Where has America gone? Where are her priorities? What is important to her people? Where does she spend her resources? Who is her GOD?
One word -- ENTERTAINMENT -- and that at the expense of the Creator Himself.
Washington Post - 11/01/98
America's biggest export is no longer the fruit of its fields or the output of its factories, but the mass-produced products of its
popular culture – movies, TV programs, music, books and computer software.
Entertainment around the world is dominated by American-made products. It's "The Young and the Restless" in New Delhi, Garth
Brooks blaring from a Dublin apartment, or the eager line of people waiting outside a Nairobi movie theater to see "As Good As It
Gets." It's Bart Simpson in Seoul, Madonna in Sao Paulo, "Dr. Quinn, Medicine Woman" on Warsaw TV.
International sales of software and entertainment products totaled $60.2 billion in 1996, more than any other U.S. industry,
according to Commerce Department data and industry figures. Since 1991, when the collapse of the Soviet Union opened new
markets around the world to the United States, total exports of intellectual property from the United States have risen nearly 94
percent in dollar terms, these statistics indicate. And that does not include the untold billions of dollars in revenue lost each year to
illegal copying.
While intellectuals debate the benefits and disadvantages of this dominance, the penetration of U.S. culture in a post-Cold War
world in which scores of countries have abandoned state controls for policies of free trade and free markets is beyond dispute.
Sociologist Todd Gitlin calls American popular culture "the latest in a long succession of bidders for global unification. It succeeds
the Latin imposed by the Roman Empire and the Catholic Church, and Marxist Leninism" imposed by Communist governments.
Tom Freston, president of MTV, the globe-straddling music network, sees it another way. "Today's young people have passports to
two different worlds – to their own culture and to ours," he said.
washingtonpost.com |
