But I have a different take on globalization, one perhaps not considered by the perpetrators of North America's gift of corporate prowess to the world.
Here's the setting: a little kid in San Leandro, California, which was at the time a geographically separate town and a suburb of Oakland (if you can imagine a town being the suburb of so dullard a place as Oakland). Then, a teenager in the hills of Oakland itself. There, all the houses harbored quiet. Gardens were beautiful, but too organized. Kids grew up, went to college and became like their parents. There was an accepted assumption among the people there that there was no reason to go anywhere else.
It was cold. A bit like East Germany without the "stasi". All my friends' parents and my parents' friends were business people of one sort or another. What I didn't understand then was that business is so warlike an undertaking. But I assume now that the quiet, church-going, un-adventuresome people among whom I grew up were also grasping, difficult pursuers of corporate success.
None of us realized, living in such a place, that large governmental forces were moving toward the export of these very values to the rest of the world. Nowadays, when globalization really means the Americanization of everything, we don't remember how isolated we were when Vietnam was at the top of the news every night. But it was during that time that the stage was set for what's happening now, and the effort hardly blinked when such events as the defeat in Vietnam or, just now, the defeat in Iraq placed minor barriers in the way. Like Vietnam, Iraq will come back and be globalized with the rest.
Luckily I was able to break free early from Oakland and to travel, and so, a few years ago, I began The Latinization of Terence Clarke.
Central and South America had stood as mysteries to me before this process began. I knew there were jungle, mountains and deserts in those places. My father loved tamales. I knew — because I'd been taught it in the fourth grade — about General Santa Ana and his ruthless, unjustified attack upon the virtuous, freedom-loving Alamo. I'd seen old cowboy movies on TV with Pedro Armendáriz in them. I had read in the fifth grade or so about Simon Bolivar and the South American revolution against evil Spain. I even came to know some Mexican-American kids later on because there were a couple of them at my high school. They weren't much like me. They were cool.
Article comments
1 - bliffle
Excellent article!