How the World Was Won: The Americanization of Everywhere review – a brilliant essay

A world without America would be hardly worth living in, argues Peter Conrad in his survey of the vast cultural reach of the US

• Nick Fraser - 
• The Observer, Sunday 2 November 2014

Inside McDonald's in Varanasi, India: American influence was inseparable from the wider world project of modernisation. Photograph: Alamy

Everyone can recall their first encounter with America, whether it was watching Gone With the Wind or Dumbo, the death of John F Kennedy, the resignation of Richard Nixon or, more recently, the election of the Barack Obama. But what does such exposure to the world’s most powerful place actually imply? For some, the result is dashed expectations or disapprobation. For others, such as Peter Conrad, it is the opening act in a lifetime drama.

Conrad is one of a glittering generation of Australians cast on to the seas of world culture in the 1960s. He first encountered America through its movies, and here he examines the way the country has both interpreted itself for the rest of the world, and has in turn been half-understood by countries on which its huge footprint has strayed. America can’t help but affect us all. We cannot not be affected by America. That is the principal message of this fitfully personal, occasionally randomly incomplete, brilliant essay. In conclusion, wrestling with symptoms of decline, Conrad reaffirms his obsession. “I am not ready to be cured,” he says. “A world without America would be a dull, constricted place, hardly worth living in.”
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