Before the Age of the Donald - by Dave Jaffe: Part Five

    Before The Age of the Donald - Part Five


        In 2013 the Gross Domestic Product of the United States stood at nearly 17 trillion dollars. Only China's GDP came near to that figure,though to-day in 2016 its economy's size has surpassed that of the U.S.A.'s. With this tremendous economy the U.S. has weighed in heavily on the lives of other countries. It is the controlling power in the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund. As a result when countries fall into economic hard times they have to go to the IMF and the World Bank to rescue their countries. Often the U.S. demands that these countries slash their social programs to pay their debts, and these debtor lands have to do what they're ordered to do. This is yet another way that the U.S. has inflicted pain on poorer lands.
      Yet there's not doubt that the U.S. has influenced the world in a positive way too. It was the first country in the world to invent the mass market. To-day hundreds of millions of people in the world, maybe billions, live in an affluence that our great grandfathers and grandmothers could never have imagined. This affluence is due to the United States that showed the way to the rest of the world.
      "I'm living in a style that the kings and queens of the past would have envied," a friend of mine said in his later years. My friend lived in a small apartment in Vancouver's West End. Yet he had hot and cold running water, electricity, access to modern medicare and modern ways of travel. He had visited many countries, and ate meals that were nourishing and tasty. In nearly all the western countries of the world most people live as he does and the U.S. did help make this happen.
      The U.S.,as president Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski pointed years ago,  has another advantage on the rest of the world: It invented mass culture. When the late  Gore Vidal was asked why he called his one of his novels 'Hollywood', he replied, "Because that's all that America will be remembered for." True or not, the American film industry that's based in Los Angeles has been turning out films for close to a century. And when television came of age in the late 1940's millions of Americans along with many other people were soon watching American t.v. programs.
       The United States also invented jazz and then rock'n roll now called 'rock music'. During the Cold War the U.S. government subsidized modern art that many people in communist countries and capitalist ones found hard to understand. Yet Eastern European and Soviet youth didn't want to look at abstract expressionist paintings. They wanted to listen and dance to rock music. Back in the Cold War days they couldn't do this. Now they can. In fact American mass culture to-day rules the world. It is another weapon in the arsenal of the U.S. of A. and gives it another immense advantage over rival countries.
      So like billions of people worldwide I have been heavily influenced by the U.S. of A. I don't hate America as that woman  that I mentioned at the beginning of this piece claimed. I just wish it would be more progressive in its politics.