This is a short book on some large subjects. It argues that the world changed fundamentally in the 1970s and early 1980s. In this sense, the twenty-first century began during those years, for powerful forces that will shape the early part of the new century significantly appeared for the first time. Or, to rephrase, a new era did not begin with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union between 1989 and 1991, but with the information revolution, the new power of U.S. capital and transnational corporations to drive that revolution, and the reaction—sometimes violent—in the United States and abroad to that revolution. This new era has been called “the information age,” and described as “post-industrial,” “post-modern,” and even “post-imperialist” or “late capitalist.” Whatever it is termed, it marks the beginning of something different in world history.1
At its end, this book briefly speculates on the meaning of the story in the long history of imperialism, including the rise of what has come to be known as cultural imperialism. It also touches on the question of whether U.S. exploitation of the new information age, so well exemplified by Michael Jordan’s successes, will lead to a better twenty-first century or, as some believe, a bloody clash of cultures and civilizations.
The analysis uses the sport of basketball to begin examining these subjects. Why basketball? Because with the help of new media the marketing of basketball has become an important fixture in global as well as American culture. Because some of the pioneering transnational corporations are exploiting American sports so profitably and with far-reaching social consequences. Because basketball has attracted both women and men as players as well as spectators since the game first appeared in 1891. And because basketball produced Michael Jordan.
This account assumes that the importance of U.S. foreign relations diminished not at all with the Cold War’s end after 1989. The nation’s overseas influence and power has only become more fascinating—contrary to what some of the more parochial members of the U.S. Congress, some academic departments, and a few publishing houses may believe—and it has become vastly more important for new generations of Americans to understand this.
Just how far that influence reached became clear to Max Perelman, a young American college student, when he traveled through remote regions of China in January 1997. While stranded by winter weather in west Sichuan, a long fifteen hundred miles from Beijing, he encountered a group of Tibetans bound for their capital, Lhasa. The Tibetans, Perelman recalled, had never strayed far from their native village. They had apparently not seen anything like his camera. As they shared with him bites of meat from the raw, bloody, rib cage of an unspecified animal retrieved from their rucksacks, the group began to discuss things American. Just how, one of the Tibetans asked the young American, was Michael Jordan doing?
How these travelers knew about the Chicago Bulls’ star was never made clear. That they knew about him, however, was perhaps not surprising. He was the most famous athlete and one of the most recognizable people in the world. Jordan and his “Red Oxen,” as his team was known in much of Asia, had gained renown for their basketball championships. But Jordan was especially famous for another reason: he was the superhuman who flew through the air in television advertisements as he endlessly and effortlessly dunked basketballs and, simultaneously, sold Nike sneakers. These glamorous advertisements flew about the globe thanks to new technologies such as earth satellites and cable. This communication revolution conveniently appeared for global commercial use just as Jordan was beginning a spectacular basketball career in the 1980s, and as Phil Knight was building Nike into a mighty multibillion-dollar transnational empire that ingeniously marketed its sneakers over the new media. Jordan’s fame rose to the point that at the 1992 Olympic games he was embarrassed by being asked at a press conference if he were a “god.” But as Time magazine noted, “If Michael Jordan is God, then Phil Knight put him in heaven.”2
Much of this post-1970s technology was dominated by U.S. empire-builders, notably the flamboyant Ted Turner. He had sunk the family fortune into the emerging business of cable television and communication satellites, only to go nearly bankrupt in the early 1980s. Not long after, however, he built CNN (Cable News Network) into an international as well as American powerhouse. Indeed, the network became so international that Turner outlawed the use of the word “foreign” in its broadcasts. Nothing was foreign to CNN. In 1997, Turner stunned the world by giving one billion dollars over a ten-year period to the United Nations to help its international humanitarian programs. It stood to reason that he gave this incredible gift to the UN instead of to, say, his home city of Atlanta, Georgia. CNN, like Nike and Michael Jordan, had burst beyond mere city boundaries to become a global institution—and had grown rich by moving far beyond U.S. borders to create a worldwide marketplace.
