THE IMPACT OF THE AMERICAN WAY

HO CHI MINH has switched to Salems, forsaking his usual Philip Morrises and Camels. This interesting piece of news was recently reported by a foreign diplomat in a cable from embattled Hanoi and was duly passed on by his government to the U.S. State Department, which is still pondering its significance. In France, Premier Georges Pompidou recently complained before un meeting of the Society for the Protection of the French Language that it was really a bit much to arrive at Orly Airport and be told by the hotesse d'air that le Welcome Bureau d'Air France was at one's disposal. And in Kenya, Economics Minister Tom Mboya, momentarily putting aside affairs of state, delivered himself of the opinion that Bonanza, shown on local TV, is exerting "a good influence on Africans. Good is good. Bad is bad. The hero always wins, and I enjoy it."

Such are only a few surface signs of a phenomenon that has come to be known, often disapprovingly, as the "Americanization" of world culture. There is no doubt that things American have traveled fast and far. The American influence can be seen in the blue jeans under the flowing robes of Oxford students, in the garish neon signs in Bangkok, even in the Russian youths who exchange jazz tapes in Moscow cafeterias. It is responsible for the aching shoulders of bowling-alley patrons on six continents, for the new tendency of Iranian pilots to name their children Mark or David or Joe instead of Reza or Parviz or Taghi, for the popularity of Velveeta cheese in Germany, Kellogg's cornflakes in England and the ubiquitous hotto doggu in Japan.

Nancy Sinatra's These Boots Are Made for Walking is among the top ten on record charts in Mexico City, Rome, Bonn and Geneva. Batoman is wowing them on TV in Tokyo and playing in Buenos Aires and London as well. Bonanza is big not only in Africa but in the Middle East and Europe; it is one of South Vietnamese Premier Ky's favorite programs. Pictures of Rock Hudson and Doris Day are pinned on the walls of Philippine homes right beside the family crucifix, and a Budapest newspaper recently exhorted its readers to imitate the manners in My Fair Lady. Bestselling books in the U.S. frequently become bestsellers in West Germany. The whole abstract-expressionist movement that originated in the U.S. with Jackson Pollock has spread to almost every continent.

Perhaps one of the most indicative--and amusing--effects of American influence has been the infiltration of American English into other languages. Japanese sometimes sounds like Japlish: masukomi for mass communications, terebi for TV, demo for demonstration and the inevitable baseballisms pray bollu, storiku and hitto. Franglais permits a Frenchman to do le planning et research on le manpowerisation of a complexe industrielle before taking off for le weekend in le country. German now is splattered with such terms as discount house, shopping center, ready to wear and cash and carry. And the latest expression in Frankfurt ad agencies is Ziehn wir's am Flaggenmast hoch und sehn wir wer gruesst --Let's run it up the flagpole and see if anyone salutes.

Thirst for Novelty

From foods to fads, from business techniques to books, things and ideas American are thus being bought, sold, used, admired and copied all over the world. Yet to jump to the conclusion that the world is becoming Americanized because of this--as disapproving foreign esthetes and uncritical Americans frequently do--would be to take a very bad jump indeed. Despite the admiration for and aping of things American, "Americanization" frequently has little directly to do with the U.S. as a nation; it represents more a desire for the things that Americans have, a thrust toward material wealth that is independent of nationality. In differing contexts and dozens of languages, it may mean modernization, urbanization or even the adaptation of products or techniques invented or manufactured by Britons or Swedes.

The world is in the midst of the greatest technological advance in its history--and the U.S. has been in the vanguard of that advance. As Gertrude Stein observed, the U.S. is the world's oldest country because it was really the first to enter the 20th century. It was the first to develop electric signs, skyscrapers, the conveyer belt and the computer. It was first with traffic jams, modern central heating and indoor plumbing, first with the airplane and the telephone, first with a radio, automobile, refrigerator, and a TV and washing machine cheap enough for every workingman. Much of the world has reached out for these things, not necessarily because they are American but because they are the symbols of the economic and social advances of a new era.

