Johnathan Pierce did a piece on Tuesday about this book by Tyler Cowen. And if you follow that link to amazon.co.uk you find that paragraph one of review number one goes like this:
A Frenchman rents a Hollywood movie. A Thai schoolgirl mimics Madonna. Saddam Hussein chooses Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” as the theme song for his fifty-fourth birthday. It is a commonplace that globalization is subverting local culture. But is it helping as much as it hurts? In this strikingly original treatment of a fiercely debated issue, Tyler Cowen makes a bold new case for a more sympathetic understanding of cross-cultural trade. Creative Destruction brings not stale suppositions but an economist’s eye to bear on an age-old question: Are market exchange and aesthetic quality friends or foes? On the whole, argues Cowen in clear and vigorous prose, they are friends. Cultural “destruction” breeds not artistic demise but diversity.
So globalisation is good, culturally as well as economically. But the Saddam Hussein reference does rather make me want to rethink my attitude to My Way. This song may indeed be a hymn of praise to individualism and individual liberty, but Saddam Hussein wasn’t (and still isn’t?) averse to individualism and individual liberty – he was/is after all an extremely liberated individual – provided that it’s his individualism and individual liberty he’s singing about rather then anyone else’s. The “My Way” critics would appear to be vindicated.
But although bad news for anyone who thinks that only Hayekian liberals sing this song, this is not exactly good news for collectivists either, for when someone like Saddam sings this song, he is ramming home the lesson that collectivism, rather than installing any sort of collective virtue into power, merely ensures the triumph of all the vices of one vicious individual, who ends up doing everyone in, and doing it “my way”. You have to admit that the world’s nastiest despotisms devise their own uniquely ghastly ways of killing and torturing people.
And now, the end is near;
And so I face the final curtain. …
Concerning Saddam, let’s hope so.
Zut Alors!
Did you know “My Way” was originally a French song called “Comme d’Habitude” by someone called Michel Sardou.
In the late sixties David Bowie re-wrote it as “Even a Fool Learns to Love” but never got it recorded.
Later the French melody later caught the attention of Paul Anka, and he reworked the lyrics and the song became “My Way”.
It’s not a one way street this globalisation thang is it.
Whenever work gets ridiculous, I think about the movie “Sid & Nancy” and the outrageous and grotesque version of ‘My Way’. I can’t help but to chuckle -at least work is not that bad.
Anorak’s corner, I know, but although Michel Sardou sung Comme D’habitude, the original words were by Gilles Thibaut and the music by Jacques Revaux et Claude François. Sorry for pointing this out!
And also, Frank Sinatra always hated it. He didn’t even want to record it.
Any police-state dictator could really sing ‘You did it my way’, using the plural ‘you’.
Sorry to be a party-pooper but what is cross-cultural trade?
I mean, are the mutha-fuckin denizens of downtown Detroit morris dancing through the flames on devil’s night?
Going back a few years, was Colin Welland correct when, on picking up his Ocsar, he bellowed into the mike, “The Brits are coming”? Did the Hollywood movers and shakers shake their heads in despondency and move aside?
No, no and, er, no, I think.
But let’s be kind to Tyler Cowen and conclude that he is just a tad euphemistic here, and what he calls cross-cultural trade is, as ever, shameless, destructive, dollar-grabbing, low-brow, mass-market American cultural imperialism. God know, I find it hard enough to put up with everywhere I go. Have I not to chastise myself for my “stale suppositions” and welcome yet one more diversity to go with all the others that so garland my culturally, economically and racially inbred little Anglo-Saxon world?
Sorry, but this is just one part area of life where I can’t see eye to eye with our elusive, Arabic crooning buddy or with Mr Cowen.