Jihad vs. McWorld (55 page)

13.
Ibid., p. 4.

14.
Ibid., pp. 21-22. The German firm Bertelsmann launched a $100 million joint venture with America Online in 1995.

15.
Cited by Bernard Weinraub, “A Hollywood Recipe: Vision, Wealth, Ego,”
The New York Times
, October 16, 1994, p. A 1.

16.
Cited in M. Meyer and N. Hass, “Simon Says, ‘Out!’, Viacom Ousts Simon & Schuster’s CEO,”
Newsweek
, June 27, 1994, pp. 42-44.

17.
Sarah Lyall, “The Media Business: Paramount Publishing to Cut Jobs and Books,”
The New York Times
, January 24, 1994, p. D 8.

18.
Bagdikian,
Media Monopoly
, p. 19.

19.
Ibid.

20.
Paramount did so well selling
Dancing with Wolves
through McDonald’s that it did the same with
The Addams Family
and the
Wayne’s World
series as well as
Ghost
and
Charlotte’s Web
. McDonald’s as a film outlet is a natural expression of its status as theme park. It’s a two-way relationship: Amblin Entertainment sold commercial rights for
Jurassic Park
products to over one
hundred licensees including McDonald’s. Bernard Weinraub, “Selling Jurassic Park,”
The New York Times
, June 14, 1993, pp. C 11, 16. Movie critic Stuart Klawans notes the irony of the film itself, which features its own theme park and theme park store with Jurassic Park tie-in items identical to those being sold in the real world. Which world then is real? See Stuart Klawans, “Films,”
The Nation
, July 19, 1993, p. 115–116.

21.
1992
Report to Shareholders
, McDonald’s Corporation, Oak Brook, Illinois. McDonald’s 1992 U.S. sales were $13.2 billion; outside the United States it earned another $8.6 billion for a total of nearly $22 billion.

22.
Its stock has more than doubled since 1991 and it projects earnings of nearly $9 billion in 1995, up from $7.1 million in 1992.
USA Today
, June 2, 1994, p. 3B.

23.
Andrew E. Serwer, “McDonald’s Conquers the World,”
Fortune
, October 17, 1994, p. 104.

24.
From the McDonald’s Annual Report, 1992; ellipses in original.

25.
The soft drink industry understands this as well as anyone: “Coke Light is trying to extend the American cultural model in its international markets,” says Tom Pirko, a New York management consultant. “They’re saying refreshment is a lifestyle thing and there may be kind of a reverse chic in this approach.” Daniel Tilles, “Coke Light Gears Up for a Hard Sell,”
The International Herald Tribune
, May 18, 1994. Randal W. Donaldson, an Atlanta Coca-Cola spokesman supporting the nationwide move to bring fast foods and soft beverages into schools, states bluntly: “Our strategy is ubiquity. We want to put soft drinks within arm’s reach of desire.” Robert Pear, “Senator, Promoting Student Nutrition, Battles Coca-Cola,”
The New York Times
, April 26, 1994, p. A 20.

26.
Prince Consort Albert, May I, 1851, inaugural address, cited by Michael Sorkin,
Variations on a Theme Park
(New York: Noonday Press, 1992), p. 209.

27.
Margaret Crawford, “The World in a Shopping Mall,” in Sorkin,
Variations
, p. 4.

28.
Ibid., p. 14.

29.
As malls find their way to Eastern Europe and elsewhere, local investors insist with a mixture of self-interest and naïveté that what they are investing in is “American conditions without the American mentality.”
The Week in Germany
, German Information Service, October 8, 1993, p. 5. The problem is, the conditions
are
the mentality. These developments have led a group of politicians, writers, artists, clergymen, and professors to form a “Committee for Fairness” that, according to its founding statement, opposes “the destruction of our industry and agriculture, mass unemployment, unbearable rent increases, unfairly low wages, the closing of social, scientific, cultural and athletic organizations, the selling of what was once ‘peoples property,’ rejection of our right to occupy apartments, houses and land and demoralization of people in the East, especially women, [that] have destroyed many hopes that were raised by German unification.” Stephen Kinzer, “Group Is Formed to Defend East German Interests,”
The New York Times
, July 12, 1992, p. A 1.

30.
Cited and brilliantly analyzed in Edward W. Soja’s “Inside Exopolis: Scenes from Orange County,” in Sorkin,
Variations
, p. 94.

