When McDonald's opened a restaurant in Istanbul, an ethnologist set out to document how hamburger franchises would damage traditional Turkish cuisine. Instead she discovered that the lowly American burger spurred a renaissance of traditional dishes in the Turkish marketplace.
Even more important, American popular culture can work to encourage young men and women to have confidence in their own potential despite obstacles thrown up by their political systems. Until recently, political satire was rare in the Arab world because it distracted from pan-Arab aims, but today, Freund says, "corruption, hypocrisy and even legitimacy of the Arab political leadership are regularly under attack in a variety of comedy programs."
One weekly television program on an Emirates-based network is something of a knockoff of "Saturday Night Live." A Syrian television comic, described as a fusion of Woody Allen and Groucho Marx, satirizes the Baathist Party, the Syrian public's complicity in its own problems and the cynical Arab exploitation of Palestinian refugees. "Superstar," based on "American Idol," draws contestants from several Arab countries with the audience determining the winner. This year a Libyan beat out a Palestinian in the final round. He didn't have to sing "I hate Israel," popular in certain Middle Eastern circles, to win.
Authoritarian systems wield powerful tools of oppression through censorship, but popular culture has a way of circulating from the bottom up, appealing to intuitive drives and personal dreams that can keep dictators off guard. The mullahs have to compete with Rupert Murdoch's Fox television hits. The Taliban, for all of its ferocious hostility to popular culture, still couldn't control young men from getting Leonardo DiCaprio haircuts in Kabul.
Freund argues that even vulgar music videos can appeal to an independent spirit, loosening the moorings of dictatorial power and the sheep-like conformity of groupthink. This enrages some and pleases others, but a singer who wants to be a superstar won't wear a bomb around his waist. American popular culture is the culture of life, vulgar as it can be, and not death. Original American creativity can inspire others to dream for something better in this world - even better than soap.