Jordan’s role in this growing Americanization of global media was profound. As noted in the following chapters, he became a part of the heated argument over whether African-American athletes increasingly dominated basketball and many other sports because they were physically different from and superior to whites, or because they concentrated on these sports due to racism since other careers were closed to them. And eventually, Jordan became a figure who often transcended race. Black social critic Stanley Crouch observed that “in 1960, if white girls in the suburbs had had posters of a Negro that dark on the wall, there would have been hell to pay. That kind of racial paranoia is not true of the country now. Today you have girls who are Michael Jordan fanatics, and their parents don’t care.”3
The immense success of Jordan and the National Basketball Association (NBA) has also helped shape the role of women in professional sports. The combination of talented and imaginative female athletes who appeared in the 1970s and 1980s, simultaneously with the growing popularity of basketball created by NBA marketing techniques and new media coverage, has led to the creation of professional women’s leagues and lucrative endorsement contracts for a few of their stars. As noted in chapter 1, women were playing basketball within weeks after the game was invented in 1891. In 1973 the U.S. government passed Title IX, a historic step that required equal facilities for men’s and women’s sports at institutions receiving federal funds.
As is also noted below, basketball has always been a commercial product. In the 1980s its ability to churn out profits reached a new level with the appearance of revolutionary technology and imaginative entrepreneurs (including David Stern, the commissioner of the NBA), who were determined to exploit it. Jordan became a world icon, even in far-off Sichuan, in part because the number of television sets for every hundred people around the globe doubled to 23.4 between 1981 and 1997.4
While the new media could create fame and fortunes in world markets for Jordan and Nike’s Phil Knight, so too could that media expose their errors, tragedies, and embarrassments globally. A “Faustian bargain” emerged in which celebrities such as Jordan sold themselves via the media, and ambitious companies such as Nike likewise sold their goods. But, in return, the media blazed Jordan’s personal misfortunes across the world’s television screens and told billions of viewers about Nike’s subcontractors in Asia who exploited and sexually abused the workers who made the sneakers. Jordan was often asked to take stands on these and other difficult political issues. On the whole, he declined. Critics, even admirers, charged that he cared more about retaining his commercial appeal than dealing with the most important issues of the day. Taking a stand could alienate some of the potential buyers of the goods he endorsed.
Jordan’s career also helps us understand something about the nature of U.S. power in the post–Cold-War era. Phil Knight liked to say that by the 1990s sports had become the world’s most important entertainment. No one better exemplified the power of that entertainment than Jordan and Knight. American popular culture (the jazz of Duke Ellington, the musical theatre of George Gershwin, the dance of Fred Astaire and Martha Graham, blue jeans, McDonald’s fast food, Coca-Cola), has long been part of U.S. influence and profit overseas. The power of that popular culture, however, multiplied with the technological marvels that appeared in the 1960s and 1970s.
In earlier eras, a culture was transmitted across national boundaries by migration, travel, or reading. Since leisure travel and literacy were often limited to the rich, the understanding—and exploitation—of other cultures was often enjoyed only by elites. Television and the post-1970s media, along with cheaper and more rapid transportation via jet airplanes, changed all that. Culture could move with nearly the speed of sound and reach billions of people, not just the privileged. Jordan and Nike (and McDonald’s and Disney), suddenly enjoyed the power to reach vast audiences with an efficiency unimagined several generations earlier.
