The American Ascendancy (Page 3)

The Sign of a Good Brand

If we retrieve the February 17, 1941, issue of Life, which carried Henry Luce's original essay, "The American Century," we find him saying that the consumptive paradise that had arisen in the twenties ("the abundant life," as Luce called it), should be available "for all mankind" once they wake up to "America's vision." This program, of course, should not march forward just with an overflow of consumer durables, but under the banner of American idealism: "It must be a sharing with all peoples of our Bill of Rights, our Declaration of Independence, our Constitution, our magnificent industrial products, our technical skills. It must be an internationalism of the people, by the people and for the people." Luce held out to underdeveloped peoples the chance to escape their problems by becoming American--an absurd proposition in 1941. But he put his finger on a truth--one that keeps people from all corners of the world immigrating to this country. Jean Baudrillard once wrote that the American flag itself was the "trademark of a good brand"; Henry Luce knew that in 1941.

Even in remote Tibet people seek consumer (or couch-potato) heaven: Take "Darchi," a middle-aged peasant who, as he harvested barley near his mud-brick village, told an American reporter that he didn't really care about independence from China: "I want to buy a television, and then I can sit back and drink barley beer and watch TV." Or as Luce put it, "Once we cease to distract ourselves with lifeless arguments about isolationism, we shall be amazed to discover that there is already an immense American internationalism. American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common." Baudrillard was closer to the truth when he wrote, "Whatever happens, and whatever one thinks of the arrogance of the dollar or the multinationals, it is this culture which, the world over, fascinates those very people who suffer most at its hands, and it does so through the deep, insane conviction that it has made all their dreams come true." If Henry Luce both understood and epitomized this "insane conviction," the world's peoples did not provide much evidence of a thirst for the American way in 1941 or, for that matter, during thirty years of anti-imperial wars after World War II. But they do today, from China to South Africa to Russia.

'Massive Fog Grips Europe;
Continent Isolated'

So read a London newspaper headline during the heyday of the empire on which the sun never set. England and Japan both occupy small islands, set just far enough away from the mainland to breed a solipsistic sense of ineffable superiority. But the American position in the world owes much to being the first hegemonic power to inhabit an immense land mass: a continent open at both ends to vast potential markets. The United States is the only industrial country with long Atlantic and Pacific coasts, making it simultaneously an Atlantic and a Pacific power; the historic dominance of Atlanticists (Henry Kissinger and Samuel Huntington are contemporary examples), gazing upon a Europe whose civilization gave birth to our own, averts our eyes from this fact. Indeed, the Continental Divide still makes a New Yorker uncomfortable in Los Angeles (and vice versa).

Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal signaled the direct involvement of the federal government in the industrial development of the far West. The New Deal was instrumental in building massive infrastructures (like the Grand Coulee Dam), in the management of Western lands and the immense water works necessary to till them (through the Soil Conservation Service and other means), and, under federal auspices and emergency conditions, in subsidizing heavy industries connected to the war effort. Southern California's rapidly emerging aircraft business was completely dependent on government contracts; military industries ran three shifts during the war, with airplanes accounting for 34 percent of all production; the population of Los Angeles increased by a third from 1940 to 1950. Washington also subsidized all kinds of social overhead in the area: the railroads, the highways, the airlines and the water needed for a vast commercialization and suburbanization.

If Los Angeles symbolized the prowess of America's West Coast at midcentury, at the end of it the symbolic city is Seattle. I lived in Seattle for ten years, beginning in 1977. Coming from New York, it struck me as an isolated and insulated backwater: an Omaha that happened to be situated on the Pacific Coast. The city fathers seemed unaware of the opportunities beckoning from across the great ocean. The city was just then emerging from the "Boeing bust" of the early seventies, when severe job cuts caused an even more severe recession; the joke was to ask the last person leaving Seattle to turn out the lights.

A decade later Microsoft had replaced Boeing as the flagship industry of Seattle, a world-class monopoly every bit as important to the American position in the world as John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil a century earlier. City fathers funded an enormous new port sprouting hundreds of container-ship cranes, helping to make of Seattle a major American exporting city, and nearly foamed at the mouth to deepen the burgeoning Pacific Rim trade. The state's Congressional delegation had become the leading pillar of free-trade legislation. Boeing had long backlogs of 747s on order--from China.

In other words, the advantage of a continental economy is that things can be falling apart in one region (the Rustbelt in the 1980s) and coming together in another (America's Pacific Rim). Today Los Angeles and Seattle are enormously dynamic, polyglot Pacific Rim cities of extraordinary multiethnic and multicultural diversity, wired-up centers of the revolution in communications, entertainment and Internet commerce.

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