I understood about 50% of the dialogue...

Hi dancingqueen,

Interesting to hear that Aussie English is shifting toward the U.S. version. What do you think is the reason for that?

Hmm. Most of it comes down to what is generally termed "cultural imperialism", operating through what we think of as normal commercial practices but driven by US capitalist greed. (Sorry, just trying to be honest.)

There are a lot of influences in play, including the way most of our industries are being gobbled up by US-based corporations, switched to US practices and documentation and opening them directly to US cultural influences; most of our books nowadays, and especially school and university textbooks, are published in the US, often with US language and spelling; our movie chains are owned by US companies and focus on US movies — because they're cheaper for them to distribute, and in the case of studios they're often their own properties (although it's fair to say that the US simply produces more commercial movies than anywhere outside Bollywood, so it's not surprising we get so many US movies — or films, as we call them); and our TV time is dominated by the US studios' practice of "bundling", where if you want to get rights to show a hit TV or movie studio, you have to buy hours and hours of other TV crap that the studios are desperate to turn a profit on.

I know this will sound like an attack on Americans, but it's really not. I love Americans (I have a lot of friends there, have been lucky enough to spend a large amount of time there, and even went there as an exchange student as a high school senior in Redlands, California) — I just don't love the manner in which the US practises capitalism, and the subsequent effect of its capitalist aggression on the rest of the world.

One thing that does make me annoyed about America is a general cultural arrogance that says everything has to be done the US way or it simply won't play. I think that's a frustration, even an outright anger, that's growing around the world. As a lover of language, it galls me that America insists that anything being imported into America must be translated into American English and spelling (a classic example is the Harry Potter books), but anything coming out of the US is left in American and the rest of us just have to cope with it; movies and TV shows produced in Australia have to be set either directly in America, or in somewhere inspecific that can be assumed to be America, and acted in almost-American accents, and have American actors in key roles, or they won't get taken up by US-based distributors.

I hear you about your frustration with the current US federal government. I think it's fair to say that Obama has been a huge disappointment, though there are probably a lot of reasons for that (for instance, an obstructionist Congress, increasingly polarised political views and the increased politicisation of issues that I wouldn't have thought politics played any real part in) that Obama couldn't have done anything about anyway. But that's not just a recent thing — as an outsider, it seems to me the eight years under Bush were simply disastrous for the US, and in many ways Obama simply inherited the legacy of Bush's terms in office (the staggering debt Bush accrued in just eight years, the social imbalances his policies and rhetoric created, the increasing social divide between the haves and the have-nots).

Ironically, as I write this, there's a documentary on TV (the sort that might be shown on PBS in the US) about the fall into poverty of hundreds of thousands of families throughout the US, and the lack of any safety net or access to financial recovery in the US system. It's a tragedy that one of the richest countries on the planet can't (or, actually, won't) provide for its own. It's awfully sad to see that the capitalist commercialism that gobbles up other cultures like the Borg also eats its own people and spits them out just as uncaringly.

Anyway. A sad note to end on. I don't know what "the answer" is, if such a thing as an answer even exists. But I do know that my own country has changed really rapidly — so rapidly that I can remember clearly when it was a totally different culture — and by my personal opinion, I don't like what it's become. (There's nothing wrong with what it's become; it's just not my culture any more.)

Whew!! dancingqueen, I'm sure that was a lot more than you felt you were asking about! I hope you understand that none of that was a criticism of you, or of American people in general. It's the "anything is fair enough as long as it makes a buck" attitude that I think is the problem for us all.



You might very well think that. I couldn't possibly comment.

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