Mimicking America

Today is Halloween, and here in South Korea young people will be celebrating. I snapped this rather sad-looking photograph recently at our nearby ‘dog café’ which has installed the typical Halloween merchandise for its clientele, who come from the apartment towers of greater Seoul to give their dogs a run-around in a safe countryside setting, complete with piped K-pop music, a swimming pool (for the dogs),  and comfy chairs and cups of coffee (for the humans).

This time last year, there was tragedy in Seoul when huge numbers of people gathered to have fun on Halloween and 151 were crushed to death  in a narrow alley in Itaewon. This year, there won’t be any tragedy there, because people will steer clear of the area and the police will be much more vigilant. But in this post I want to ask a simple question:  ‘What the Hell are South Koreans doing celebrating Halloween?”

Let’s start with some history.  What is Halloween? The History Channel explains:

The tradition originated with the ancient Celtic festival of Samhain, when people would light bonfires and wear costumes to ward off ghosts. In the eighth century, Pope Gregory III designated November 1 as a time to honor all saints. Soon, All Saints Day incorporated some of the traditions of Samhain. The evening before was known as All Hallows Eve, and later Halloween. Over time, Halloween evolved into a day of activities like trick-or-treating, carving jack-o-lanterns, festive gatherings, donning costumes and eating treats.

And this is what the website of an (American) company called Gourmet Gift Basket informs us about Halloween’s metamorphosis into a modern-day (and for Gourmet Gift Baskets, very lucrative) event:

American colonists are responsible for initially bringing Halloween to the United States. Most of the colonists were English Puritans who celebrated Samhain before traveling to their new Country. Although the Celtic religious traditions had long been replaced by Christianity, many of the old practices remained. Influenced by a variety of cultures, the Halloween traditions in the American Colonies began to meld and change.

In the New World, All Hallow’s Eve became a time for “play parties”, which were private parties thrown to celebrate the harvest. Many dressed in costume and told scary stories. These first Halloween parties helped shape the history of Halloween into the celebrations we have today!

In the mid-1800s, Irish immigrants came to the United States, bringing their Halloween traditions with them. This included dressing up in costumes, asking their neighbors for food and money, and pulling pranks in the evening on Halloween. Americans started doing the same thing, which eventually turned into what we now know as trick-or-treating. However, it wasn’t until recently that treats became more common than tricks.

For Example, In the 1920s, rowdy pranks had become expensive and costly, especially in major cities. Over time, cities and towns began organizing tame, family-oriented Halloween celebrations, which eventually helped reduce the number of reported pranks. Once candy companies began releasing special Halloween-themed candies, our modern idea of “trick-or-treating” was born.

Halloween, as we know it today, is one of our oldest holidays. It wasn’t always celebrated in the United States, but it has become an important and fun part of our culture. So, we can’t think of a better way to celebrate than by sending Halloween gifts. Because at GourmetGiftBaskets.com, it’s what we do best!

I remember as a child in England in the 1960s also enjoying Halloween. But we didn’t do the ‘trick-or-treat’ thing. We used to play ‘Murder in the Dark’, a game with a fabulous name but whose rules I can no longer remember. I seem to recall knowing that Halloween wasn’t something that we traditionally celebrated in England. I certainly didn’t know back then it originated from Ireland (even though my mother’s family were Irish immigrants); in fact, I didn’t realize  it had Celtic roots until I started researching this post. Back then, I vaguely sensed Halloween was an American import, which is closer to the truth: despite the ‘Celtic’ gloss, Halloween is obviously an overwhelmingly American thing, and this is why young South Koreans also celebrate it.

Halloween is, one could say, a bizarre dimension of the pervasive and hugely successful cultural imperialism of the United States of America.

Actually, this is one of the reasons why living in Korea has been relatively easy for me, a Westerner. As a Brit growing up in Eastbourne, a small seaside town on the south coast, I discovered I shared this imperializing experience with my future Korean wife who was growing up in northern Seoul.

When I was sixteen, I brought a pale blue sweatshirt with the logo of the University of California on it. Why? Because it was cool. It symbolized something glamorous.. I took to wearing Levi jeans, which I had to make a pilgrimage to a shop in the nearby and more cosmopolitan town of Brighton to purchase  (I still wear Levi’s – in fact, by very good fortune there’s a Levi’s store in the nearby Lotte Outlet shopping complex!).  Back then, I listened mostly to American music (although we Brits had our fair share of pop stars) and watched mostly American tv and movies. But to call this influence ‘cultural imperialism’, as my left-leaning and inherently anti-American adult mindset encourages me to do, fails to confront the fact that what I’m referring to is more like a ‘romance.’  If I’ve been colonized, it’s because I wanted to be colonized.  

For the British, this romance began during World War Two (when the American GI’s were ‘over paid, over sexed, and over here’) and was propelled by a bullish Yankee dollar and overwhelming American confidence in their nation’s destiny to be guardian of the ‘free world.’ For my wife and South Koreans, the romance began after World War Two and went into turbo-drive after the Korean War. Nowadays, South Korea is by far the most Americanized East Asian country.

