My local corner shop now has three whole shelves dedicated to american confectionary: varieties of peanut-butter filled Reeses pieces; chews unaccountably claiming to be ‘grape’ flavoured; vomit-tainted Hershey chocolate; and so on. I’ve noticed the same pattern in other shops too. This is not a complaint: the sweets are clearly fashionable, and in general (apart from Hershey bars) don’t taste any worse than the sickly-sweet, artificial treats I’m used to from my childhood.
What makes me mention it at all, is that it’s so recent, and so obvious, like other signs of the rising tide of American cultural dominance, and yet it almost seems to be too obvious to remark on. Yes, that’s it: I’m not so curious about this americanisation itself, as I am curious about the fact that we don’t talk about it, as if it’s too well-known and too boring to mention. Perhaps it is? After all, it has been going on at least all of my life, and probably for a much longer time. When I was a child in the eighties, the rising tide was the appearance of Kentucky Fried Chicken (we used to say the full name) and McDonalds in town centres, and then not long after when the drive-thru’s sprang up out of town. But it had probably been going on throughout the twentieth century, with tastes and cultural attitudes borne in on celluloid and airwaves. Brucciani’s in Preston’s town centre began selling ice cream floats in the sixties. Brucciani’s was never meant to be just an italian, but rather an italian-american coffee house.
But at some point it stopped being worthy of mention, and I think that unconscious agreement not to talk about the american cultural tide, somehow made us believe it had stopped, as if the arrival of McDonalds was the peak, and the end of our americanisation. After all, the peak of America’s political dominance passed with the end of the Cold War, or at least it seemed to. It’s neat to imagine that, just because an idea is no longer fresh, it is no longer relevant. It’s far more fun to look somewhere else—say, East—and look for evidence that the cultural balance has shifted. In what ways are we all Chinese now? And it’s true that there are many international influences on british culture. And, before you get the wrong idea, I’m not being reactionary or nativist. I like British food and British culture, but I’m not really so invested in it that I’d raise arms against foreign incursions, and when it comes to food, I’m ecstatic that we have more variety. I’d feel as much of a foreigner in the UK of the 1970’s as I would anywhere in the world today, and I’d probably have to move to London, just to slurp some comforting laksa.
But I don’t think it’s true that americanisation is now just a part of the wider globalisation of culture. In my local corner shop, the american sweets are not just widening the selection—they’re taking over. Not only the Dairy Milk, but also the Daim and Milka have had to give ground to the shelves of primary-coloured boxes of grape-kool-nutz whatever. My kids are saying ‘can I get a’, and ‘gotten’, and ‘prom night’, and ‘math’—they’re not saying ‘ciao’, ‘nee hao’ or ‘origato’. They talk about Trump—they don’t talk about Macron, or Lagarde, or Xi Jinping. It’s not globalisation; it’s americanisation. And it’s not a process that happened at some point in the twentieth century and is now over, or even slowing down. From my limited viewpoint it even seems to be, if anything, speeding up.
So what? I don’t know, I really don’t. I’m not promoting any particular stance about it. It just seems weird that we’re all becoming, slowly but steadily, American, and we don’t even remark about it. Probably I could go a bit further, and say that it’s especially weird that we don’t seem to notice, given how apoplectic we get about the incursions of the EU on our ‘sovereignty’, or how we tear our hair out about ‘multiculturalism’. But picking apart my own mixed feelings about american culture, or analysing the intersection of americanisation with identity politics, and making some clever point about hypocrisy feels like too much effort right now.