Happy Meal, Anyone?
Ponder this: Why is it called cultural diversity when Americans embrace enchiladas and Islam, but cultural imperialism when they export things American overseas?
Six anthropologists studying the local impact of McDonald’s-gone-global found the corporation accommodates local custom quite willingly.
When the first McDonald’s opened in Moscow, the franchise positioned an employee with a bullhorn outside informing waiting Muscovites: “The employees inside will smile at you. This does not mean that they are laughing at you. We smile because we are happy to serve you.”
In beef-adverse India, McDonald’s serves mutton-based Maharaja Macs, and in Rio de Janeiro, champagne is served under the Golden Arches. (From summer Wilson Quarterly)
* Boys will be boys, part 2: Spokane therapist and author Michael Gurian continues to beat the drum for letting boys be boys and went one-on-one with Harvard psychiatry professor William Pollack in a Time magazine article titled “Is It More Than Boys Being Boys?”
Pollack says society encourages boys into a premature separation from their nurturing moms, hence discourages boys from learning and practicing emotional expression.
Not so, says Gurian. Boys are just being who they are — they are making a natural and critical separation. And, by the way, moms cling too much. Gurian says boys are more independent than girls at ages 5 and 6 and to suggest something is wrong with this is to pathologize boys.
One of the biggest problems for boys in our culture is that adults, especially female ones, need to be educated about “what a boy is,” Gurian says. Evolved from hunter-gatherer primates whose main purpose was survival, boys’ uniquely fragile brains are not equipped to handle emotive data in the same way girls’ are.
Women, he says, do not see “how neglected their emotionally disadvantaged adolescent sons feel” as a result of women’s lack of interest “in male biology and thus its forgetfulness of the subtleties of the male soul.”
The bottom line, Gurian says, is to stop asking boys how they feel and nurture them instead through action-oriented activity. (From July 20 Time)
* Could Jet Skis inspire such thoughts? One of the snippets offered up as part of a Victoria magazine spread on turn-of-the-century summer retreats to the Adirondacks hit just the right chord during a mid-summer lakeside retreat: “Suddenly from around a wooded point, a tiny fleet of canoes dart out into the glittering water … and the lake seems all at once to be smiling and human.” (From July Victoria)