In 2011, Hilary Clinton announced the US was at war. She wasn’t
referring to the US’s ongoing invasions, wars and occupations but an
ideological war for hearts and minds. Clinton lamented the fact that,
since the end of the cold war, US global ideological influence had
weakened, especially with the advent of the Internet and TV channels
like RT.
Of course, Hollywood still manages to propagate the
‘great American myth’ globally every day: the US as the beacon of
freedom, as the flagship of democratic
ideals, based on the great ‘American Lie’ of the great ‘American Dream’
whereby the individual can somehow miraculously overcome adversity and
make it in life, just as long as s/he keeps his or her nose to the
grind. US mass culture exported across the globe. The ‘anyone can make
it’ syndrome sugar coated with a sprinkling of ‘freedom and democracy’
then rammed down the collective throat by Hollywood, which magics away
into thin air the reality of capitalism and its deeply embedded
structural power relations. As the commentator and comedian George
Carlin once stated: “The American Dream, you have to be asleep to
believe it.”
