woot.

Gitlin is saying that the stream of rhetoric is both influential in other cultures and a result of the influences of other cultures. This is because everyone partakes in the culture that is emulated by America by watching our movies and listening to our music. The most influential example was of the very random Russian tribe where the grandfather was wearing tribal garb and the grandchild was wearing a backwards baseball cap. As the article put it, it seems that American English is becoming more and more the universal language due to its spread of culture, and while it is still not the largest language it is increasingly becoming the most learned language. I agree that America pours its rhetoric onto the world the way Gitlin depicts. My favorite example of this is how burger king attempted to prove that the Whopper was better then the Big Mac by finding random tribes who had never tried hamburgers and paying them large sums to try each burger and say which is better.