"Amerika, du hast es besser [America, you have it better]," said Goethe 145 years ago, and the world today looks to the U.S. as the pinnacle of material prosperity. In seeking the creature comforts of the modern age, other nations consider it incidental that most of the goods can be obtained most cheaply and efficiently in ways and styles designed by the Yanks. Says Britain's leading Americanologist, Sir Denis Brogan: "What is called Americanization in the rest of the world is largely modern industrialization. America is the chief modern industrialized society, in all the things that means in the last third of the 20th century, from automation to urbanization to mass affluence." "No other country in the world," adds Italian Designer Emilio Pucci, "applies scientific discovery as fast as America does. America thus is leading a new way of life. It has caused a thirst for novelty in all fields, and this thirst is contagious."

The Fundamentals of Technology

Placed by history and circumstance in the vanguard of the technological revolution, the U.S. also found itself carrying the results of that revolution abroad through the accidents of history. It first displayed its wealth to the world when it was recognized as an international power in the wake of World War I. But it was not until after World War II that the U.S. really began to lead a worldwide march toward affluence. By then, it was abundantly equipped for the job. It had a wealth of natural resources, a scarcity of skilled labor that forced the pace of mechanization, and an immense domestic market that permitted cheap mass production, provided customers for almost any speculative scheme.

Because the requirements of modern technology are so vast, only the U.S., untouched among the large, powerful nations by the ravages of war and nurtured on a freewheeling capitalism, had the resources to lead the technological advance. By the very nature of the advance, other nations had to follow, adopting the techniques and products that had been developed. This fundamental fact of modern technology, as much as anything else, is what has galled Charles de Gaulle and spurred him to insist that France develop, for example, her own atomic force de frappe. The Common Market, too, is Europe's attempt to create a huge mass market like the U.S.'s own and a pool of resources capable of meeting the huge needs of technology. While pioneering the technological revolution, on the other hand, the U.S. was not a bit shy about using techniques developed elsewhere, from France's pasteurization to Austria's basic oxygen process for steel. The British invented the jet engine --but U.S. jets practically monopolize the world's long-range routes today. The U.S. opened its arms to European scientists, who gave it, among other things, The Bomb.

Much of the world got a good look at what the Americans had accomplished when they arrived as conquerors in 1945. To Asia, the Americans brought the Jeep, the candy bar, K rations, portable laundries, health units and toilet paper--but they also planted in Asians an awareness of and a desire for much more. To Europe, they brought $46 billion in aid, food and clothes and massive Marshall Plan reconstruction loans. The presence of hundreds of thousands of obviously prosperous, obviously confident American soldiers in Germany alone unconsciously created an image that was far more lasting and effective than the conscious efforts of the Nazi re-education process. Since the war, of course, wave upon wave of American tourists and students have further entrenched American attitudes and products in Europe, though in the doing they have sometimes marred the American image. And almost everywhere there have been U.S. businessmen eager to cash in on the aspirations of others to reach the American level of prosperity. In. fact, one major reason for the prevalence abroad of many things American is that U.S. business sees the world as a huge market and has consciously set out to conquer it with the American wealth of research and development, distribution and sales genius and powerful advertising.

Derivative Wares

It is little wonder, then, that many of the trappings of American life--and some of its altitudes--have spread around the globe. Still, Ho Chi Minh certainly does not smoke American cigarettes because they are American ("He didn't change to a French cigarette, did he?" crowed a State Department aide); like millions of others who have made U.S. cigarettes the most universally preferred, he smokes them simply because they are better than most of what is available. Coca-Cola is the universal symbol of Americanization, but it was the distribution, merchandising and advertising techniques of the American company--not the fact that the drink made one feel American or implied admiration for the U.S.--that made it so. It is hardly a triumph of culture that an American can get a dry martini on request practically anywhere in the world; it is just good business in a day when so many Americans travel.

"You always imitate people richer than you," says Paris Interior Decorator Slavik, who designed "Les Drugstores" in Paris. Slavik makes the point, though, that the imitator usually puts his own imprint on what he imitates; he did not design his stores to resemble American drugstores, but "we knew the name would attract, and we were right." Though American-made goods, from cake mixes to Mr. Clean, are now taken for granted in many parts of the world, many of the typically "American" wares are just as derivative as Les Drugstores. They are frequently not made either in the U.S. or by Americans, are often produced abroad even more efficiently and cheaply than in the U.S. European canned and packaged goods, for example, are nudging American merchandise off the shelves of Greek supermarkets, and European cars built with Detroit's mass-production methods compete well in world markets with U.S. autos. Even more important than the products that the U.S. has exported are the techniques, which have enabled businesses in many parts of the world, particularly in Europe and Japan, to operate more efficiently. The U.S. influence not only punched holes in the traditional autocratic ways of the old aristocratic hierarchies, but popularized such modern ideas as cost accounting, mass merchandising and advertising techniques, supermarkets and discount houses.