Jordan and Nike, moreover, exploited yet another kind of power new to the post-1970s media. For centuries, the control over mass dispersal of information was held in the hands of monarchs, the Church, or, more recently, powerful newspaper and radio owners. After the 1970s, however, this power to spread information and culture became more decentralized. Masses of people could pass on information in large globs over computer systems. When only three major U.S. television networks existed, as in the 1950s, the network owners generally controlled what people could see. With 70, 150, or even 500 channels, audiences enjoyed much wider choices. Thus Jordan and Nike could select certain channels (MTV) to target young buyers of sneakers, or use other channels (ESPN) watched by sports fans. And with the emergence of globe-girdling communication-satellite systems to carry these television advertisements, Jordan and Knight instantaneously flashed their messages, and themselves, around the world.5
It was an awesome power. Transnational corporations not only played a dominant role in creating and defining American popular culture, but they used that culture’s own seductiveness to influence the language, eating habits, clothes, and television watching of peoples around the earth. “‘Globalization,’” John Cassidy wrote, “is the buzzword of the late twentieth century,” and it is powered by vast amounts of capital—and by “English, the global language of money.” Cassidy believed that “Globalization is set to become the biggest political issue of the next century.” It already had become an interesting issue, for example, in the former British West Indies, where basketball began to displace cricket as the national sport, especially on islands where television was most watched. On Trinidad and Tobago, the black lower class took over basketball and turned it into a statement for their class and racial pride. Their model, historian Allen Guttmann noted, was the NBA, as they adopted NBA team and player names, while mimicking moves of the players. Thus the sports of the British Empire gave way to the technology of the American Century.6
Other peoples have not as willingly accepted U.S. influence. A respected historian (and former basketball coach), in Canada, Geoffrey Smith, likened the new era to the corrupt, rampant exploitation of the so-called Gilded Age in the United States of the 1870s–1890s. In the States, Smith argued, there has developed a “new Gilded Age—with its accompanying greed and rapacity.” Among its worse qualities is that “the ‘market’ in sport defines nearly everything.” The immense amount of money and celebrity generated by sports, he concluded, leads many, especially the young, to conclude that playing games is more important than education and politics.7
Smith’s and other Canadians’ concern about U.S. influence is understandable. American television programs became so popular that by the mid-1990s the Canadian government finally required television and radio stations to broadcast a minimum amount of programming from Canadians themselves. Some 96 percent of films shown in Canada were foreign-made, the large majority from Hollywood. Four of five magazines sold were foreign, mostly American. But the Canadians were hardly alone. Other friends and allies of the United States also warned that its power was unwelcome. “The United States has assets not yet at the disposal of any other power,” French Foreign Minister Hubert Vedrine declared in 1997. These assets included “political influence, the supremacy of the dollar, control of the communications networks, ‘dream factories’ [that is, Hollywood and television], new technologies.… The situation is virtually unprecedented.” Vedrine argued that France had to ensure Americans did not fall into the temptation of “unilateralism and the risk of hegemony” over other peoples.8
Even in Germany, staunch U.S. Cold-War ally, a leading newsmagazine, Der Spiegel, warned in 1997: “Never before in modern history has a country dominated the earth so totally as the United States does today.… The Americans are acting, in the absence of limits put to them by anybody or anything, as if they own a blank check in their ‘McWorld.’” It was time, Der Spiegel suggested, to fight back before the entire world “wears a ‘Made in USA’ label.”9
Growing resistence to the power of American popular culture led to an intense debate over whether the United States was actually an imperialist spreading its culture so effectively that it was radically changing, if not potentially destroying, other cultures. Some of these observers believed that Americans fooled themselves if they thought other peoples would change their traditional way of living just to enjoy U.S. products. Indeed, some argued that as Americans went abroad to spread their culture and fatten their pocketbooks, they would instead have to change their own culture. That is, they would have to become less nationalistic, less ignorant of and more open to other cultures and religions.
The new global commercial power exemplified by Michael Jordan, Nike, CNN, in other words, is making Americans fear that as they are electronically interspersed into the world community, they are threatened by the loss of their national identity—they are a people becoming too “multicultural” and sympathetic to the global power of groups like the United Nations—just as other peoples begin to eat and dress like Americans. Such fear moved into American political and economic debates during the 1990s, especially through the surprising number of votes given to Pat Buchanan and Ross Perot, who attacked such outside influences. As revolutionary technology thus integrated Americans into the rest of the world, many of them feared the strangeness and challenges that they encountered. Americans had feared the strangeness and challenges of other peoples since the seventeenth century, but never before had such dangers been so instantaneous, so immediate, as they were in the new, tightly wired world.10
In this developing battle of capital versus culture, capital will ultimately win. The United States is, and has been since World War I, the world’s clearinghouse for capital. By the 1990s, the volume of that capital became overwhelming; some $1.5 trillion moved through New York City financial markets every day. This torrent of money developed the new media and powered the new transnational corporations. For good or ill, it wielded the power to bring other governments nearly to their knees during the recurring financial crises of the 1990s. It even forced the world’s superpower, the U.S. government, to change social priorities and spending policies. Other nations, such as France and Japan, do not necessarily favor this kind of fundamental change and will certainly resist such power. American culture, if powered by vast sums of capital, will thus change as it becomes more global or else produce conflict that will have explosive results for U.S. politics and security.
