Jihad vs. McWorld (62 page)

  6.
J. G. A. Pocock, “The Ideal of Citizenship Since Classical Times,”
Queen’s Quarterly
, Spring 1992, p. 55.

  7.
Neil Postman,
Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 52.

  8.
Pocock, “Ideal of Citizenship.”

  9.
Zbigniew Brzezinski,
Out of Control: Global Turmoil on the Eve of the Twenty-First Century
(New York: Scribner’s, 1993), p. 73. Solzhenitsyn thinks “the former crisis of the meaning of life and the spiritual vacuum (which during the nuclear decades had even been deepened from neglect) stand out all the more” in the new age of evaporating “self-restraint.” Solzhenitsyn, “To Tame Savage Capitalism,”
The New York Times
, November 28, 1993, Section 4, p. 11.

10.
Quoted by Dirk Johnson, Its Not Hip to Stay, Say Small-Town Youth,
The New York Times
, September 5, 1994, p. A I. Meanwhile, teenage ex-subjects of the commissars, wooed by the same seductive voices of McWorld, flock to the new punk clubs like Tam-Tam and the World Jeans Festival in St. Petersburg and to Cokefest and Moscow’s hot new radio stations that specialize in Annie Lennox, Cyndi Lauper, and Urban Cookie Collective. “We reach for the young adult,” says the manager of Moscow’s most popular radio station, “we play what people want to hear, and believe me, that is not opera.” Nor even Russian rock (the Russians do not share East Germany’s taste for local bands): “It wouldn’t be fair to the native musicians to cram them in between UB40 and Prince. That would sound so bad.” Michael Specter, “Could We Tell Tchaikovsky This News?”
The New York Times
, February 20, 1994, Section 1, p. 5. There is only one classical music station left in Moscow, and the explanations are pretty much identical to those offered in explaining a similar situation in New York.

11.
Vaclav Havel,
Summer Meditations
, translated by Paul Wilson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992), p. 6.

12. Robert Putnam, “Bowling Alone: America’s Declining Social Capital,”
Journal of Democracy
, Vol. 6, No. 1, January 1995, p. 65.

13.
Harry Boyte and Sara Evans,
Free Spaces: The Sources of Democratic Changes in America
(Chicago University of Chicago Press, 1992).

14.
John Dewey,
The Public and Its Problems
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1927), p. 137.

15.
Joshua Muravchik,
Exporting Democracy: Fulfilling America’s Destiny
(Washington, D.C.: American Enterprise Institute Press, 1994).

16.
Democracy requires patience and flexibility and an architect’s sense of place, and cannot be delivered ready-made to peoples unprepared to make it function. Jean-Jacques Rousseau warned would-be founders that “as, before putting up a large building, the architect surveys and sounds the site to see if it will bear the weight, the wise legislator does not begin by laying down laws good in themselves, but by investigating the fitness of the people, for which they are destined, to receive them.” Jean-Jacques Rousseau,
The Social Contract
, Book II, chapter 8.

17.
David B. Truman,
The Governmental Process
, first published in 1951, second edition (Berkeley: Institute of Governmental Studies, 1971), p. 51.1.

18.
There is a new international organization called CIVICUS dedicated to creating a framework for transnational N.G.O. cooperation. See also Peter J. Spiro, “New Global Communities: Nongovernmental Organizations in International Decision-Making Institutions,
The Washington Quarterly
, 18:1, Winter 1995, pp.45-56.

19.
Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Joseph C. Cabell, February 2, 1816.

20.
Regis Debray warns that “An American monoculture would inflict a sad future on the world, one in which the planet is converted to a global supermarket where people have to choose between the local Ayatollah and Coca-Cola.” Cited by Roger Cohen, “Aux Armes, France Rallies,”
The New York Times
, January 2, 1994, p. H 1.

  1.
Cited in David Brooks, “Buchananism: An Intellectual Cause,”
The Weekly Standard
, March 11, 1996, p. 18. Buchanan, with his penchant for “cultural war” (see his 1992 Republican National Convention Speech), is as close to an official (respectable) leader of American Jihad as we have.

  2.
Phil Patton, “Now It’s the Cars That Make the Characters Go,”
The New York Times
, Sunday, April 21, 1996, H 13.

  3.
Glenn Collins, “Coke Drops Domestic and Goes One World,”
The New York Times
, January 13, 1996, B 1.

  4.
“The Walt Disney Company is helping build one of the most unusual public schools in the nation—a high-tech model for the next century, a learning laboratory with fiber optic cables linking classrooms to the homes of every student. But the most unusual aspect of this public school … is that it is linked to an adjacent national teacher training academy that could make Disney a lot of money. Disney will use the academy and school to
develop classroom videos, software, and other educational products to be sold nationally.” Mary Jordan, “This School’s No Mickey Mouse Operation,”
The Washington Post
, National Edition, July 25–31, 1995, p.33. The town of Celebration (in Florida), where the school will be located, will have 800 homes, hospital, fire station, lake, inn, barber shop, churches, movie theaters, and ice cream parlors. Disney has also opened a for-profit Chautauqua called The Disney Institute. Meanwhile, through its ABC division, Disney fired controversial talk show hosts on the left and right, including Jim Hightower in 1995, and Alan Dershowitz and Bob Grant in 1996—Dershowitz because he called Grant a racist, Grant because he was a racist!

  5.
Kinsley drew
Newsweek
cover attention and a long
New Yorker
profile, earning back his salary almost instantly. See “Swimming to Seattle,” Cover Essay,
Newsweek
Magazine, May 20, 1996. Ken Auletta, Gates/Kinsley essay,
The New Yorker
, April 8, 1996.

  6.
Cited by Thomas L. Friedman, “Revolt of the Wannabes,”
The New York Times
, February 7, 1996, A 19.

  7.
Even the Nazis played this game: “Work will make you free!”
(“Arbeit macht frei!
”) was the slogan that greeted incoming “guests” of the work/death camps.

  8.
See, for example, Fareed Zakaria, “Paris is Burning,”
The New Republic
, January 22, 1996, pp. 27-31.

  9.
Fareed Zakaria, ibid.

10.
See my op ed essay “From Disney World to Disney’s World,”
The New York Times
, August 1, 1996.

11.
See, for example, Philip Gourevitch, “Misfortune Tellers,”
The New Yorker
, April, 1996.

12.
President Clinton, in an extended critical exposition of the book’s themes before a breakfast gathering of religious leaders in Washington, September 7, 1995, C-Span.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

B
ENJAMIN
R. B
ARBER
is Kekst Professor of Civil Society at the University of Maryland and director of the New York office of the Democracy Collaborative. He is the author of the classic
Strong Democracy
and most recently of
The Truth of Power: Intellectual Affairs in the Clinton White House
and
A Place for Us. In
2001 he was honored with the Berlin Prize of the American Academy in Berlin and the Palme Académiques (Chevalier) of the French Government. With Patrick Watson, Barber also created and wrote the prizewinning television series and book
The Struggle for Democracy
. He writes regularly for
The Nation, Harper’s
, the
Atlantic Monthly
, and many other publications. He is married to the dancer and choreographer Leah Kreutzer.