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JAMES BROWN IN EGYPT - I was walking through a backstreet in Cairo, Egypt, when I suddenly heard James Brown booming out. It was the song "The Big Payback" and I was suddenly transported back to the United States. Wherever you go in the world you are assaulted by American pop culture.
I was surprised then, but now I don't know why.
As Ben Wattenberg pronounced a decade ago, we are the Universal Culture, for better and (possibly) worse.
People might not understand our television-based jokes, but they know our films and our music -- sometimes better than we do. And that is the rub. We have spread our pop culture like a virus. Michael Jackson draws mammoth crowds in Japan and Madonna is no longer the name of the mother of Jesus.
One of my girlfriends, from Ayrshire, Scotland, loved another James Brown song and on our first date took me to a George Clinton concert at the Fillmore in San Francisco. For her, American culture was world culture. This was the Gold Mountain, as my Chinese friends in Ess Eff joked.
So it should not be surprising that back in 1974 I would find James Brown blaring on a street in Cairo, Egypt. There are MacDonald's everywhere in our brave new world of globalization. But it struck me as odd then. I was not ready for us to be the biggest empire since Rome in 1974. I am not ready for it in 2001.
I understand why we are resented around the globe. We offer Updike in exchange for Voltaire and DMX in exchange for Beethoven. What is not to resent about that?
When I went to the movies in Cairo, I saw Charles Bronson. The queue went around the block. My Egyptian friends and I stood in this queue for the Bronson movie for an hour.
Though I had sworn not to hang or look for Americans, American culture was all around me. I couldn't escape it.
I got on a bus and went to Alexandria. I visited the Cecil Hotel to see where Nessim had first seen Justine in the mirrors there in Durrell's novel. I was escaping, I told myself. Two blocks away the film "Sugarland Express" was playing. I couldn't get away.
I wanted to visit Pompey's pillar and Lake Mareotis. But everywhere, ubiquitously, almost so that I felt I would choke, there was America. As far away as I thought I could get from America, there she was dead in my face.
Is it any wonder we are called "The Great Satan?"
There was so much to take me away. There was the monumental statue of the pharaoh Ramses before the train station, towering above us in the waves of white heat. There were the garish pictures of the cinema, in primary colors on all the billboards, interspersed with those of Sadat. When I would drift in the rented felucca down the Nile with Captain Mohammed, for the breeze, for the respite from the city, there was no America.
When the muezzin cried out, a voice like a blinded canary, there was no America. I would look out of my window at a celebration of white doves cross the golden globe at the top of a minaret and there was no America.
On my felucca rides I was in Cairo, in Egypt, in its greatest sense. I was in a dream. But when I stepped back on shore, the Empire could not be denied.
There was James Brown on a backstreet in a souk in Cairo. And that's when I knew I could never escape...
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