Going American

After examining Australia with a cold and analytic eye, Britain's terrible-tempered Malcolm Muggeridge (onetime editor of Punch) last week shot off, in the pages of the Sydney Morning Herald, a characteristic Muggeridge salvo: "Superficially, Australia is very British, indeed--in fact, I should say decidedly more British than Britain is. It constitutes a kind of National Park in which extinct British species can be seen living in their natural habitat. But I cannot help thinking that Australia's Britishness belongs more to a dream than to reality."

The trouble, as Muggeridge saw it, is that "what is really happening is that in Australia, like so many other countries, life gets increasingly like LIFE magazine. The jukeboxes sound and the hamburgers are munched and the glass buildings go up story on story here as elsewhere. The only resistance which can be offered is to be more British than ever."

Sadly, he observed that it was a forlorn hope, for Britain and Europe have already capitulated to Yankeedom: "It is a complicated state of affairs which exists in all Western European countries, particularly in Britain, where you find an intense anti-Americanism--more intense I should say than in France, where heaven knows it is strong enough. Yet, with all this the circulation of Reader's Digest (that last infirmity of the American Way of Life) steadily mounts; the consumption of Coca-Cola steadily increases; American musicals run interminably and, in almost every aspect of life from television to pornography, an increasing American influence may be discerned."

How account for this progressive collapse of ancient cultures? Muggeridge sees one cogent reason: "Practically everyone wants to live as Americans live. It must be the first time in the history of the world that human desires have been so standardized. Driving at night through little American towns, I used to notice it. Neon signs starkly proclaimed contemporary man's basic requirements--food, drugs, beauty, gas. These are the pivots of felicity in the mid-20th century. Everywhere in the world is getting to look like everywhere else, and everyone is getting to look and be like Americans."

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