31.
Linda Killian of the Renaissance Capital Corporation, quoted in Ann Imse, “Hang on for the Ride of Your Life,”
The New York Times
, December 12, 1993, p. F 6.

32.
William Booth, “Wayne’s World,”
The Washington Post
, National Weekly Edition, August 29-September 4, 1994.

33.
From an article in
Der Spiegel
, summarized in
The Week in Germany
, German Information Center, November 5, 1993.

34.
Coldwarland has already come to pass, according to a peculiar and droll story that came out of Russia at the end of 1993. Russian aerospace entrepreneurs, working with American counterparts, leapt out ahead of the Germans by putting into practice an idea even the inventors of Ossi Park might have found far-fetched. MIGS Etc., Inc. of Sarasota, Florida, ran ads in major print media with the offer: “Fly a MIG-29 at Mach 2.5 in Moscow … You Need Not Be a Pilot”! The company promotes what it might profitably advertise as Evil Empire nostalgia rides in MIG-29 fighter planes and T-80 tanks for prices approaching $100,000 (for a two-MIG dogfight). The
New York Times
not only ran the ads but published a tourism piece by someone who took a ride and editorialized on the concept, musing about whether Lenin, Stalin, John le Carré, and Tom Clancy must not be somewhere “shaking their heads in collective amazement.” “Your Very Own Cold War,”
The New York Times
, October 25, 1993, p. A 18.

35.
Cited by Michael Sorkin, “See You in Disneyland,” in his
Variations
, p. 206.

36.
The Disney Annual Report, 1992, p. 14.

37.
Ibid., p. 8.

38.
In Florida, President Clinton delivers stirring words written by lyricist Tim Rice, the librettist for
Jesus Christ Superstar
and the Disney films
Aladdin
and
Beauty and the Beast
, the latter now a musical playing at Disney’s Broadway theater in New York. Rice’s script has Clinton propose that national happiness “still evolves from liberty, from property.” See Jon Wiener’s understandably cynical account in “Disneyworld Imagineers a President,”
The Nation
, November 22, 1993, p. 620.

39.
The description is Michael Wines’s in “Yes, Virginia, the Past Can Be Plasticized,”
The New York Times
, November 28, 1993, p. E 4. Wines’s piece is less skeptical than his title, however; he cites James McPherson (Princeton University’s civil war historian and Pulitzer Prize winner and avowed preservationist) as having “mixed feelings” and notes that places like Williamsburg (which in 1994 ran a highly controversial mock slave auction) have already established the precedent for Disney at Manassas.
  CEO Eisner is certainly anxious not to be seen as ransacking history. In Florida, he hired Eric Foner, the DeWitt Clinton Professor of History at Columbia University and a prize-winning Civil War historian, as a packaging consultant. According to Jon Wiener’s account in
The Nation
, Foner had complained about the editing and context of the speech delivered by the Lincoln robot at Disney’s Anaheim Hall of Presidents, a speech that
omitted any reference to slavery. Disney hired the critic. When Foner was finished, even a radical journalist had to acknowledge an “impressive” achievement: “In this park full of attractions that are calculatedly sentimental, sickeningly cute or crudely commercial, visitors to the redesigned Hall of Presidents will find a strikingly intelligent and remarkably progressive program.” Jon Wiener, “Disneyworld Imagineers.”

40.
For an account of the sad struggle of Dexter King to build a $60 million hi-tech King amusement center in time for the Atlanta Summer Olympics in 1996, against the United States Park Service, which has to date overseen the King Historic District, see Ken Ringle, “A Dream Turned Nightmare,”
The Washington Post
, National Weekly Edition, January 23–29, 1995, p. 9.

  1.
Ben H. Bagdikian,
The Media Monopoly
, fourth edition (Boston: Beacon Press, 1992), p. 19.

  2.
Bagdikian’s top twenty-three, listed alphabetically, are Bertelsmann, Capital Cities/ABC, Cox, CBS, Buena Vista Films, Dow Jones, Gannett, General Electric/NBC, Paramount (now Viacom), Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Hearst, Ingersoll, International Thomson, Knight Ridder, Media News Group, Newhouse, News Corporation Ltd. (Murdoch), New York Times, Reader’s Digest, Scripps-Howard, Time Warner, Times Mirror, and the Tribune Company. Ibid., pp. 21–22.

