I once lived in the Netherlands. It is a fine country, with pleasant canals, and green fields reaching to polders. I lived in Gouda and commuted to Rotterdam. Each morning I looked in on my sleeping daughter, said goodbye to my wife, and headed out of town, across the draw bridge, and toward the highway. I turned on the radio and listened to news and talk shows as I drove, sipping the coffee I had carried out the door of the house. One morning I heard a Dutch professor interviewed about a growing concern in Europe, American Cultural Imperialism, as it was called. The term struck me, and I listened to the professor develop his argument that Europeans in general and Dutch in particular must be on guard against the cultural hegemony foisted over them by the United States. It was feared as an invasion of sorts--movies, music, television programs, books, even cultural icons. It was not only cultural, but economic, a way of living, an acquisitiveness, a materialism that was taking over society. After I had lived there for a while and got to know more Dutchmen, I realized that the average person had other concerns which had to do with daily living, not any American cultural or economic imperialism.
This came to me as I improved my command of Dutch. In part, it came because I found it difficult to practice the language. I would walk into a shop and in accented Nederlands asked for something and the response inevitably followed in English. Almost everyone spoke it. School courses of up to five years in English were required.
When I asked a storekeeper why so much emphasis on English, I was told that it was a matter of economics. English was the dominant business language in the world today. I asked, Doesn't this ability to understand English also heighten a fondness for, and acceptance of, foreign things? Doesn't it quicken the absorption of other cultures, goods, and points of view, and especially things American because of the volume of imported U.S. goods?
Yes, but people live in a global economy, he said. English was necessary to grow and survive and prosper.
But what about its influence on what I heard called American imperialism?
Ah, well, said the storekeeper, That was another matter, one best left to the professors to discuss. It was how they earned their own livings--by thinking about society and lamenting what was happening to it.
Yes, a steady American flotilla of goods, ideas, and images, sailed on a commercial tide to Europe and Holland but so, too, were markets opening everywhere else. As one instance, jobs increasingly left American shores for places like China and India. The imperialism, it seemed to me, was not American. It was of history, of time as we know it, of an entire world in competition to move toward growth economies. It was an accidental imperialism, one that nobody intended but which everyone becomes ensnared in. It was called The Twentieth Century. In developed countries, most people steadfastly regard it as an age of relief for the common man and time for his entry into affluence. I had no quarrel with any of that. I just wondered about what we had forgotten or had never known.
I looked at a lovely windmill perched along a canal as it turned slowly in the wind. Its blades caught the rising sun as they passed their zenith. Drivers sped along the canal road, encased in glass and metal, listening to a rock station or morning news. They might glance at the windmill and briefly think that it was pretty and then they braked for the bridge, drawing up for a barge to pass underneath. They glanced at wrist watches to see if they would be late to the office.
After I noticed drivers passing the windmill, hardly glancing at it, I was reminded of what I had read about forest natives in Brazil. I thought of breeze along a jungle river and of the Amahueca Indians of the upper Amazon. They gathered evenings and discussed the day as it had passed. A hunter described the sounds a jaguar made. He talked about the animal's mood. Another tribesman noted the greenness of the foliage and that a certain plant was growing in an area. A band of howler monkeys had moved on to another part of the forest. Some birds settled in the trees over by the river and hadn't moved for days. Somebody mentioned that the wind had shifted several times during the day and carried a strange smell in it whenever it blew from up river. They discussed the personality of plants which gave off strange vibrations that they could feel as they walked by.
After I had thought a few weeks about imperialism, economic and cultural, I decided that I would read The Education of Henry Adams to my daughter when she was older. Henry Adams, the author, a grandson and great grandson of U.S. Presidents, narrated a visit to the Great Exposition of 1900 in Paris where he was drawn to the huge gallery of machines. There he looked upon forty foot dynamos which became for him a symbol of ultimate energy, inhuman, that man had unleashed. With such machines he had fear for the future of humankind.
In 1884 Hiram Stevens Maxim invented the machine gun in England. He harnessed the steady and progressive burning of the propellant, which released gases that drove the gun mechanism. He held the trigger down and it fired eleven rounds a second.
The Maxim gun changed the course of World War I. It was largely responsible for the men, horses and mules left to rot on the fields of France. The Allied and Central Powers had anticipated quick victories and a war soon over but the machine gun forced soldiers of both sides into trenches and it kept them huddled there. Trained two feet above the mud, it could shoot the knees off anything that moved.
Henry Adams had feared the future and at the Paris Exposition he walked in the galleries which manifested what would become a new view of normalcy. He was not sure if it would become the right view or not, but he beheld it all through a crystal ball of his imagination and didn't feel assured by what he saw.
I could tell my daughter that from one perspective, despite the Maxim gun, another machine, an economic one, gained awesome strength so that today the common man continues to be better off than his peasant forbears, and he considers it his normal lot. I would say it to reassure her of a future yet uncertain.
I would say, Yes, there have been other machines: nuclear bombs and the one fed by Zyklon B. I would not add that it is also true that the economic engine demands more fuel of human spirit but so far, I would say to myself, we are better off if we don't think too much about what sanity might mean.
I would talk to her about the dynamo Adams saw in Paris among those gentlemen with top hats and frock coats as they escorted ladies with bustles and parasols. Modernity can be traced to that thing, not to economic imperialism. The machine had been created by people who didn't know that instead future generations would serve it. I would say that Adams was right to fear it, but it is what we have and now we find it hard to look at the world any other way than through technology and the money it brings.
American cultural imperialism, the Dutch professor complained, is bringing the country down. At the Rijksmuseum in Amsterdam I found a painting by Jacob van Ruisdael, once attributed to Duurstede. It is titled The Mill Near Wijk and shows a great sky of dark, ominous clouds moving over a windmill, a boat and three tiny women in the right foreground.
As I gazed at the painting I was drawn into it and asked myself if the sky Ruisdael had seen was like what Henry Adams saw in the future, for the one in the picture swelled beyond its borders and did not warn of a storm merely. It hid the sun and threatened the people below with something far beyond their dreams and fears.
It seemed to look out of the past to suggest an age when no one could seriously paint like that again. It implied a time when the natural could no longer be represented because nobody could be sure what nature meant. Entire cultures would think that way. Henry Adams and the Dutch professor were implied by that sky. My wife and daughter were in it. So was I.
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