The story of how the United States and the world reached this point begins in the 1890s, when the American economy first became the world’s greatest, and when basketball was first invented. The history of basketball, especially in the era of Michael Jordan, helps us understand this era known as “the American Century.”
The Asian economic downturn of 1998 stunningly exemplified the crises and challenges to U.S.-capital-driven culture that Americans (and many others) will face in the early twenty-first century. The dramatic decline in Asian economics touched off a near-panic globally: Russia teetered on the brink of bankruptcy, Brazil faced severe crisis, and even U.S. stock markets dropped sharply. The Asians, notably the Japanese, Indonesians, and Malaysians, blamed the West, especially U.S. capitalists, for overwhelming their economies, making quick profits, then exiting—leaving behind shattered societies. U.S. government and business officials, however, emphatically placed the blame on the Asians themselves for trying to close off and overly influence markets, often through a kind of “capitalist cronyism” that favored Asian over Western investors.
It was a clash of capitalisms and cultures of the most dramatic, and important, kind. Then it turned worse. Under tremendous U.S. pressure, 102 nations, led by Japan (the world’s second largest economy), agreed to open their financial markets to foreign investors. Suddenly U.S. firms began buying up or controlling Asian firms that had long been protected from foreign influence. The most important American economic official, Alan Greenspan, Chairman of the Federal Reserve system, announced that these other nations were finally seeing the light; they were moving toward “the type of market system which we have in this country.” A century of U.S. economic power apparently climaxed with an ultimate triumph. Others, however, were not so sure. Anti-American feelings rose in Japan, Malaysia, Indonesia, and elsewhere as these nations tried to protect themselves from U.S. capitalism’s cultural backriders. Otherwise, as one American reporter wrote from Japan, it would only be a matter of time before an Asian family would take cash from their corner U.S. bank, “drive off to Walmart and fill the trunk of their Ford with the likes of Fritos and Snickers,” then stop at the American-owned movie theater to see the latest Disney film before returning home to check their U.S. mutual fund accounts and America Online (on their IBM computer with Microsoft software).11
Asians see this as nothing less than the U.S. “desire to bury Asian values,” and they are not pleased. Nor are many Americans. Former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (later a wealthy business consultant with many ties to Asia) put it directly: “I am disturbed by the tendency to treat the Asian economic crisis as another opportunity to acquire control of Asian companies’ assets cheaply and to reconstitute them on the American model. This is courting long-term disaster.”12
At the center of this discussion arises one all-important question. Given Americans’ increased dependence on world markets for jobs, given how the new technology is locking Americans into a sometimes violent global community that too easily resorts to terrorism to fight the United States, and given that Americans have no choice but to be participants in that complex, often threatening global community—what kind of participants will Americans be? They wield immense power, and unless that power is accompanied by an understanding of its effects and how it came to be, the twenty-first century will be a continuation of the confrontations and bloodshed of the twentieth century. But with new technologies the clashes will occur in a confined, interlinked global village from which no one can escape to safety.
On January 13, 1999, Jordan announced his retirement from basketball. The Chicago Tribune headlined, END OF AN ERA. “The most popular athlete in the world and undoubtedly the most popular in American sports history,” experts gushed. “Beyond that he transcended the game, becoming an international celebrity and spokesman.”13
The impact was indeed global. JORDAN RETIRES! SHOCK FELT AROUND THE WORLD, a Japanese sportspaper headlined. Basketball was a minor sport in Japan, but thanks to television ads, Air Jordan Nike sneakers had sold for as much as $1,000 a pair and some were collected like jewels. Mexican, Polish, German, Spanish, Chinese, and British headlines, among others, echoed Japanese feelings. Standing at the end of a century in which the United States had come to command global financial power, communications systems, marketing networks, and cutting-edge technologies, Jordan exemplified this imperial control—and also some of the explosively dangerous challenges and high costs Americans now confronted in the newly wired world’s new century.14