So, what is so ‘romantic’ about America? David Hockney, the British Pop artist emigrated to California in 1964 and later wrote: ‘Within a week of arriving….in this strange big city, not knowing a soul, I’d passed the driving test, bought a car, driven to Las Vegas and won some money, got myself a studio, started painting all in a week. And I thought: it’s just how I imagined it would be.” ‘Just as I imagined it would be.” I know what Hockney means! New York City was ‘just as I imagined’ when I moved there in 1983 (I stayed for three years). America was so familiar because we’d absorbed  it through the mass media. We’d absorbed it willingly and easily because it was so appealing. America seemed so free, so unburdened by the past, so unlike staid, repressed, grey England. It is this promise of freedom that we all desire by becoming ‘trainee’ Americans. I recall  when I lived in New York having very strongly the sensation that everything was potentially within my reach, whereas in England it had felt many things were not, due to class, and my small-town background. Being ‘American’ meant nothing less that becoming truly modern and free.

The first thing I noticed when I arrived in Tel Aviv as a very immature eighteen year old going to work on a kibbutz, was a big Coca-Cola sign written in Hebrew script.  This still sums up for me the pull and reach of American culture. It seems so easy to translate into every world language.  It’s a kind of cultural Esperanto. But how does it succeed in being so democratic? Because it is the lowest-common denominator? American culture is almost synonymous with consumer capitalism and neoliberalism.  On a material level, practically everything is American (though not manufactured there): this Apple computer I’m working on, the clothes I wear, the food I often eat (even in Korea), the social media networks I use. But you can’t really be a diligent consumer – or even just a  person of the modern world - without also embracing a state of being that we could call ‘Americanness’.  In Sapiens. A Brief History of Humankind, the Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari writes:

The capitalist-consumerist ethics is revolutionary in another respect. Most previous ethical systems presented people with a pretty tough deal. They were promised paradise, but only if they cultivated compassion and tolerance, overcame craving and anger, and restrained their selfish interested. This was too tough for most……In contrast, most people today successfully live up to the capitalist-consumerist ideal. The new ethic promises on condition that the rich remain greedy and spend their time making more money, and the masses give free rein to their cravings and passions – and buy more and more. This is the first religion in history whose followers actually do what they are asked to do. How, though, do we know that we’ll really get paradise in return? We’ve seen it on television.  

Of course, America isn’t paradise. As I grew older, I learned to question the Americanizing imperative. But this often meant focusing on the American ‘nightmare’, on all the ways it patently fails to be the paradise it advertises itself to be: the appalling inequalities in wealth, the racism, the violence, the dysfunctional democratic system,  the superpower overreach, et. etc. But this obsession merely reinforces the fact that whatever we might think of the real America, the one that’s implanted in our imaginations – in the global collective imagination – is overwhelmingly compelling because it syncs so perfectly with the socio-economic reality of modern, ‘developed’ societies.  

The English writer Martin Amis wrote a book called ‘The Moronic Inferno’, published in 1986. It’s a collection of essays about America that are so entertaining because Amis is simultaneously appalled and enamored by his subject.  He wrote:  “I got the phrase ‘the moronic inferno’, and much else, from Saul Bellow, who informs me that he got it from [the English writer and artist] Wyndham Lewis. Needless to say, the moronic inferno is not a peculiarly American condition. It is global and perhaps eternal. It is also, of course, primarily a metaphor, a metaphor for human infamy: mass, gross, ever-distracting human infamy.”

There is a steep price to be paid for enjoying this cultural lingua franca. The Japanese philosopher Ueda Shitzuteru calls it the “hypersystemization of the world” - the deadening unifying cultural uniformity imposed by American-stye consumer capitalism, which is “bringing with it a swift and powerful process of homogenization that is superficial and yet thorough-going”.  We live, declares Ueda, in a “mono-world which renders meaningless the differences between East and West”. This ‘hypersytemization’, as Amis noted, also has an ominous, apocalyptic dimension because the United States is a superpower equipped with nuclear weapons: ‘Perhaps the title phrase is more resonant, and more prescient, than I imagined. It exactly describes a possible future, one in which the moronic inferno will cease to be a metaphor and will become a reality: the only reality.”

We wince at the crassness of American culture, it’s deep superficiality, but we cannot escape its profound allure.  I guess people living under Roman rule might have felt a similar compulsion to mimic Roman manners and ways of thinking  - the manners of the rulers. It’s a form of assimilation, but also of being on the right side of history: the winning side. However much China might challenge America economically, it has already been colonized culturally simply by adopting consumerism.  There are very few places left one Earth that have not been colonized. One of them lies just a few miles north of where I write this post. However much we might cringe at what America has become – as if the kind and encouraging Uncle Sam has turned into a serial rapist and murderer -  there’s still nowhere else that can enchant like the idea of America.

NOTES

The quote from Gourmet Baskets is from: https://www.gourmetgiftbaskets.com/Blog/post/history-halloween-united-states.

The quote from the History Channel is from:  https://www.history.com/topics/halloween/history-of-halloween

The David Hockey quote is from: https://www.thedavidhockneyfoundation.org/chronology/1964

Martin Amis’ book can be purchased at:  https://www.amazon.com/Moronic-Inferno-Other-Visits-America/dp/0140127194

Yuval Noah Harari’s book can be purchased at: https://www.amazon.com/Sapiens-Humankind-Yuval-Noah-Harari/dp/0062316117