Chez MacDo (cc photo by _gene_)
The other day, The Weekly Standard’s Michael Goldfarb wrote:
In the course of Donald Morrison’s review of Au Revoir to All That by Michael Steinberger, we learn that McDonald’s is the largest private employer in all of France, which is sort of like being the largest provider of health insurance in North Korea, but nonetheless, it feels like a major triumph for American culture and cuisine. I once ate at the McDonald’s right next to the Arc de Triomphe. My quarter pounder tasted like hegemony.
It’s worth pointing out that this is not hegemony at all, but rather the dread soft power. When I was in Finland, I saw an episode of Medium dubbed into Swedish on television. There was a Starbucks near the hotel I stayed at in Geneva. I’ve shown you my photo of Dunkin Coffee in Barcelona before. I’m told that an American-style Santa Claus is popular in Japan. They play basketball in China and baseball in Colombia. And of course Microsoft Office and iPods are ubiquitous wherever you have people rich enough to own modern information technology.
This is all good stuff. Just as it’s good that you can get sushi in any major world city, that Ikea has brought Scandinavian design concepts to a mass market, that Belgian beers are now widely available in the U.S., that there’s now a DC branch of a South African spicy chicken chain, and all the rest.
But the point is that that kind of thing is the real strength of the United States of America. Our culture, our technology, and our ideas—things that like sushi and the klippan sofa are good enough on their own terms to be appealing to others without resort to coercion and domination.
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