PERSPECTIVE ON CULTURAL EXPORTS : The World’s Taste Is All-American : In classbound societies, burgers and blue jeans --the lowbrow best--represent the freedom of constant reinvention.

Sitting in North Korea recently, listening to the Village People singing scratchy disco classics--only one week after watching “Jaws” again on the Holiday Inn video in Tibet--I could not help but be struck by all the familiar old questions: What is it about American culture that so captures hearts and minds around the world? And why is it so often the same American products that seem to us all but a refutation of true culture? Every week the newspapers bring new examples: hour-long lines outside the Pizza Hut in Moscow, 300 million Chinese watching the Super Bowl, Frank Zappa invited over as an adviser to the new Czech government. And in the age of satellite and fax, the shots seen round the world are moving more rapidly than ever: Within six months of “Batman” assaulting the screens of New York, I saw bowler-hatted Indian women in lonely Andean villages selling Batmobiles (together with their pan-pipes).

There are, of course, many practical explanations for this. The American Century has been the technological century, and all the great communicators of the global village--radio, TV and the cinema--came of age at a time when America seemed the strongest and most confident nation in the world. Thus the two powers ascended hand in hand: “Casablanca,” Life magazine and Coca-Cola took the promise of America abroad, and vice versa. In time, the power abetted the culture, till American movies and music were leading the world in slickness and scope. And after a while the trend became self-fulfilling: America was seen so often on the screen that it became a place of two-dimensional glamour. By now, America is such a byword for everything young and modern and free that everything young and modern and free is deemed to be from America (in the mythic imagination of the world, Mick Jagger is American, and pizza and Reeboks are, too).

Nor is it surprising that the best of American culture is not necessarily the most popular abroad; the best of American culture is not even the most popular at home. Besides, Woody Allen or David Lynch are much more culturally specific than Rambo, who stands to lose far less in translation (as is the case with Bruce Lee in reverse). And what the world seeks out, in any case, is a particular vision, a certain face, of America. The reigning American literary giant in both Germany and France is Charles Bukowski, and French cineastes are talking of an hommage to Mickey Rourke--an honor that will come as something of a surprise to those who sat through “Desperate Hours” and “Wild Orchid.” Yet even this need not seem quite so strange to us. Many Americans, after all, still prefer the rosy Edwardian cadences of “Masterpiece Theater” to the grittier realities of contemporary Britain, as presented by Martin Amis, say, or Johnny Rotten.

Yet there is to all this another dimension, and a more interesting one. For, the more closed or oppressed a society, the greater its hunger, so it seems, for things American. And this is not just because nothing excites the appetite like prohibition; it is, rather, because America is still in many respects a symbol, and one with a hopeful ring to it. Michael Jackson in Havana means something different from Michael Jackson in Encino. Watching him in Cuba becomes a way of making contact with a world of possibility, affiliating oneself with a land that seems fresher and more open than older or more established cultures. I once saw a dissident intellectual in Havana scrawl passionate political appeals to Mr. Jackson all over the album cover of “Bad.” The people who spend a week’s wages to visit the Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet in Tian An Men Square are not there just for the Colonel’s secret recipe; they are buying into something more, not unlike the students who erected a Statue of Liberty nearby last year. In Thailand, McDonalds’ franchises feature floor-to-ceiling windows so that customers can be seen by their envious friends paying three times more for their burgers than they would elsewhere Those of us who covet Gucci, Mercedes and Dior can hardly scoff.

What is surprising to us, though, is precisely the fact that the appeal of America is, in many ways, the opposite of chic; America is fashionable in part because it represents a freedom from history and class and fashion. People look to America for blue jeans, but to Europe for haute cuisine. America still has a decidedly democratic air; it is the people’s choice, catering to the dreams of Everyman. The most popular American figures in Japan, for example, are the icons of rebellion--Elvis, James Dean and Marilyn; the most popular Hollywood products are “Gone With the Wind” and “The Wizard of Oz.” America still has the air of a country without traditions, and, to that extent, without pretensions, able to reinvent itself with each new decade. That is also why it feels like Everybody’s home, as much a notion as a nation.

This is, I think, what will keep America on top of the airwaves even as it loses its political and economic pre-eminence. Germany and Japan may take over much of the world with their efficient systems and discipline and industry; yet it seems to me a safe guess that no one, even in Pyongyang, will soon be singing along to Kraftwerk’s “Bahn, bahn, bahn, auf der Autobahn,” and no one, even in Tibet, will soon be glued to Tora-san’s latest film adventure.