What is Fluck talking about?

[tess marek]

Americanization, thus, cannot be viewed as a tacitly
engineered hidden cultural takeover but as
a process in which individualization is the driving
force. 

OK. 

This process is most advanced in the
US for a number of reasons. 

OK, but what are the reasons? Fluck doesn't say. 


The promise of a particular form of individualization
provides the explanation why American popular culture
finds so much resonance in other societies where it   
has taken hold almost without resistance (mostly
carried by a young generation trying to               
escape tradition). 


What is this particular form of individualism? 


Cultural Americanization is thus part of a modernizing
process. Americanization is not a form
of cultural imperialism, but the embodiment of
modernity's promise of painless self-realization
for each individual, in contrast to the demands made
by more traditional concepts of emancipation. 

Now were getting some clues, but this is not quite
right. Is it? Is is a promise of modernity? Painless
as opposed to more traditional concepts of
emancipation? 
Painless? Relatively painless? NO! Not even for the
USA is it painless. For America, inho, it far more
painful than in Europe and some parts of Asia and
Africa. 


Globalization, which often appears as the triumph of
cultural standardization, in
reality undermines standardization. No single national
culture is the driving force but, instead,
globalization is powered by a restless individualism
drawing on a growing store of mass symbols.
So: we are not becoming Americanized. We
``Americanize'' ourselves. 

This argument is nonsense. 

A restless individualism? What the hell is that? 

Why is it less painful for Europeans to "Americanize"
than it is for Americans (South and Central)? 

First, American individualism is a European concept.
The US took the concept from Europe. In Europe it was
selfish idea, it was anarchy, bad shit, but in the US
it became freedom, liberty, self-determination, in
other words, "The American Way." Again, see "The Dying
Animal" on the Puritans and Wyatt. US Republicanism
was quite different than Republicanism elsewhere. And
that includes most of America. The Democratic forces
in the US emphasized individual rights, not
collectivism, social unity, sovereignty in the State.
All US institutions came to express, to embody,
individualism. 
American Philosophy (Pragmatism) and Ameerican
religions are based on this concept. This is the land
where the poor and so many criminals and outcasts
became men. Free men. Fearless of the elite and the
family attorney,  Melville's Castaways, Pynchon
Preterit, came to work and measure sucess and every
institution of power, every thing in fact--poetry,
virtue, frienship, family--by how well it served the
advancement of  the individual. By the 19th century,
it was impossible to advance any other course. 
And she has never looked back. 

Ah, the nihilists, the chicken littles. America is in
decline. 

Yeah, right. That's what Tocqueville said. America was
over confidence in her own strength. Some myths last a
long time. American individualism is only Hercules in
his crib. 




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