi the Killer"? According to Variety, it's done more than $50 million in box office; that's about twice what "Fargo" made. And to put it in further perspective, "An Inconvenient Truth" has been seen by more people (and made more box office) than "Fargo". And "Fahrenheit 9/11" did five times</u< the box office of "Fargo"; indeed, it was the highest-grossing documentary of all time, and one of the highest-grossing films -- period -- of 2004. An American documentary that spent over two hours savaging Bush? What do you make of that? Too bad your video rental place didn't have "Crash" or "Enron: the Smartest Guys in the Room" or "Gunner Palace" or "Super-size Me" or "Syriana" or "Good-night and Good Luck" or "Fast Food Generation" or "The Corporation" -- all of which are recent, important and unflattering inquiries into American socio-politics, and all of which were made by Americans. My Japanese video rental place has little but horror films, samurai films, anime and hentai. Maybe that says something about the inaccuracy of video rental stores as a reflection of a culture.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I didn't properly close the underline tag.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

>>And I do believe that guilt is a factor in changing what Americans are, and what Americanized people are. There needs to be guilt.<<

As I've pointed out above, Americans are doing a fine job of being self-critical, nor is there a shortage of criticism from abroad; your contributions are merely predictable and superfluous.

And what does there need to be guilt for, and to whom should it apply? Your assignment of guilt seems rather didactic to me. I think that "guilt" is for the criminal justice system to determine and mete out, not for pundits.

I'll ask again: where is America's Hitler? Where is America's Tojo? Its Stalin or Pol Pot? As much as I despise George W. Bush, he's nowhere near the tyrant of those leaders, and yet I don't hear you (or many other people) spending much time criticizing them or guilting the people and nations they ruled.

If you're looking for leaders and nations today who deserve approbation, how about the Congo and Sierra Leone, where they've killed more than a million of their own civilians in the past decade? How about Saudi Arabia and other totalitarian Islamist states where women get stoned to death for having sex (or even being raped)? No, you're too infatuated with Islam to be critical.

If you're looking for nations to criticize, it's remarkable that you never seem to talk about China -- a nation of thought-crimes and brutal oppression, where merely being a dissident can get you imprisoned for life. Where they're destroying Tibetan culture and murdering any Tibetans who try to escape. How often do you criticize China on these pages? No, you have your agenda, and you're sticking to it.

[imomus.livejournal.com]

Some points. Hitler, Pol Pot and so on are, at this point, synonymous with evil. Also, they're not causing suffering right now, as Bush and the neocons are in Iraq. China hasn't infiltrated my local video store and an entire lifetime of my television viewing with propaganda about "the human condition" as seen from Beijing. Also, my blog isn't read principally by Chinese people, and the Scots and the Chinese are not connected by long, strong ties of ancestry and common culture. For me to criticize China would be to attack "the Other". For me to criticize US culture is, in a very real sense, self-criticism. Cultural self-criticism is what left-leaning people should do. When I speak about guilt I don't mean guilt in the criminal justice system. I mean a cosmic sense of the aesthetic and ethical wrongness of a certain habitus. The sense of guilt, a sense that you're living wrong (the thing that drives so many Americans to become born-again Christians) can be an engine for social change.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

I can see that we're just going to have to agree to disagree. You know, I wondered (even hoped) that your motivation was merely too subtle or complex for me to have understood, but now I recognize that it's just garden variety "America is bad, Americans must be guilted". I'm surprised to see that shallow of a perspective from you, but there it is.

If I were alive in the 1930s, I don't believe I'd be saying "Germans are bad, Germans are guilty". The majority of Germans were good people, they just happened to have been used by some very clever, charismatic and bad people in positions of power. And Germans today are more or less the same as the Germans during the Hitler Administration -- good, decent people. (Most Germans over 70 today were de facto Nazis; should we still be guilting them merely for having been alive in that milieu?) Nor would I have said "Japan is bad; Japan is guilty". Japan has been around for millennia, and during most of that time, it wasn't being an expansionist aggressor. Japan and Germany were "good" before, and they're "good" now (or rather, they've always been neutral envelopes). The Japanese and Germans have always been predominantly good or neutral people. I find it astonishing that some people can have such a black-and-white view as to say that America -- a nation that has done much good and relatively little bad (especially compared to China, the USSR, et al) over the past century -- deserves to be vilified by otherwise intelligent people, and that its 300 million diverse citizens -- some of which are themselves refugees from Iraq, Vietnam and elsewhere -- are guilty by citizenship. And never mind the fact that only 16% of Americans voted for Bush in the first place, nor that the criticism of his administration has been resounding from inside America for the past six years.

