Cultural Crossbreeding Makes America Great
Carlos Alberto Montaner
 

Some years ago, Frenchman José Bové, leader of the antiglobalization movement, burst upon the front pages of newspapers when he attempted to destroy a McDonald's restaurant. It wasn't a question of hating calories but of expressing patriotism. To Bové, the American restaurant was a threat to the identity of his country.

Earlier, French Culture Minister Jack Lang had declared war on the American cinema with a passion similar to the one with which the French Academy combated Americanisms that slipped into the language.

Curiously, Americans have a much more intelligent vision of foreign influences. It is true that the American entrepreneurial muscle -- to the ire of globalization opponents -- has created 270 McDonald's franchises in Mexico, but meanwhile, without a word of protest, there are 6,000 Taco Bells in the United States that sell an apocryphal and less spicy version of popular Mexican dishes. At the same time, there has been an upsurge in the number of Japanese, Chinese, Vietnamese, Italian and many other restaurant chains that have something to offer the tireless American palate.

The paradox is that while the rest of the world struggles against American influence as if their national identity were in danger, Americans absorb and metabolize all foreign influences, constantly and fearlessly altering the very profile of their own country, without wasting a minute on the absurd definition and defense of ``the American being.''

Nobody, with the exception of a few crazy racists, has defined the essence of the Homo americanus and tried to proclaim his virtues or to defend him from the cultural features or the styles and customs of other peoples. On the contrary, almost 300 million people perambulate through this country, people from all corners of the world, colored by all possible combinations of accents and doses of melanin, tenuously linked by institutions, history and interests, who freely choose the means to find happiness, according to their preferences and common sense.

Intuitively -- because there isn't even a national debate -- that's the attitude that allowed European immigrants to bring the great cinema into America; the Bauhaus Germans to bring their graceful architectural accents to New York; and the Caribbean musicians -- led by Paquito d'Rivera -- to introduce and disseminate Latin jazz into the eager ears of society.

In sum, the foundation upon which this country rests is simple: The American as a Platonic idea, as an abstraction, does not exist.

The American is a dynamic being, in constant evolution, who knows that his astounding vitality is not a consequence of the virtues of an uncontaminated native culture but of the capacity to adopt and adapt a foreign talent.

What makes this nation great is the genius of cultural crossbreeding, not cultural exclusion. Few activities are more dangerous than defining the national being. That's the starting point for all forms of fascism. Nazi Germany did not begin with Adolf Hitler but with cultural nationalism, the kulturkampf (culture struggles) advocated by Bismarck half a century earlier.

When the dominant groups within a society define the sacred perimeter of culture itself, they inevitably end up crushing those who partially escape or dissent from that definition. When they proudly believe that they have identified the national archetype, the mold and model of the perfect citizen, they are really condemning to death or alienation those who are different from that dangerous construction.

The horror of the Holocaust lay not only on a monstrous prejudice toward the alleged nature of the Jews but also in the idealization of a German archetype, the sum and summary of all virtues and talents. It starts as a prank, by throwing stones at the glass windows of a McDonald's. It ends by building extermination camps.