Adieu la Culture Americaine

I first observed the phenomenon over the summer as I walked through the streets of Paris. I was strolling past a cafe, when I heard the words, "C'est cool," being muttered from afar. I stopped, turned my head and followed the mutterings until I found their source. My eyes came to rest on a group of teenagers, none of them more than 16 years old. They were smoking cigarettes and talking.

I was able to pick out bits and pieces of their conversation. And although I couldn't really put enough of the bits and pieces together to know what they were saying (which really depressed me because I was in France and there were people out there including me who believed that I knew enough French to speak and understand it), I did catch a couple of English words like "fast food" and "walkman."

Being the very friendly person I am, I walked over to chat. I knew that I too, could intersperse a foreign language with my own and think it was "cool." As I approached them, I noticed that one of them was wearing a "Jurassic Park" t-shirt, another was wearing a Chicago Bulls cap and a third was wearing a pair of New York Yankees sweatpants.

I stopped and pondered. Was I in France? Why were the French wearing all this American stuff while I was wearing a beret? Why were they speaking more English than I hear in my house in America?

The spread of "Americanisms" in France--evidenced through the use of our words, phrases and clothes--is now the subject of a heated debate in that country. What some describe as an appreciation of an intriguing and different tradition, others call the invasion of a detested and low-brow culture. The controversy has French teenagers exploring what's hip and what's not on the other side of the Atlantic Ocean, while their parents are desperate to preserve the nation's own cultural identity.

Conservative French pin the blame for the massive American invasion on the French media, which seeks to appeal to a younger audience by using bits of the English language and American culture. Some hardliners want the French government to bring this new fad to a halt before American and French culture become so intertwined that they can no longer be told apart.

Jacques Toubon, a well-known advocate for the preservation of French culture, recently helped persuade the French government to bar the use of foreign words or cultural references in any written, audio or visual advertisements shown in France.

Many conservative French see the Toubon Law as just the first of more barriers to the infiltration of France by foreign culture.

Yet what these French seek to prevent, others call a dream come true--the emergence of a universal culture. Should we really by trying to stop this phenomenon or should we be rolling out the red carpet and celebrating its arrival? Or does what is happening in France indicate the ugly truth that a universal culture can never exist because each country will fight to preserve its own?

The debate in France indicates how ridiculous the idea of a universal culture is. Not only is it unrealistic to believe that in the future there could be one culture with which the whole world would be content, but a universal culture would also rob countries of their individual identities.

Will it really be possible to make a melting pot of the world and still preserve each religion, language and custom, and appreciate them to the extent we would if the world were composed of individually strong cultures? The answer is an emphatic "No."

It's easy to argue that the French hate everything American. But this is patently untrue. The French are intimidated and threatened by American culture. And it is this fear of being dominated--of having a foreign culture overtake their own--that pushes many French to appeal to the government as the only institution that can eliminate the source of their fear.

The truth is that the French admire our culture in much the same way we admire theirs. But admiration is not enough to make any country want to replace its culture with another, or even with a mix of various cultures.

As I walked away from the group of teenagers, I realized that they were very similar to me and to other American teenagers. I say "bonjour" and "au revoir" once in a while. I wear a beret occasionally and drink French wine because I think these things are pretty cool. And while I don't have a problem using these bits and pieces of the French culture in my everyday life, I would have a problem giving up my language, religion or dress for the sake of universality.

This, then, is the lesson of the French experience: there will never be a universal culture, because no country will ever want to give up its own.