Your claim that Americans (in whatever way you're trying to collectivize us) are guilty of an "aesthetic and ethical wrongness of a certain habitus", which I find equally simplistic. For every example you might give of such a fault, there exists a very different example to offset it. For the 1959 Impala with its garish styling, there's the 1956 Kaiser Darrin (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/1954_Kaiser_Darrin_104-b1.jpg), or the 1961 Lincoln () or the 1963 Studebaker () -- all of which were aesthetically the equal of the best cars coming out of Britain at the time. The "American look" was distasteful to you? Well, the "British look" at the same time was dowdy (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/1957TriumphTR3photo0006.jpg), fusty (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/N101.jpg) and no less garish (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/gr_daim-sp250.jpg). But I'm not going to try to claim that a "look" or the national industries which promote it, reflects anything more than the taste of some automakers; it doesn't impugn the British or Britain, no matter how much jingoism might've been trotted out in their service at the auto shows, the Festival of Britain, or anywhere else. Equally, for every Iraq or Vietnam, there's the fact that America entered WWI and WWII, even though the US had not been attacked, and without American assistance, the other Allies would surely have lost. (Were you aware that more American soldiers died in WWII than British soldiers?)

[bricology.livejournal.com]

No idea why some of the links above aren't working, but these do:

For the 1959 Impala with its garish styling, there's the 1956 Kaiser Darrin (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/1954_Kaiser_Darrin_104-b1.jpg), or the 1961 Lincoln (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/1961_lincoln_continental.jpg) or the 1963 Studebaker (http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v332/pygar/avanti63rf.jpg) -- all of which were aesthetically the equal of the best cars coming out of Britain at the time.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

You wrote "For me to criticize US culture is, in a very real sense, self-criticism." I understand that tactic, but it's no more true than for me to claim that it's "self-criticism" for me to criticize Scotland or the Scots because I happen to be partly of Anglo ancestry, an inhabitant of the "first world", an English-speaker, a "left-leaning person", whatever. Those facts don't excuse such presumption. You're not an American, nor are you affected by America as much as you're affected by where you live. "America" didn't make ugly cars; Chevrolet did. "America" didn't attack Iraq; the Bush Administration did, using lies and its power over the military and media. "America" didn't foist mediocre American films on your local video rental store; your video rental store bought them, thinking they would be popular. "America" didn't come up with "The American Look"; manufacturers and marketers did, just like they do in their own way in every developed nation on earth.

You appear to choose your targets of criticism strategically, with the comfort of knowing that you're preaching to the converted. Do you really think that any English-speaking audience you might reach doesn't recognize the entire panoply of faults that have come out of America, from commercial hubris to military aggression? That you're telling us anything we don't already know? That the web needs one more Lefty pundit? And more salient -- that you're going to be a tool of positive change in America through your words? There's nothing inherently "bad" abouut America or Americans as a group. The faults and lie with a minority of humans and corporations, and they're not reading your blog, nor are they accessible or controllable by those Americans who do read it. You want to express your indignation about things? Go right ahead, but please -- in the future choose your targets more appropriately.

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

Just to rehearse a few things you perhaps know. Some Americans are involved in manufacturing, and most are happy to consume, a cultural edifice that imposes itself to a uniquely predominant degree throughout the world; especially through the mass media - film, television and music. To give an example of the kind of effect this might have; many children in England use the syntactical peculiarities, intonation and phrases of a character from Friends. It's even more worrying than it is annoying, which is saying something. Further, it's not just patterns of behaviour but modes of artistic expression that are also improportionately affected. Improportionately because the weight and ubiquity of this dominant culture is in no way proportionate to its worth.

