Keeping Other Cultural Ties Alive

I will write today about keeping connected to cultural roots, so to speak. This is something that I think too many Americans, in particular, have lost sight of, since the focus in the United States always seemed to be about acclimating in order to better and more efficiently join what came to be known as the “melting pot”. It might have been that, but it came at a high cost, as well. People call themselves all different nationalities here (I'm Irish or British or German or Dutch or Italian or Greek or whatever the case may be) when they are really referring to their distant family background. Most of these people are far, far removed from these “nationalities” of theirs, and many of them (far too many), have no real interest in exploring these backgrounds any more than mere mentioning of the nationality. Almost as if, to do so would imply they were somehow less American, which is ridiculous. It also has contributed to a national mindset of arrogance and an inability to see beyond the American borders, to see that there actually is an entire world out there!

For me, having lived most of my life in the United States, and as such struggling to keep alive the other culture of which my life is a part, that being French, it can be a real challenge. First of all, there seems to be, at least on some level, some real hostilities between the two, and the responsibility is on both of them. Just some mutual disaffection, and on some levels, there are people in both societies that seem to want to maintain this degree of antagonism and suspicion towards the other. That was always a challenge, and in both countries.

Similarly, living in the United States, which remains the world's leading superpower (for now, although I would posit that China, and even arguably the European Community, might be seriously challenging America's traditional dominance in this role), means adapting to a certain measure of cultural uniformity – more so than in France (or any other western European country that I am aware of). There are reasons for this. The United States is a very strong nation, and has been, historically, for a long time. It is geographically, and thus also culturally, far away from Europe and other powerful nations (such as China and Japan). France, which used to be the most powerful “superpower”, if you will, of it's time, always had strong neighbors to keep it in check, bordering as it did Germany, Italy, Spain, and being very close to the United kingdom, it's main rival over the course of the centuries. So, it never had the unparalleled lack of challenges that the United States did. China is the rising superpower, and it was invaded by the Mongols, borders India, Russia, Korea, and Vietnam, and is relatively close to Japan, as well, which it got invaded by only a few decades ago. Russia, which not long ago dominated the Soviet Union, the world's other superpower, had a history of being invaded and kept in check, if you will, by other countries close to it's border. Why, in the twentieth century alone, Russia was attacked by both Japan and Germany, and had armed scuffles along it's border with China. It felt so threatened after the German invasion, that it built a buffer zone of satellite states, known as the “eastern Bloc”, or the countries of the “Warsaw Pact”, the other side of the Iron Curtain, during the Cold War that followed the Second World War.

The United States? By contrast, it has relatively weak neighbors. There were wars, but the United States tended to be more the aggressors. They fought a war on largely fabricated grounds against Mexico, and got a huge chunk of the present day territory of the United States as a result, in the southwest. Similarly, there were wars and battles with Canada, and the United States established their border to the north largely on the threat of war. If you go up to Quebec City, it is the only walled city in North America, but these walls were built by the British, who destroyed the original walls built by the French. They did so not to guard against the French, who no longer had a real presence on the North American continent, but rather to keep the Americans in check. Invasion was a real threat, they felt, too. After all, Americans had already tried to invade Quebec City during the American Revolution, albeit unsuccessfully, when Montgomery was killed, and Benedict Arnold retreated in defeat. Prior to that, Montreal was outright occupied by Americans. There was also the War of 1812, and Americans invaded certain parts of Canada again. So, from a British perspective, it was necessary to do what they felt they had to to protect little Canada (in terms of population, anyway) from it's bigger, stronger neighbor to the south.