As the leading youth-centered culture, America has a special allure for the world's adolescents, even those who like to burn U.S.I.S. libraries on occasion. Teen-agers abroad have taken to such Americanisms as picnics, transistor radios, blue jeans and the frug, and some young Europeans hit the roads as beatniks, much as alienated young Americans did in the early '50s. The U.S. influence, in fact, is sometimes a disruptive one in families abroad, where the desire of youths to imitate their freer American counterparts may run smack up against an authoritarian family structure. When Free University of Berlin students recently staged a sit-in, they asked an American visitor: "Is this the way they did it in Berkeley?"

The American's thirst for novelty means, of course, that he also continues to borrow from abroad. The U.S. is a melting pot not only for races but for ideas as well, and many of the American customs and habits that travel abroad have already been influenced at home by other cultures. From the King James Bible to Scandinavian modern furniture to LSD, some of the best and worst of culture in the U.S. has been imported. With the rise of U.S. power and affluence, much American music, cinema, art, design, ballet and theater have begun to meet and marry in midocean with their European counterparts, forming a sort of Atlantic culture.

Avant-garde French moviemakers study Hollywood directors, who return the compliment. Basic rock 'n' roll, formed in the U.S., peaked in England with the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, who proceeded to influence U.S. music. The French invented the discotheque, but the discaire at New Jimmy's in Paris plays mostly American records. Italian coffeehouses proliferate in big U.S. cities, while the Italians wear Jantzen swimsuits on their beaches. Japanese transistor radios, TVs and tape recorders do as well in New York as James Baldwin's novels in Tokyo or Edward Albee's plays in Athens. Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns and Andy Warhol created a pop art derived from the Dadaists and Marcel Duchamp; their work, in turn, has influenced such pop artists in Britain as Joe Tilson and Peter Blake.

Just as American society has not basically changed under the pressure of influences from abroad, much of what passes for Americanization abroad occurs on a very superficial level. The most significant denominator of a culture is its rhythms, from the way the telephone jangles to the cycle of the seasons, and those rhythms are resistant to most change. Italian life is still essentially baroque beneath all the surface trappings. Japan, for all its material modernization, remains quintessential Japanese in its process of thinking, its personal relations, its social organization. Moreover, though technological change can and does profoundly affect societies, modernization is mostly confined to the big cities, particularly in Asia, Africa and Latin America, where the heartlands remain relatively untouched by progress. Even in the cities, there is a distinct time lag; some of the more jarring aspects of American culture continue to flourish abroad even while they are on the decline in the U.S., where the general level of sophistication is steadily rising.

Too Much or Not Enough?

The U.S. has also exported many nonmaterial things, including a new concept of woman's role that is slowly catching on abroad. But perhaps the most valuable commodity that the U.S. has given to the rest of the world is the basic American spirit that has made possible its affluence and style of living and that blends its material possessions into a unified pattern of existence. Bertrand Russell summed up the American outlook as: "Man is lord of the earth: what he wants, he can get by energy and intelligence." By its example, the U.S. showed the world that things could be done, that dreams could be embodied in action, that a better life could be achieved with effort and ingenuity. The American style reflects a questing spirit, a desire for change and investigation, an irreverence for authority that has lasted since 1776, a built-in dissatisfaction with the status quo. The American system is a constant seeking of practical means to an end. "Americans," says French Humorist Pierre Da-ninos, "adapted naturally to the modern environment. They seem to be born into this age, born to make long-distance calls, hop international flights or act in films."

Given the American combination of strength and spirit, it was historically inevitable that the U.S. should serve as a model to many nations in the world's postwar climb toward modernization and greater affluence. As models go in an imperfect world, it has been a good one. In that sense, the problem is not whether the world is too Americanized but whether it is Americanized enough: whether the many millions who have not yet been exposed to the material advantages of American society can be guided toward them without revolution and discord. Even if that happens, though, the world will never become a grade-A, U.S.-inspected, homogenized world. It is too full of diversity for that, and the U.S. is a powerful part of that diversity.

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