American Soft Power Becomes Extra Crispy
Published June 14, 2006
I was reading on Blogcritics about KFC: KFC Raises Eyebrows, Cholesterol With New Offering, writes Pete Blackwell. He writes, amusingly, "It's tough...out there in fast food land." Perhaps the pseudo-chicken is crispy. But is it the American soft power that was once made of the Statue of Liberty, the American Dream, Levis, and the vision of success in business?
American soft power that once made the world yearn to come to America and to emulate its ideals has become crispy and sometimes rancid. Levis are no longer banned in Russia and the rest of the world has knocked them off or made designer versions. Mexico has tequila and Mayan ruins. Italy offers style. Our insistent powers of attraction and of the American dream have soured into Blackhawk helicopters and smart bombs, Guantanamo, and Alcatraz.
The new soft power of the most powerful nation on Earth is fast food, junk food, sweet drinks, convenience foods, and abominable movies of sex, violence, superficiality and money-worship. In the world of junk food, Competition is fierce and marketing budgets are immense. In an attempt to get a leg up, fast food outlets are forced to continually update their menus with new, or apparently new, items.
Now come the new huge servings for the newly huge Americans:
Hardees has...their new gigantic hamburgers and Burger King...their Enormous Omelet Sandwich. Talk about truth in advertising: the latter fare, which consists of bacon, sausage, cheese and eggs on a bun, weighs in at 730 calories, 47 grams of fat (including 87% of the daily allotment of saturated fat) nearly 2,000 mg of sodium and 138% of the RDA for cholesterol.(For me this is a day's worth of salt, a week's worth of cholesterol and 1.5 days of fat.) This is America. It has become a symbol, an icon of the American Dream with gas-guzzlers, smart bombs, border walls, and surly security people. America is rewriting itself. It is finding new types of "soft power" with which to influence the world.
(Photo © Beringer-Dratch. New Orleans before the deluge.)
This is America's legacy to the world that once looked to the Liberty Bell, Elvis Presley, Babe Ruth, and Hollywood. Our soft power base has gone from the Dream to breast-like golden arches, the kid on a Dominos motorbike, and a president spying on all his own citizens.
Soft Power is, as Joseph Nye, Jr, the originator of the term, writes:
...the ability to get what you want by attracting and persuading others to adopt your goals. It differs from hard power, the ability to use the carrots and sticks of economic and military might to make others follow your will. Both hard and soft power are important in the war on terrorism, but attraction is much cheaper than coercion, and an asset that needs to be nourished.What can the government do? Soft power grows out of both U.S. culture and U.S. policies. From Hollywood to higher education, civil society does far more to present the United States to other peoples than the government does. Hollywood often portrays consumerism, sex and violence, but it also promotes values of individualism, upward mobility and freedom (including for women). These values make America attractive to many people overseas, but some fundamentalists see them as a threat.
- American Soft Power Becomes Extra Crispy
- Published: June 14, 2006
- Type: Opinion
- Section: Tastes
- Filed Under: Politics: International, Culture: Society, Culture: History, Tastes: Food and Drink, Sci/Tech: Health/Fitness
- Writer: Howard Dratch
- Howard Dratch's BC Writer page
- Howard Dratch's personal site
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Comments on this articleComments
Or they might point out that 17,000 random people in 15 countries don't know any more about foreign affairs or the war in Iraq than 17,000 Americans.
Dave
whether they know more or not is NOT the Issue here...
what is the Issue revolves around and emanates form the impressions and perceptions that those 17,000 people have...and by pollster style extrapolation, what they represent in the larger population...
and tat raises significant points and questions about how the US is perceived by other parts of the world...
well put in this article that those perception are a major factor in the olde quandry about "hearts and minds"
we are far better served, as a nation, by paying attention to such, and placing the topic in the public discourse for analysis and discussion than we are by tossing it aside in favor of a quip or curt dismissal
"the greatest Warrior is he who wins without ever having to fight" Sun Tzu
an axiom which shows that such "soft power" was understood at least 5000 years ago...even if it appears to be forgotten today in favor of "you're either with us or against us" unilateralism that spawns such idiocy as "bring it on"
something to do with that old cliche about history and repeating itself...
your mileage may vary
Excelsior?
Gonzo, reality itself and things like objective criteria of right and wrong are not capable of being redefined by public opinion no matter how many people are polled or where those people live.
Dave
i must Question whether you are being deliberately obtuse here..
what is in question as the Issue is how perception of our Nation among the rest of the world is part and parcel of both the problem and solution when it comes to many foreign affairs conflicts...
example: the Fall of the Iron curtain - yes hard power was utilized as a deterrent as was fiscal policy on many fronts...but the insidious infiltration of American culture into eastern europe and Russia also played a large role in the popular support of Yeltsin, who was instrumental in the tranmorgification of the old USSR into what we have today
similar examples can be easily extrapolated when it comes to the current changes in China and elsewhere...
as i said, "hearts and minds"...these are not often swayed by bombs and guns, bu rather on eperson at a time...a soldier showing kindness to a child can sway a whole village...a movie picked up on a satellite dish can cause questions about "the Great Satan" as someone was dogmatically instructed about it when that film demonstrates values beyond the two dimensional propaganda otherwise being the ONLY information about the "other"
on and on...note the Quote form Sun Tzu i used earlier, and think about it a second...the point is really easy to see...but it does take a moment of empathy at least imagining yourself in another pair of shoes
Excelsior?
Dave Nalle: reality itself and things like objective criteria of right and wrong are not capable of being redefined by public opinion no matter how many people are polled or where those people live.
So what? None of us have direct contact with this alleged reality, so our actions are always going to be the result of what we subjectively think reality is. And that is capable of redefinition.
The consensus view now is that, in reality, that Brazilian guy in London wasn't a suicide bomber; but the police who shot him in the head thought he was at the time. Thus, somebody's perception of reality seems to have had a far greater influence on his future than what he might rightly have considered objective reality.
Will objective reality eventually impose itself on us, constraining our goals and perceptions to conform to what is really possible, to what is really right? Maybe. But surely you would look around here and agree that for a lot of people, if not all of us, it might not happen within the time frame of our decision-making processes.
So really, how much faith do you put in this objective reality? Would you stake your life on its ability to overcome peoples' subjective reality? Because that seems like an unrealistic expectation to me.
Dave, in general the people of just about any country (certainly in Europe - we may have to exclude truly isolated, strongly tribal Pacific Island states) know more about their neighbours than Americans. Demonstrated time and again in surveys and practice.
Most of us have borders, neighbours; we meet them, we visit their countries. Most of us have passports. They visit ours. They come to live in ours - legally and illegally. We work with them. We play football with them.
I remember Chuck Heston's mouth moving silently when he was asked to name Iraq's neighbours - a valid question, since he had just asked for it to be bombed off the map. Of course, he couldn't.
PS my first draft said "But hey, I'm Dave and the boys will line up to..."
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And:
But hey, I'm plenty of pundits and bc'ers will line up to tell us those furrners are all confused, misinformed, stupid, leftists, hate Americans, hate God etc etc