  3.
Jolie Soloman, “Hollywood and Vice: Here Comes a New Golden Age,”
Newsweek
, August 23, 1993, p. 51.

  4.
Quoted by Cindy Skrzyki in her appropriately entitled piece, “Today, AT&T; Tomorrow, the Wireless World,”
The Washington Post
, National Weekly Edition, August 30—September 5, 1993. Skrzyki comments: “It will make it possible for customers to stroll into an AT&T Phone Store and order everything from a cellular phone (which AT&T makes) to cellular service (which McCaw offers) to long-distance calling (over the AT&T network). On the technical side, AT&T switches may handle the call and AT&T software will tell the network which calls to send, hold, or put into a messaging system. And the slice of radio spectrum that AT&T would acquire as part of the deal gives it a precious commodity that is vital to launching new wireless devices that send and receive voice and data signals over the air.”

  5.
Quoted by Ken Auletta, “The Last Studio in Play,”
The New Yorker
, October 4, 1993, p. 80.

  6.
Calvin Sims, “Synergy: The Unspoken Word,”
The New York Times
, October 5, 1993, p. D I.

  7.
Ted Turner is chairman of the board and president of Turner Broadcasting, TNT, etc.; Sumner Redstone is CEO of Viacom and the feisty competitor for Paramount; for Barry Diller see text; Martin S. Davis is former president and CEO of Paramount; Michael Ovitz is chairman of the Creative Artists Agency and a key player in the MGM—Crédit Lyonnais deal;
Bill Gates is the power behind Microsoft; and John C. Malone is president of Tele-Communication, part-time chair of Liberty Media, as well as a one-quarter owner of Turner Broadcasting, which makes him a major force beyond Barry Diller’s QVC Network.
  For a biography of one of the great masters of communications and entertainment who set the course for many of the men here, see Connie Bruck,
Master of the Game: Steve Ross and the Creation of Time Warner
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1994).

  8.
Fortune
says Malone is now worth over a billion dollars. His sobriquet as king of cable is reported by Allen R. Myerson, “A Corporate Man and a Cable King,”
The New York Times
, October 14, 1993, p. C 7.

  9.
The declaration is offered as an appendix in Kenichi Ohmae,
The Borderless World: Power and Strategy in the Interlinked Economy
(New York: Harper Business, 1990).

10.
Cited by Ken Auletta, “Under the Wire,”
The New Yorker
, January 17, 1994, p. 52. Gore genuinely believes in the role of government as a regulator and equalizer, but after the elections of November 1994, there is little to suggest he will get much support in Congress or the nation.

  1.
See David Gonzalez, “The Computer Age Bids Religious World to Enter,”
The New York Times
, July 24, 1994, Section 1, p. 1.

  2.
See Allan Bloom,
The Closing of the American Mind
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987). I have explored the ironies of Bloom’s complaint elsewhere in
An Aristocracy of Everyone: The Politics of Education and the Future of America
(New York: Ballantine Books, 1993), Chapter 5.

  3.
The Rudolphs suggest that “Clinton and others too easily invoke ‘ancient hatreds’ to explain what are really contemporary conflicts. The question, in other words, is not why old conflicts are flaring up anew, but rather why traditionally harmonious mosaics have been shattered.” Susanne H. Rudolph and Lloyd I. Rudolph, “Modern Hate: How Ancient Animosities Get Invented,”
The New Republic
, March 22, 1993, p. 25.

  4.
Benedict Anderson,
Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism
(London: Verso, 1991).

  5.
Walter Russell Mead in a review of William Pfaff’s
The Wrath of Nations
(New York: Simon & Schuster, 1993),
The New York Times Book Review
, November 7, 1993, p. 25.

  6.
Observers like Liah Greenfeld try to elicit some consensus by persuading us that nationalism is a question of phenomenology: simply everything and anything people we call nationalists say and do. Her broad characterization permits nationalism to encompass multiple “roads” to modernity,
certainly all of those alluded to above, new and old alike. Normative philosophers like Yael Tamir take a narrower “essentialist” view, insisting that we must first define the idea theoretically and then limit actual cases to those that conform to the normative concept. For her, “liberal nationalism” and “ethnic nationalism” are not two species of an underlying genus but rival understandings, only one of which can be tenable. Yael Tamir,
Liberal Nationalism
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993); Liah Greenfeld,
Nationalism: Five Roads to Modernity
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Even Greenfeld ultimately chooses to see nationalism as a forge of modernity and to this degree narrows her definition to exclude wholly reactionary visions of nationalism.