From: newt@dcs.glasgow.ac.uk (Michael Steven Newton)
Newsgroups: soc.culture.celtic
Subject: Re: My Ugly American post for the year....
Date: 2 Oct 92 09:09:00 GMT
Organization: Glasgow University Computing Science Dept.

mmh@cs.qmw.ac.uk (Matthew Huntbach) writes:

>OK then - do you know what is destroying your Celtic heritage?
>The answer is the Americanisation of European culture. Go to
>the remotest Irish, Scottish or Welsh village, and what will
>you find? American films on TV, kids who know more about
>American cartoon characters than their own myths and legends,
>kids who demand American junk food and reject their own
>traditional recipes, kids who wear American baseball caps and
>tee-shirts with the names of American sports teams, people who
>have forgotten their own language because America has made
>English the dominant language of the world, people who live and
>dream America, for whom America is more real than their own
>heritage. And all you can do is say that those of us who would
>like to protect a little bit of this heritage, who want to keep
>it alive, who don't want to see it swamped by world
>Americanisation are "snobs" who "haven't gotten over the
>revolution".

  Thanks, Matthew, for presenting my sentiments with so much conviction.
  As someone who was born an American, my shame and anger with my mother
  nation never abates.

  And of course, the fact that it is America is somewhat immaterial.  Maybe
  Japan will occupy this position in 50 years, and we'll all have to
  learn Japanese (although at the rate they're adopting American culture
  they'll be more American than Californians are).

  The point is that *any* large centralized force with a huge amount of
  wealth and power over the world, which broadcasts media reeking with
  its own dogma and cultural values, is going to have a devastating effect
  on native cultures everywhere, stamping them out like so many little
  matches.  Look around the world right now, and see how little groups of
  people are sometimes taking arms to protect what little they have left
  of their language and culture: Basque rebels, Welsh activists, 
  Lithuanians, American Indians, Quebec separatists, etc etc.

  How can these little groups of people, lacking the support and
  understanding of the main-stream, hope to win?  They are always pictured
  as troublemakers and radicals.  The people who are always asking for
  tolerance and peace are those who want them to abandon what makes them
  different and individual.

  How can these groups of people hope to offer their children anything as
  glamorous and glittering as American TV shows and bikini clad women in
  Florida?  Why else would Coke be so expensive and yet popular all over
  the world (or MacDonalds for that matter!)?  Why else would people spend
  a month's wages to see a Michael Jackson concert, when they can hardly
  afford to buy bread?

  It's not that America in specific is evil to me, it's any large
  centralization of power and wealth which impinges upon smaller, more
  gentle cultures.  This is a very underpinning of early American thought
  (Jefferson, et al) which seems to have been forgotten and abandoned in
  the search for bigger, better and richer.

  The fact that most Americans are so blind, and even arrogant, about their
  inherent "superiority" and ability to stamp out the cultural diversity
  in the world gives me very little love for them.

  -- mn