Jihad vs. McWorld - Benjamin R. Barber [65]
As movies and television have pursued common programming strategies, Hollywood’s creative monopoly over material has increased: indeed, the Americanization of global television is proceeding even faster than the globalization of American films. In England, where football (soccer) and cricket once dominated weekend sports broadcasting, viewers can now watch the NFL Game of the Week, and even in France there is an American football jeu de semaine, complete with an American-born announcer whose breathless French description of plays, rendered in an intentionally atrocious American accent, runs on with a gritty Yankee charm along the lines of “alors, quelle finesse! Regardez le quarterbacksneak de Dan Marino, ça marche vraiment parfaitment, n’est-ce pas?! Tiens! Touchdown! Eh, oui, je suis étonné! Quelle jeu! Quel grand show!”
The Anglophilia that characterizes so much of American high culture is reciprocated by the British in low culture. On the tube, Hollywood is the template, with imitations of Gladiators and Oprah (in the person of Crystal Rose) joining Brighton Belles (a licensed version of Golden Girls) and the goofily Amerocentric youth magazine show The Word, which features personalities like basketball superstar Shaquille O’Neal, the porn star Jeff Stryker, and a policeman from Albuquerque who had his penis enlarged (though, regrettably, not on camera).4
Eastern Europe is chasing its neighbors to the West in the race to catch America in television along with everything else. According to Miklos Vamos, a Hungarian journalist, “Hungarians, Czechoslovaks and Bulgarians try to imitate everything that is American—and I mean everything…. [T]he state-run financing system of culture doesn’t exist any longer, but neither does any network of foundations and other private funds that can be used, as in the West, to support the arts. East European films and literature cannot compete with their American counterparts. If we keep going on like this, our small countries will gradually lose their national cultures.”5 In Budapest they are watching The Cosby Show on reruns—though in a German dub since Magyar dubbing is not yet available. In Yeltsin’s Russia, TV viewers can watch a rip-off of Wheel of Fortune called Field of Wonders on which lucky winners receive Sony VCRs into which they can load their pirated cassette versions of wildly popular American films.6
Poland does still better, having access to Wheel of Fortune itself (dubbed in Polish) along with its own licensed version Kolo Fortuna, which plays to 70 percent of Polish households on Thursday evenings. Twenty-five percent of Polish households have access to cable or satellite at relatively moderate cost.7 Where Jihad and McWorld collide on television there is little doubt about who wins: the Catholic Church may be reasserting itself in areas like abortion (banned in Poland in 1992) and the Communists may be making a political comeback, but the cultural wars are being won hands down by American television. The Church has conceded as much, and elsewhere in Europe is advertising on VH1 and MTV for converts to the priesthood, which is rendered as a kind of new, AIDS-safe form of cool.
In Asia, where wiring homes with cable or fiber optics is not yet financially feasible, satellite is making major inroads. Asian (now Murdoch’s) Star satellite network reaches hundreds of thousands of upscale Indians pining for Western fare. Satellite dishes are showing up in China as well, in flagrant disregard of state laws banning their use in keeping with the war on “spiritual pollution.” In 1993, State Council Proclamation 129 prohibited both purchase and possession of dishes. Yet millions of electronic outlaws have installed them and current estimates suggest over a half million “heavenly threads” (the literal translation of satellite antenna into Mandarin)