We Are All Americans.(global influence of American culture)

Once upon a time the Americans were the British, lost. On the narrow lip of a distant continent, clutching their faith, songs, customs and memories, they were 17th-century space travelers, cut off from Planet Europe with its corruptions and tyrannies. Today the British sometimes seem more like strayed Americans--islanders who speak American, watch American, eat American. A visiting anthropologist from Mars might conclude that we must be a tribe of migrants from Pennsylvania who ended up, for obscure reasons, squatting off France.

But what is true of the British is also true of most other world cultures. The world is turning bicultural. From Pakistan to Paris, everyone has a local culture--language, history, food, religion, buildings. But almost everyone has some American culture, too, a secondary culture nudging the first. Thanks to American hyper-power, some 4 percent of the world's population, the Americans, now dominate the other 96 percent. Compared with this, Rome was just a village with attitude.

So what does the rest of the world think of America? The BBC commissioned polls across a spread of countries to try to find out. The good news for Americans is that our basket of countries regarded them as friendly, united, religious and free. The bad news is that they are also seen as arrogant and are disliked over a wide range of policies, from Israel-Palestine to world poverty and global warming. Overall, 30 percent agreed that "America is reaping the thorns planted by its rulers in the world," including 56 percent of the French, 48 percent of South Koreans and 46 percent of Indonesians. The quote, by the way, comes from Saddam Hussein.

President George W. Bush has a terrible global image. It's also clear that many people have only the haziest idea of America, just as many Americans know very little about the rest of the world. To teeming millions, America means only its brands--its burgers, fizzy drinks and a few trite, aging TV series. The deeper United States of Jefferson, Twain, the Constitution, the War Between the States, the New Deal and desegregation... none of that registers at all.

Class makes a difference, self-evidently: there is a global ruling class, and it tends to speak American English, wear chinos on the weekend and know its U.S. culture. American legal ideas have been spread through multinational business. The speaking of English, from India to Canada, makes countries vastly more porous to U.S. ...