The Ghost In The Machine

Consider the food we eat. The old American meat-and-potatoes diet has been transformed over the past 30 years by the arrival of what would have seemed, in the 1970s, quite exotic culinary experiences. In those days, if you wanted sushi, salsa or croissants worth eating, you basically had to go to Japan, Mexico or France. Now you can find excellent versions of them almost anywhere in the United States. When Jimmy Carter was elected president, who had heard of wasabi? Who hasn't heard of it now? As formerly rare foods and spices became mainstays of "fusion" cooking in restaurants all over the country, that influence then spread back across the Atlantic. Much of the haute cuisine in France these days could as easily have been cooked in Seattle, say, or, for that matter, South Carolina. (And it's often as good or better in the States.) Meanwhile, one of the best French restaurants in Paris is now run by a Japanese chef. All this can make for some wonderful eating experiences. But there's a downside: cultural influences instantly assimilated then become instant clich?s. Like wasabi.

Even in a society as self-conscious about its "exceptional" nature as France, some of the institutions that make it distinctive are giving ground to the onslaught of global assimilation. The classic French caf? has been disappearing for decades, and still is. In my Paris neighborhood, we've lost three over the past few months. Meanwhile, McDonald's, which opened a 400-seat restaurant on the Champs-Elys?es in 1988, has spread all over the country. The company's latest innovation: bringing the McCaf? to France. Starbucks has invaded already. There are dozens in Paris, including one in the Louvre—which, by the way, is home to a vast shopping mall and food court.

If, when you travel abroad, you are going to find the same sorts of stores and restaurants and caf?s, and art and music and movies, that you had at home, you might wonder why it's worth traveling at all. (In Forster's story, "thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over.") The quintessential capitals of this first century of globalized culture are not New York and Los Angeles, London and Paris, or even Mumbai and Shanghai, but Dubai and Las Vegas, where urban developers have created extravaganzas of ersatz in the sands of the desert. Why actually go to Paris or Giza or Lake Como if you can have the Eiffel Tower, the Sphinx and Bellagio all in one place?

Nearly 20 years ago, in a collection of essays called "Expats," I wrote about "a new Arabia," a land of both Arabs and expatriates "that blends the convenient and the exotic like a Raj rooted in suburbia and Silicon Valley." Dubai was and remains the center of that world. Before the Persian Gulf region was flush with oil, Dubai had been a port for gold smugglers. Its markets "were crowded with many races," the English explorer Wilfred Thesiger wrote in 1948: "pallid Arab townsmen; armed Bedu, quick-eyed and imperious; Negro slaves; Baluchis, Persians, and Indians … Here life moved in time with the past. These people still valued leisure and courtesy and conversation, they did not live their lives at second hand, dependent on cinemas and wireless."

Today, among Dubai's many glittering glass and steel attractions, there are special office parks for Internet and media com-panies. The model for development—the soaring buildings, the swarming highways, the sprawling apartment complexes—is at once a dream version and a nightmare vision of the urban landscapes that have erupted across America over the past half-century. Dubai's streets are still filled with a marvelous mingling of peoples, now from Ukraine and the Philippines, Iran and Scotland, Kerala and California. But the life of the old souks has been repackaged and sanitized into multifarious malls and hotels. Tours of the desert beyond the high-rise skyline, which will soon include the world's tallest building, are only slightly wilder than a safari park in New Jersey.

The common language in the new world of intercontinental commonality is English. Here, too, the United States must bear responsibility as a nation that has imposed its language on the world—not least because its people are so reluctant to learn any other tongue. Yet the transcultural vernacular has become less than a commercially functional Esperanto understood more easily in Delhi than in Dallas. No novel or poem has yet been written in "international English," but even this hybridized idiom has too many geographical strings attached, so the trend in mass culture is toward visual media—TV shows, movies, music videos, YouTube snippets—where action is extensive and vocabularies are as elementary as possible. The "strong, silent type" and the slapstick comic have always been American clich?s that exported well. Now they're global paradigms.