Is American Culture a Harmless Invasion - Essay Example

Is American Culture a Harmless Invasion According to a report on National Public Radio on Tuesday, November 4, 2008 France has now become the most successful European market for McDonald's; a place where a Big Mac costs the equivalent of $11. The fact that American fast food culture has successfully permeated a country that is world famous for its haute cuisine says much about the extent to which the culture of the United States has become a global invasion. American troops may have been fighting against a country without an army for five years in Iraq to bring the culture of democracy to it, but the real victory has been the corporate invasion that has even managed to witness a company that has long used the advertising slogan related to how many hamburgers it has sold establish a footing in India, a country where the natural resource that provides beef is considered sacred.

American culture is not a harmless invasion because it is even more successful actual battlegrounds attempting to enforce democracy upon foreign nations that are perhaps not quite ready to make that leap. Every town in American already looks like alike with its Wal-Marts, Burger Kings, Home Depots and Rave Motion Picture Theaters standing proudly as beacons of homogeneity in part because they displace the specific cultural touchstones of home-owned business. American culture is constructed upon a solid foundation of destroying the specific generational individualities of towns, cities and regions.

Monoculture is the real description of American culture because it is based upon a bland sameness in which every street in a town resembles every street in any other town. Globalizing America's monoculture threatens to do the same, and is there really anyone who wants to travel to London or Paris or Tokyo or Sydney and not be able to distinguish between those towns and Peoria or Las Cruces or Pittsburgh The spread of American culture is not a harmless invasion because the intent is clearly to turn the rest of the world into a simulacrum of America, which has already lost the very distinguishing features that set it apart from the rest of the world.