The World Is in Love with America

I’d been in Africa for a few weeks when I met a young man selling pirated DVDs. This was in a market outside Kampala, the capital of Uganda, and in the chaos I’d only noticed his small wooden stall because he was blasting American country music. Specifically, he was listening to “Gone Country” by Alan Jackson, who he said was one of his favorite musicians, along with Travis Tritt.

The man had never traveled further than a few hundred miles from the small fishing village he grew up in. So you might think his fondness for two musicians born just outside of Atlanta, Georgia, is incongruous. But after two weeks in Uganda, and three years walking around the world, I didn’t find it surprising at all.

American culture is everywhere.

There’s no escaping it, not in sub-Saharan Africa, and not in a kampung in Jakarta, Indonesia—where shouts of “Whoomp, there it is!” ring out when one of the kids playing soccer in tattered shorts scores a goal. Not in the outdoor restaurant down the alley from the concrete pitch, where the same Maroon 5 album blares out, over and over—its continual run only punctuated by the call to prayer—until you wish you’d never started this whole “around the world jaunt to gain new experiences” thing, because learning every lyric to “Girls Like You” wasn’t the new experience you had in mind.

I’ve spent the last three years walking around 30 countries—specifically around parts of these countries that tourists rarely go—and talking to ordinary people. Whenever I give a talk in the U.S. about my travels, one of the most frequently asked questions is some form of: “Doesn’t the world hate America?” I’ve also noticed that it has become fashionable, among pundits of a certain political stripe, to claim that the world isn’t interested in America anymore. Exhibit A:

Mr Maçães has a lot of tweets in this genre, such as this equally absurd one:

I don’t want to address here the moral issues around U.S. foreign policy, or even the question of exactly how dominant the U.S. is on the political stage, but I can tell you for a fact that the notion that the U.S. no longer has cultural power is so absolutely wrong it’s laughable.