RR: Under the Sign of Mickey Mouse & Co.

1. Gatlin identifies that the qualities, values, and attitudes that shape American society is that we are trying to reach a feeling of: Freedom, wealth, comfort, innocence, power, and the state of mind of a youth. It’s a good list but I would add ruthlessness because in our society we are ready to backstab anyone as long as it helps ourselves.
2. Gatlin tells us that the American way of life is taking over the identities of cultures that maybe smaller or different from itself. It does this by bombarding every part of your life with little hints to whatever the American’s are liking, doing, acting, appreciating, or obsessing over. What are lost though are our heritage and our pride as a culture.
3. Gatlin suggests that American culture is spongy and promiscuous because we take different parts of other cultures, combine and fuse them, and then add it to the rest of the hodgepodge of traditions, fads, and lifestyles we call the American culture. We are also a bottom-up society because we control our representatives not the other way around.
4. The English language (American English) is most simplified of the common languages and is mostly used for business because of it. It’s a common language because of how much it is used in business. When a culture needs business they use this language and therefore have to teach it in schools and when its taught students want to have some kind of self identity so they go for some new culture than the one they grew up in and then the American culture gets integrated into the other culture though the shear force of how many people identify with it.
5. My interpretation of what Gatlin thought of American culture and what it’s doing to the rest of the world is that the American culture as a whole is a drug for the rest of the world. Gatlin talks about how sad it is that American culture is corrupting isolated tribes of people, and that we are for pleasure. Our top export is entertainment and it corrupts the other cultures because we look like we’re having fun or being free.
6. I think that very traditional cultures would reject American culture openly and still have some who are part of it solely out of rebellion and pressure.
7. I would think that Kupelian would agree with Gatlins idea that we are destroying traditional cultures but I think that Kupelian would want to change the other cultures but to his ideal American society of the 1950’s.
8. In our popular culture we have a very eclectic taste in music, because we have so many different cultures that we integrate (d) in our culture, which makes defining what “American style” is. The genre of music that can be the closest to being called “American style”, what we so aptly call “pop music”. It ranges from any kind of music so the changes and fusions are infinite. The ever-changing styles of “pop music” is perfect for allowing any kind of music into itself the same way “American culture” does with other culture.