It is American culture and as such it depends upon Americans. You might find more appropriate ways to respond to this state of affairs as an American than the following bag of arse:

For the 1959 Impala with its garish styling, there's the 1956 Kaiser Darrin, or the 1961 Lincoln or the 1963 Studebaker -- all of which were aesthetically the equal of the best cars coming out of Britain at the time. The "American look" was distasteful to you? Well, the "British look" at the same time was dowdy, fusty and no less garish. But I'm not going to try to claim that a "look" or the national industries which promote it, reflects anything more than the taste of some automakers; it doesn't impugn the British or Britain, no matter how much jingoism might've been trotted out in their service at the auto shows, the Festival of Britain, or anywhere else. Equally, for every Iraq or Vietnam, there's the fact that America entered WWI and WWII, even though the US had not been attacked, and without American assistance, the other Allies would surely have lost. (Were you aware that more American soldiers died in WWII than British soldiers?)

You betray yourself.

[bricology.livejournal.com]

"Just to rehearse [sic] a few things you perhaps know. Some Americans are involved in manufacturing, and most are happy to consume, a cultural edifice that imposes itself to a uniquely predominant degree throughout the world; especially through the mass media - film, television and music."

I'm sorry, but that's a load of twaddle. You're making the all too common mistake of conflating the most visible American commercial exports with "America". It's a typical outsider's narrow perspective, and utterly superficial. It's no different than if Americans had an image of Britain based upon...say, what British products are successful exports today? That Simon guy from "American Idol"? Stephen Hawking? "Harry Potter"? Burberry plaid? Ergo, Britain must be a nation of wizardly children, men in wheelchairs with robotic voices, smarmy TV show hosts and strident clothing patterns. What an evil and miserable place it must be!

It's a shame that British and German video rental shops don't have a wide selection of great American films, but the blame for that rests upon the proprietors and (to a lesser degree) their customers, not "America", "Americans" or me. You're conveniently forgetting that America is also the nation of "Fahrenheit 9/11", the highest-grossing documentary film in history, seen in the theater by more than 20 million Americans. And "An Inconvenient Truth", the third-highest-grossing. And "Syriana" and "Good Night and Good Luck" and a slew of other very good American-made films of the past 2 or 3 years which are introspectively critical and critically acclaimed. But you can just keep seeing the surface, if you're determined to.

The shallowest perspective is the stereotype, like the way that Sasha Cohen has stereotyped Kazakhstan. The next-shallowest perspective isn't far removed from the stereotype: to claim that the universal must represent the particular. That can sometimes hold true for averages, and in some contexts, but if the group contains enough diversity, it cannot be accurate. That's the level on which you and Nick are operating on in this subject, albeit with a politically-correct twist. The formula goes like this: generalization + power = bad thing. America is the approved target for criticism; fire away. Of course, your criticism is particularly ironic, given that 150 years ago, everything you're claiming reflects "America" would've been even more likely to be applied to the British Empire, who seemed to have making the world over in its image as its goal. But did it? Only to those operating on level 2, where the universal supposedly represents the specific.

"To give an example of the kind of effect this might have; many children in England use the syntactical peculiarities, intonation and phrases of a character from Friends. It's even more worrying than it is annoying, which is saying something."

Yeah, well I'm not thrilled with the influence of rap/hip-hop on the syntactical peculiarities, intonation and phrases of American children, but what do you propose we do about it? Children will choose to emulate the worst examples; it's the way they distinguish themselves from their parent's generation, and seem more worldly than their peers.

"...the following bag of arse:...You betray yourself."

As what? A person who happens to introduce some balance instead of seeing only one side of things? Feel free to try to point out anything non-factual in the paragraph I posted. Can you? I doubt it.

[eustaceplimsoll.livejournal.com]

You misunderstand me completely, but then perhaps I misunderstand you. Good luck.

Cordially yours,
EP

[butterflyrobert.livejournal.com]

As Wilde put it, "Divided by a common language."

Just once I'd like to see you seriously combat your essentialist proclivities...

[uberdionysus.livejournal.com]

Do you watch ANY Japanese films?