It’s that time of year again. You can feel it in the air. The star jasmine is blooming, the jacaranda is on the way, and all across this wide brown land people are bitching about Halloween.
“It’s unAustralian!”
Yes, it is.
“It’s creeping Americanisation!”
Right again. But then again, so what?
Rather than spoiling it for kids and parents who like squeezing back into their high-school goth gear, there are far more insidious American imports to fret over than kids stomping about in Freddy Krueger masks.
Aerosol ‘cheese’
Australians don’t need fancy American spray-on cheese to ruin our meals. We have chicken salt for that.
Kardashianisation
Coming over here, taking jobs away from our own feckless, vacuous grotesques. Monetised, talent-free inanity should begin at home!
Supersizing
For many Americans, eating too much fat, sugar and salt has morphed from making poor dietary choices into a proud, patriotic duty. It’s up there with big cars, trenchant incuriosity and screaming “USA” at people rather than using more traditional rhetorical devices to make a point.
Australians are right to be concerned about big pharma, big data and big oil, but Big Mac is an existential threat.
The war on drugs
Dumb. (Of course we did it too.)
The war on terror
Dumber. (Ditto.)
Wherever you go, there you are!
Q: If I drive straight by the Mcdonald’s, turn right at Pizza Hut, keep going past KFC and Domino’s, but stop before the Subway and Starbucks, where am I?
A: Anywhere in the Western world.
Expertaphobia
“A little knowledge is a dangerous thing.” So wrote Alexander Pope in his 1709 An Essay on Criticism. Fast forward 300-plus years and America’s ongoing war on experts has millions of people now violently believing that Jesus was a white dude, the Bible was written in English and Jordan Peterson can count up to 12 with shoes on.
Some observers like to say when America sneezes Australia gets a cold. And now with hordes of local “cookers” claiming that the Earth is flat and that Melbourne has more secret tunnels than artisanal bakers, it’s hard not to agree.
The war on music
The USA took music from all over the world and gave us back the blues, jazz, soul, country, rock ’n’ roll and funk. This made the world an infinitely better place.
But being America, they couldn’t just leave it alone. And now Aussie playlists and airwaves are slowly but surely being polluted with Frankenstein genres such as Christian EDM, KKK-Pop, National Socialist Black Metal, Vegan Straight Edge Punk and Country Rap, aka hick-hop.
Idiocracy
There was a time in America when liars, fools and charlatans were tarred, feathered and run out of town. Now they’re given media platforms and venerated like gods as they rain their monkey shit down at us from their golden cages.
Luckily here in Australia the Sky after dark experiment is still embryotic — more travelling flea circus for the blissfully bewildered than full-blown, anti-democratic mass movement.
But from little things…
Shooting stars (and stripes)
In Australia, Halloween is school-age kids scamming lollies on gun-free streets in blood-splattered clothes, pretending they’ve been shot.
It’s similar in the US, but with more of the guns and less of the pretending.
Know any other creeping Americanisms you’d like to share? Write to letters@crikey.com.au with your full name to be considered for publication. We reserve the right to edit for length and clarity.
For me the worst Americanisation is out language bum/butt, loo or toilet / bathroom, wee/piss, path/sidewalk, and so on. Even pronunciation has changed, my kids say “vase” the American way. Bring back the bum!
Just listen to how a lot of younger people pronounce adversary, advertisements, comparable, junta (to name just four) if you really want to hear English mangled.
Or the ABC. Oh-fence, dee-fence, hurri-cane, do-main, dee-cide, dee-lay, dee-rail, dee-fault …
And the execrable ‘ree-source’ and ‘ree-search’
And the “D” in impordant as opposed to important.
“Impawdent”? That mainly comes from the children of non-English speaking migrants.
well – you know … it’s like -you know, like yeah … awesome, ya know?
Well said.
And “zee!”
All very funny. Except Halloween is actually a Celtic festival, derived from the Celtic celebration of Samhain. Then like so many other good Celtic festivals the early Christians subverted it. The Americans then commercialised it.
The return of the sun became christmas. Spring bonking became easter. King’s birthday isn’t. Where will it all end? Hand on heart, salute the flag.
Mind you, you won’t find many Starbucks to use as landmarks for directions here. That’s one threat we’ve kept largely at bay.
That one was self-inflicted. Gloria Jean’s is similarly an American conquest of the Australian coffee market, but was successful in a way that Starbucks wasn’t. Starbucks failed because it didn’t adapt to the local market, and apparently only survives now in capital cities because Chinese tourists want to drink it.
Gloria Jean’s world wide head office is in Castle Hill NSW – controlled by Australian interests since 2004 (ex USA) and 2009 (incl USA) according to Wikipedia. Which might help to explain their success in Australia. But not my cup of tea it must be said.
“Gloria Jean’s is similarly an American conquest of the Australian coffee market”
Gloria who?
The coffee place you can go if you want to support girls getting exorcisms, or something to that effect.
We didn’t really keep that threat at bay. Up until 2008 they were everywhere actually. They had oversaturated the market and when the GFC hit, the market contracted and they were forced to do a seriously heavy prune. It was more like good luck.
So true, some of your best work, but this hurt “parents who like squeezing back into their high-school goth gear“, except I haven’t bred…
As a Student of the fall of the Amerikan empire, it troubles me that I know that you did not in fact make up these truly horrifying genres: “Christian EDM, KKK-Pop, National Socialist Black Metal, Vegan Straight Edge Punk and Country Rap, aka hick-hop.“
I feel like the word vegan in vegan straight edge punk is a bit redundant because didn’t straight edge at least imply or encourage veganism back in the 80s?
I thought that it meant generally abstinent as exemplified by the, necessarily short lived, breatharians.
I may be wrong, but I suspect there are more lard-arsed Suburban assaUlt Vehicles per capita here than in the U.S. But maybe that’s because every day someone throws one at me.