Globalization and its harmonious bastard culture will put out to pasture the race agitator at the university, but it may well also drown out beautiful Mexican folk songs with American-style rock in Spanish. Sounds of hip-hop draw blonds and Koreans alike. Television assumes interracial smooching. Gay desire makes no distinction between brown and black, who fight alike the sexual prejudices of their respective cultures.
Celebrity magazines with glossy pictures and little text proliferate, aimed at the illiterate of all races. Bestsellers are often confined to mystery, sex and diet - with plenty of illustrations, big fonts and a vocabulary of fewer than a thousand words, all readable in a couple of hours. The current taste in popular music runs to shouting laced with obscenity, underscored by a pounding, totalitarian rhythm. These assaults on formality, prior erudition, modesty and manners may be offensive, but they assume that almost all Americans, without education or knowledge of fixed genres, find instant commonality with one another through the medium of desire.
The supercharged nature of such texts, pictures and sounds, delivered instantaneously through inexpensive radios, televisions and the Internet - along with the swift and easy way they are discussed and debated via cell phones and e-mail - has the effect of creating a dynamic popular ethos that often trumps all previous hierarchies. Not only are the authority of family, religion and government waning, but all the suppositions and pretensions of the old culture - class considerations, racial prejudices, snobbery of any sort - are silenced as well by the high-decibel magnetism of popular entertainment and its ferocious dumbing-down to the level of easiest comprehension and acceptance. What a war the new popular culture has inadvertently taken up through the pursuit of its own naked greed - no less than an assault on the age-old class, race and gender hierarchies that were previously thought to be innate to, and unassailable within, the human condition!
Globalization can now unite any two people from the most disparate backgrounds in taste, appearance and manner of daily life. Humberto Gama, who lives down the road from me, has been in the United States for twenty years. I am not sure of his legal status, a topic never broached between us. He works occasional jobs - farm work and construction mostly - and is married with three children. I still hear only Spanish waft across the vineyard from his numerous parties and weekend festivities. He has filed for workman's compensation, been on welfare, received unemployment insurance - and worked on and off the entire time he has been drawing his various subsidies; a global citizen, he assumes that the spreading Western idea of entitlement can ameliorate the occasional roughness of the marketplace. I have little idea what he makes, but imagine it is under $30,000. He drives a 1991 Chevy Astro van, which he bought used for about $3,000. It looks not all that different from a $30,000 new model, and for purposes of driving to town and back, it is just as serviceable. His sneakers, jeans, T-shirts and hat - off the rack from Kmart, Old Navy and The Gap - look no different from mine. He has no health insurance, but then various state and federal programs and local clinics seem to provide him with adequate care. To my knowledge he has never forgone medical treatment for lack of funds, and he doesn't worry much about the pro forma bills that occasionally come from the Selma hospital - an institution claiming to be millions of dollars in the red each fiscal year. We forget that globalization is not merely the proliferation of goods, but also of notions of entitlement, and Humberto at least expects high-tech medical care as part of his newfound affluence.
People in town treat him no differently from me. In the new classless society of California, the fact that I have a Ph.D. in classics and he quit high school somewhere in Mexico during his second year, while critical factors in determining our respective incomes, is mostly irrelevant. The status provided by educational attainment means absolutely nothing to people at McDonald's or Jiffy Lube, and perhaps even to the teachers we both encounter at the local back-to-school night. When I take my daughter to the emergency room with a bloody leg, we are given service no more quickly than is Humberto; health insurance cards, five generations of residence in the same town, ample capital, the ability to discuss with the physician the nature of the epidermis - all that and more means hardly a thing to the Hispanic clerk at the admittance window, and even less to the interns who put us way at the back of the line of wounded and ill in our brave new society.
This is all as it should be, but nevertheless is a revolutionary development in the history of civilization. Americans are actually the radical society that French intellectuals envisioned when they shook their fists at the barricades, before slinking back to their lounges and salons for more table talk and pipe dreams.
As neighbors, Humberto and I talk with a familiarity that suggests we are in the same class, have the same tastes and share similar problems. This is fact, not supposition, and the equality is natural, not forced. His television is nicer than mine; indeed, his family uses two cell phones. Their home - a small wooden ranch house - is provided by a local farmer to ensure his presence for occasional chores. Humberto listens to rap music on his work truck - a 1992 Dodge Dakota he bought from me in 1998 for $2,000 (paid over three months) with 80,000 miles on it. On purchase, he immediately put in a bed liner, added a new stereo, had it detailed - so now it is in better shape and more reliable than the Mazda I got to replace it,
