Ever see a picture of Communist China during the 1960s-era Cultural Revolution? Insane teenagers in bad Mao suits jostling men through the streets at gunpoint. Seen those teenagers recently? I have. Saw a lot of them when I lived for several years within a stone’s throw of the UPenn campus.
Today they wear expensive designer clothes, are mostly easy-going and friendly, and generally sound like they grew up in San Diego. Their cities back home? Shining, sky-scraping monuments to authoritarian capitalism. Basically the Mussolini regime on steroids. What happened? Wham! No, not the breakfast ham or any other consumer consumable. But the highly-coiffed Britboy band of the 1980s starring George Michael and Andrew Ridgeley. How?
By touring Communist China, as the first major western rock/pop band to do so, in 1985. 15,000 not-sure-what-to-expect fans filled the People’s Gymnasium in Beijing on April 7th to first tentatively, and then as the concert went on enthusiastically, go teenage bonkers over the prancing kings of Britpop. The Western confidence and energy of the Reagan-Thatcher years was brought home in every step.
They went on to tour the Great Wall and inspired a generation of young Chinese fans to embrace Western fashion, music, and culture. Why? To Give Them Money, Woo!
I saw the phenomenon myself as a young American soldier stationed in then West Germany when the 1981 song “Kids In America” came out, sung by sultry British singer Kim Wilde. Many of my young German friends were convinced, given the lyrics in that song, and those later of Galleria chanteuse Tiffany, that all U.S. kids were rich, good-looking, and spent most of their waking hours overshopping in malls. When I tried to explain this was generally not the case and told them I had led a pretty normal teenage existence in South Florida, they immediately inquired whether my adolescent years were all spent smoking dope and riding my surfboard. Only one of the two is not true.
Fast forward over thirty years and those kids are the parents of the teenagers I met at UPenn. So you want to know how to introduce market capitalism to a country and also make it an economic competitor, which is toiling in the shade of soooo not cool socialism? Easy. Wham Diplomacy.
Call it The Kamioner Doctrine if you will, but cut way back on the AID funds, UN contributions, and sundry assistance that will only end up in the Cayman Islands account of what-used-to-be-called Third World dictators. Instead, send them insidious American pop culture. Deliver Pitbull to the Latins, Bruno Mars to the Asians, and Madonna to the infirm and deaf.
The best we could do in this regard is send a renovated post-lunatic Miley Cyrus on an international tour where she plays but one song, “Party in the USA.” Have you seen that video?
Cute kinda shy Miley lands in California accompanied by other attractive young ladies and proceeds to throw an unannounced dance party in a playground, I think. During significant segments of the video an American flag is slowly, languorously, draped down over the stage, setting the backdrop for the most effective piece of American cultural propaganda of the last fifty years. For what is the probable visceral reaction of some foreign teenage boy to the United States once he sees the lovely unfurled American flag as a backdrop for the gyrations of nubile, beautiful American females?
Paging Dr. Freud.
Unless he may be residing in a conservative Muslim nation. Then he damns the shedevils for filling his heart with lust, and subsequently watches the video again for the fourteenth time. Teenage girls? They will love the clothes, adore Miley’s friendly-looking multicultural entourage, and long to join the California twenty-something glitterati.
However, pop culture can also be used as a weapon.
What do you think a reunion tour of N.W.A. or 2 Live Crew would do to the cultural sensibilities of modern-day Zimbabwe? We could parachute the Shahs of Sunset into Tehran and if there is a non-aligned Caucasian country just waiting to be corrupted, I bet we could put The Sex Pistols back together, minus Sid, and send them careening about throwing up on people and playing unintelligible, yet total fun, versions of their own material.
We’ve seen what our pop culture has done to this nation in the last fifty years. What were vices are now habits. The putrid and aging forever rock-and-roll mentality, followed by the violent stepchild of rap, has reduced the gray ponytail set to sad, mumbling, long-in-the-tooth hipsters. Rap has led to just wonderful things for our culture, don’t you think? It could do the same to the cultures of our enemies.
But alas, my idea is not completely original. During the days when grownups ruled the Earth and the CIA, Langley sponsored the CCF, the Congress of Cultural Freedom. It sent musicians like Dizzy Gillespie, Dave Brubeck, and Duke Ellington all over the world to share what was then an American culture at its apogee. It also sent the First Man of Jazz, Louis Armstrong, to East Berlin and Budapest in 1965. The coup of the program? Six months before the Cuban Missile Crisis Benny Goodman was touring the Soviet Union and even played a concert for Soviet honcho Nikita Khrushchev.
However that was when we had music to listen to and the listening of it could make the most frozen commie cold warrior tap his jackboots and think maybe the Running Dogs of Wall Street Tyranny weren’t that bad after all.
So cut the foreign aid budget to ribbons, weaponize the Grammy Awards, and send off our worst and dimmest to go do that voodoo and whodoo that they do so well.
At the very least, it gets the Grammy cretins out of the country for a merciful bit. It’s worth trillions alone just for that.
