So, they've opened up a TGI Fridays in Kathmandu. They've opened a new Gap there too. The largest McDonalds in the world is in Beijing, not to mention the world's largest Kentucky Fried Chicken. They have MTV twenty-four hours a day almost everywhere in Southeast Asia where you can find a TV, and that's quite a lot of it, believe you me. I met a couple of guys who've spent their entire lives in Nazareth who were more up to date on the American rap scene than I was. And don't even get me started on Tokyo Disneyland. This, my friends, is the march of the monoculture. This is the same force that's putting a Barnes and Noble and a Starbucks in every American suburb, and, because we love them so much, this force is exporting our stores, our music, our movies and our values to the rest of the world. So now if you hopped on a plane and traveled seven thousand miles to Bangladesh, you could get the same jeans you would get at the strip mall down the road from your house and have a cup of coffee at Denny's while you're waiting for your return flight. No wonder the rest of the world is so pissed at us. "But wait," I hear some people say, "I like the Gap! Barnes and Noble is a good bookstore. What's wrong with spreading them to the rest of the world?" Fair enough, but let me take you on a quick tour of the history of the hotel industry.

Kemmons Wilson started the Holiday Inn Hotel chain in 1952 based on the idea of offering the same, consistent level of service at every location throughout America. When his heirs opened the first Holiday Inn Hotels outside the continental US of A, they expanded on this original idea. Realizing that travelers to foreign locales would be disoriented by their new surroundings, the owners of the chain reasoned that tourists would want to stay at someplace familiar to them, someplace that they knew they could trust -- and thus set up each Holiday Inn around the world to be almost identical to the ones in America, with the only difference being a little local color thrown in for verisimilitude. So if you went to the Holiday Inn in Atlanta, you would walk into a lobby with a nice fern in the corner and eggs and pancakes for breakfast. Walk into a Holiday Inn in Hawaii and you'd get the same lobby, same rooms, same services, but with a palm tree in the corner and a slice of pineapple with your pancakes and eggs. In England, it's the same everything, but you get tea and crumpets with breakfast. In India, it'd be the same lobby but a statue of an elephant in the corner, and maybe a mango lassi for lunch. And so on. The same things happened with Denny's and is happening today with every franchise America exports to the rest of the world. Every new McDonalds manager is issued a three ring binder from Golden Arches Central which outlines every detail that must be adhered to in a McDonalds facility. From the color of the seats to the thickness of the burgers. With tiny differences allowed for regional variety. This is what people are afraid the monoculture is doing to the world, the Holiday-Innization of the planet. Local culture gets stomped out and replaced by the monoculture. People stop listening to local music and start listening to the Backstreet Boys. People stop going to street performances and decide to watch Batman 17 in the theatres. And, after a while, you stop getting local art, or local products or any real cultural diversity at all. You just get the Gap, with the service personnel wearing denim sarongs with their nametags. Now it is possible that I'm being overly pessimistic. After all, diversity isn't dead yet. Even in America, not everyone buys their clothes from the same places and listens to the same music. Not quite anyway: there are still people out there who are creating music, and art of all forms and even movies that stand distinct from the monocultural norms. Nor is cultural diversity dead abroad. Despite all the similarities, there is enough unique to it that no one is going to mix up Hong Kong and New York City, even if cities reside firmly in the first world. And local culture is still alive in Singapore, despite the fact that you can find four Starbucks within a six block radius in the center of the city. Heck, Japan even continues to export some of their culture to us. Maybe some things will change for the same, but perhaps local diversity, the myriad differences that other cultures will bring in, will adapt to and interpret the culture we're giving (or forcing upon) them, and will keep things varied enough so the whole world won't just be the same strip mall of the Gap and Starbucks, our culture defined by Disney and our music by Britney Spears. Just maybe. And perhaps there is an up side to all this. But to explain what it is I'm going to have to talk about memes for a while.

The word 'meme' was coined in 1976 by an Oxford Professor named Richard Dawkins and means 'a self-replicating unit of culture'. Just as genes build and define the human body, so do memes build and define one's mind, and on a larger scale, a culture. A meme can be a habit, like scrunching up your eyes when you're trying to think, or it can be a belief, an idea, or a story. Tunes, catch-phrases, fads, fashions, even the way we construct buildings and bridges, these are all memes. The key phrase here is 'self replicating'. Memes are contagious, passed down from parent to child like a gene, or transmitted like a virus from one person to another. As you come in contact with an idea, it changes you, the way you think, or your actions. When you interact with others, whether face-to-face, over the phone, in writings or recordings, you spread the meme, whatever it is, idea, fad or catch-phrase, on to them. Here in America, we have some memes, some viral ideas, that are almost national in character. Belief in what we consider to be basic human rights: liberty, freedom of speech, and the like, is one of them. So are the beliefs in personal and social freedoms, as well as in the equality of the sexes. Tolerance of things different from oneself is sometimes one of them, although we are tragically reminded that this is not always the case on a daily basis. Now as we Americans export our culture to the rest of the world, we don't just give them our movies, our stores and our music, we export our memes as well. Someone watches a movie or listens to some music, and more often than not, they pick up some of our values, often ideas of what their personal freedoms should be. An even better example of the contagiousness of the American memes are the thousands of foreign students who come to America every year to attend university. These students come from places notorious for their repressive regimes such as Singapore and the People's Republic of China, and yet a huge percentage of them go home having completely adopted our memes, believing in freedom of the press and human rights, in a more permissive and tolerant society. More importantly, they take these memes home with them and spread them on to others there. If this and the proliferation of American culture are any measure to go by, the American memes are extremely strong a viable ones. Now, by and large, I view the proliferation of these memes to be a good thing. Not because I believe that American values are perfect or even close to perfect, but because I believe that some memes residing in the larger collection of American memes are incredibly important and should be spread. Human rights, a government by and for the people, freedom of speech and the press, tolerance, gender equality -- these are all memes contained within the 'American Meme', in many Western Memes, and are things that will make this ball of rock a better place for everyone. Personally I want to take my memes, the values that I believe in, and get them to beat the crap out of some of the other memes out there, the ones that stand for intolerance, prejudice, totalitarian control. The meme war, the war of conflicting values is the war that's being waged today, and despite their negative side, our chief weapons are MTV, the movie industry, books, comics, the ruthless efficiency of marketing personnel everywhere -- any element of culture that can get the good memes out there and across to other people. Obviously, not every movie, or song, or book any other unit of culutre actively pushes forward socially redeeming memes, nor do I really believe that the companies that spread these things are doing so for any other motivation than the bottom line. However, there is no medium that is propagating our memes, the ideas and values that I view as important, to the average person faster than American popular culture is today. Sometimes, this export of memes takes the face of the monoculture, and we lose elements of cultural diversity that would prevent this world from becoming the cultural strip mall that it threatens to turn into. But there are times when our values force out the dark things in the world. When women's rights trumps the custom of female circumcision, when belief in the freedom of expression means the people will not stand for a book being banned or burned, this is when the export of our culture is doing the best things that it can do. Perhaps the true objective then is to find a way to balance the two, to figure out how to transmit the memes without the stupefying aspects of the monoculture.