Let us make a bold attempt to imagine me incorrect in assuming that America will continually swell to embrace, amalgamate and (handsomely) commodify all forms of opposition, until the world is all America and America is no more.
That formidable effort having somehow ended in success and not laughable failure, there would appear to be three critical obstacles to ending American hegemony, and military force isn't one of them (did I mention Disneyland?): first, America's extraordinary capacity to invent indispensable things (including itself), so that, just as the world begins to break free of the Spell cast by the American invention of the PC, some pencil-pocket geek prophets invent the internet in Stanford, and the world lives American for another century or two; second, Hollywood, the 'factory of dreams'; and last, even more fundamental and intractable, the English language, which America, like any good merchant, is quite happy to bastardize and banalify indefinitely, in order to increase its currency.
Ultimately, this is the currency, not the dollar, which you will have the greatest trouble replacing, I think. And as long as this--or rather some pathetically debased version of it--is the language the world speaks when it talks to itself, that world will remain essentially and always American. Here again it is so not about the oil. English is very simply, and ever-increasingly (since attempts to unseat it will never catch up to the speed of global evolution plus the protean capacity of English to adapt to same) the native language of the global village. You don't have to live there. Wear a loin cloth and eat locusts, it's a free world. But if you choose to live there, and wish to prosper; enjoy the (many) good things it has to offer and avoid the bad; you must, as in any village, learn the native tongue.
A group of anti-American activists from different countries, all with different tongues, gather together to plot the downfall of America, and wish to communicate with the ease and rapidity necessary for true concerted thought and action, without the laborious and finally self-defeating inefficiency of multiple translation. What language will they speak? American.
American English has made its deal with the devil, and traded its soul for worldly power. The devil, a native English speaker, is now firmly on its side, knowing that if it succeeds he will win the soul not merely of America but of the world. His minions, Gates and Jobs. His key weapons, Gates' speed, and man's most incurable addiction: pleasure. As long as the world continues to accelerate down the i-highway, it will only have a greater need for a common tongue, since i, regrettably, needs we to be comfortable at last; and as long as English is not merely the language of America's inventions and movies, but able and willing to whore--I should say adapt--itself to every place and time and circumstance, far better and more easily than any other language on earth, what other possible candidate for that common tongue is there?
It is the native language of Prosperity and Pleasure. And they are bad students of foreign tongues.
The octolingual Slovenian father of a friend of mine said that English was the easiest language to learn badly, and the hardest to learn well. And he was right.
I once took a hurried cab to the Toronto airport, driven by a voluble old man with a heavy Eastern European accent and insanely bad but comprehensible English, who spoke faster than he drove (and that was breathtaking). After a few minutes, in response to some biographical detail, I asked him how long he'd been in Canada. He said 38 years. 'Wow, I said, and you never bothered or needed to learn better English, eh?' Unoffended, he proudly launched into a brilliant demonstration of why that was totally unnecessary to succeed and be happy in my country.
And he was right.
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