Title: The McDonaldization of the whole world?
Headings: The McDonaldization of the whole world?

Content: The entertainment that the U.S. exports--especially now, during the U.S. government's "war on terrorism"--often tries to feed people a line about "American values" of "democracy" and "freedom." But the U.S. entertainment industry has plenty of other rotten ideas to offer--from the sexism and corporate self-centeredness of TV's Ally McBeal to the anti-Arab stereotypes of movies like The Mummy. In his book Jihad vs. McWorld, journalist Benjamin Barber describes "McWorld" as "a busy portrait of onrushing economic, technological, and ecological forces that demand integration and uniformity and that mesmerize peoples everywhere with fast music, fast computers and fast food--MTV, Macintosh, and McDonald's--pressing nations into one homogenous global theme park." You could easily reach the conclusion from this argument that the process of globalization has meant that U.S. culture is destroying "weaker" national cultures--and has to be stopped. But there are problems with this view. First, the idea that people in poor nations are "mesmerized" by a flashy, technologically advanced culture is condescending. Secondly, this attitude can lead to the conclusion that "weaker" national cultures are always "good"--while all of American culture is "bad." Marxism provides a different way of looking at the question. Culture can be defined broadly as all of people's different social practices--what they do for a living, their religions, the way that women are viewed, languages. There's also a narrow meaning of culture, which refers to art, music and literature.