What is really going on

It is time for another missive in the massive canon of the Bureau.  You have been warned.

The United States has been waning as an influence for some time.  I submit as evidence the completely anecdotal fact that the most impressive piece of music I've heard in a very long time comes from Colombia, 'Tu No Eres Para Mi', by Fanny Lu, and the most impressive movie I've seen in a while is 'Chandni Chowk to China'.  To be perfectly fair and open, I grew up in India, and the experience was very nostalgic.

However, as always, your analysts continue to read between the lines (yes, there's more than one, and at least one other analyst has also seen 'Chandni Chowk to China').  Two things about that movie really grab the attention of the bureau.  First, the movie is produced by an American movie studio, Warner Brothers.  This fact is actually held as part of the reason the movie itself is considered a failure by those following Bollywood, that the Americans dumbed it down for international release, that Warner Brothers is having trouble making its own movies so is seeking to get a percentage of the foreign market but in the process is ruining the genre.

The bureau does not think so.  Warner Brothers, and Hollywood, in general, are really not in need of saving.  The American music industry is in trouble, a mess laregly of its own making, as its margins are too high to be sustainable in this day of easy copies, but the movie industry is still seen as providing a good value for the money, and is moving to make its margins far more palatable.

No, what is going on is that Warner Brothers is, indeed, trying to make Bollywood more mainstream.  What that means is that they  picked a snore of a movie specifically because it was a good vehicle to explore the market, as it would not cost a lot and it would produce guaranteed box office money.  This is just good business on the part of Warner Brothers.

However, the second, possibly more interesting thing shows up in that this movie is about interaction between India and China, where Indians are shown as 'cool, artistic and full of leadership' while China is shown as 'technically savvy'.  It's that last little bit that ought to scare Americans, because we made them that way.

Essentially, we have handed China the keys to the kingdom by teaching them how to make all our gizmos.  For the US market, they do not do the KIRF (Keeping It Real Fake) knockoffs, but for the rest of the world they do.  This means much of what we have them make for us, they knock off, reducing the cost of the unit and some of its western polish, and sell to the eastern rim.

The bureau is of the opinion that the end of the US hegemony will be a good thing for the world and may bring forth a new renaissance where the world politic and world culture is not dominated by the mass market western mold but rather is a bizarre bazaar model common to the east, a situation where ideas flourish largely unfettered by control.

In a situation like that, in the new global world that is emerging, your author can hear a song on the radio and locate the actual song within minutes, buying the song so that royalties get paid back to the original singer in Colombia (theoretically; we all know that most of the 'overhead' in the music industry is the RIAA and its ilk).  In an unfettered global economy, this sort of thing would be commonplace and such an artist could have the opportunity to become an international superstar.

For years the US market for culture has simply dwarfed all other markets simply because the US economy dwarfed all other economies.  As the US economy contracts and other economies grow into its place, this will be less so.  Hollywood still has a massive lead on most other centers of culture, and most of the money ends up in Hollywood somehow, but other centers are emerging, and, indeed, it is now possible to produce a movie completely without involving a studio, and distribute it online, as the wildly popular 'Dr. Evil' series has shown.

So, to wrap up, the US used to have all the money, no longer has it, and this is a good thing for the rest of the world.