Consumption culture in today's America is easy to observe, not only by regarding America and Americans, but by looking east, towards western Europe, where globalization (or "Americanization" is quickly turning once socialist and "small c-" communist countries into consumption-driven, capitalist states... and they're not happy about it.

"Globalization is the Americanization of foreign culture," I hear, with just a little prick of disdain, a little bit of bitterness. This sentence is hard enough to hear as an American citizen in a foreign country. It's harder still to hear when you are expected to be the sole American ambassador in the room.

As a student at the Collge International de Cannes last spring, I entered into a melting pot of different cultures and ideas. Students come from the world over to learn French while living in one of the most beautiful parts of France. Aside from myself, my class was made up of four other students from Italy, England, Japan, and Switzerland. We always started each three-hour class with an attempt to conquer some of that mystical French grammar (only the French would have a tense called the plus perfect of the subjunctive that's constructed from a near extinct and somewhat redundant tense called, ironically, the simple past). We almost always strayed from the exercise at hand to discuss elements of our own cultural and political systems, with each student acting as a representative of her own country, and our teacher representing his native France.

On this particular day, the others in the room, the Europeans especially, were quite upset with the introduction of McDonald's into their countries. As they turned to me to defend myself, I recalled a caricature I had seen several years before: a map of America, with our capitalist merchandise represented by Ronald McDonald, the cast of Friends, and an ominous looking Mickey Mouse looming over the Atlantic Ocean, poised to crash like a massive tidal wave over the small yet proud amalgamation of European countries, an ancient Roman soldier brandishing a sword bravely next to a Viking holding up his battle axe against the invasion of our "culture."

Many Europeans have a hard time grasping the concept of an American culture aside from these capitalist consumption-driven images, and even as an American, I have to agree. We're a nation of immigrants: any culture that we claim to have often appears to have been stolen from some other country, giving us our "melting pot" image.

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