Of course, it is not all about strong military or economic rivals near one's borders, although the lack of a strong power nearby geographically to keep America in check, so to speak, certainly did not hurt it's growth and ultimate rise to superpower status. It is also about cultural strength, and again, America went about a course that was far different, and more geared towards exporting it's culture, than anything any neighbors were able to muster, and perhaps even, arguably, anyone anywhere in the rest of the world could muster. With it's ability, good or bad, to scrap it's historical ties and focus on changes, particularly in regards to technology, the United States was able to export it's culture with increased persistence over time. By the time that the Second World War was over, and most of the other powers were either on their knees or still largely recovering from the toll that such a monumental war had taken on them, the United States stood virtually alone and unchallenged as a burgeoning, growing world power, and not just militarily or politically. American movies, which had already been perhaps the most popular, became the unchallenged leader worldwide, and the trend towards the massive exporting of American movies and music had begun. American cars were more popular at the time, as well. While that in particular has died away, it has been replaced with many other American products that regularly find themselves on foreign markets, especially in neighboring countries, and in Europe, where there are more McDonald's per block in Paris than there are in Manhattan, and where you can find everyday products like Coke and Mars bars and the same major toys that Americans children play with. American culture, for better or for worse, dominated, and the impact of this domination is still very largely in effect to the present day.

So Americans took pride in this, and they began to assume that their was just something about their culture that was inherently superior. I would suggest that the roots of the American malaise in recent decades actually was a product of this arrogance, which also was growing with each decade of American dominance. After all, historically speaking, every empire has essentially imploded and lost it's privileged position by becoming overly inward looking. I do not see how the American example is any different in this regard, and the comparisons to the decadence of the ancient Roman Empire are not entirely misplaced. Indeed, I would even argue that Americans have allowed themselves, collectively, to indulge in certain measures of arrogance, particularly regarding their perceptions of America's dominance and privileged position the world over, and that this arrogance has been the green light that allowed further arrogance to blossom and thrive, as it has today. I am speaking, particularly, of the arrogance of corporate America and of the greed and unprecedented corruption that is all around us, working to undermine everything great that America has brought to the world. Not that everything America brought to the world was necessarily great, mind you. But there were some great things, and yet, even these, Americans have largely undermined, and are still undermining, by their stubborn refusal to let go of the arrogance of being “Number 1”. For example, if they were to give up the burden of being that they placed upon themselves of being the world's policeman, an approach and attitude towards the rest of the world that many, many people the world over are less than thrilled with, it would allow the United States to spend much, much less on imposing their presence throughout the world. Americans have military bases on almost every continent, many times over. This costs a lot of money, and I did not even mention the wars, of which their have been quite a few, with some prospective wars still lingering. Americans like a strong defense, which has been traditionally a sound argument, but can such vast sums of money readily given to the military industrial complex each year really strictly be for “defense”? I was personally opposed to the Iraq war, and I remember answering someone's claim that Saddam had a massive arsenal and had built it up, obviously with the intent to use it by saying the same was obviously true of the United States, which was aggressively pining for war at the time, after all. He was angry with the response, but he did not exactly refute it, either. He gave some typical answers about American responsibilities and protecting the world (as opposed to aggressively promoting it's own self-interest, like any empire does), but those could not actually count as real refutations, right?

Nowhere in the industrialized world is this more important to take a step back from what is popularly accepted, it seems, than right here in the United States. It is all too easy to fall into the trap of cultural uniformity, which tends to interpret patriotism with a xenophobic, “America First” attitude, where all other countries should be so grateful fr America's presence as a gift to the world, that they should swallow any differences that they have, and accept American paternalism and dominance, politically, culturally, and militarily. So long as such an attitude persists, we will likely see more wars like Iraq and Afghanistan, which have hardly illustrated American dominance.

Anyway, all this to say that it is important to keep other cultural ties alive, at least to the extent possible, in this regard. To have an open mind to other ways of seeing things and doing things, to a different language – literally. To a different history, a different experience, a different, if even diminished, world view.

So, I am an American, but I am French as well. There are aspects of being American and French to be proud of, as well as ashamed of. After all, everyone pretty much has skeletons in their closet, right?

I am glad to have kept my cultural ties alive to the extent possible, and am trying to do so more over time than ever before. At a moment when, perhaps predictably or typically, Americans are grasping at every illusion of superiority that they can as their dominance seems to be slipping away before their very eyes, it is more important than ever to be able to bridge that illusion with the new reality of a world that relies less and less on the cultural ascendance of some rising or already established superpower, like China or the United States, but rather to take a m,ore balanced, to say nothing of realistic, perspective of our place I the world, with a particular eye as to our limitations. In this day and age, as a global citizen, perhaps there is nothing more important than this.