The America Series

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About this series

"America, America, this is you."

Remember “America’s Funniest Home Videos”? The show began with this throaty jingle played over a graphic of a video camera surrounded by red, white, and blue bunting – patriotic trimmings for televisual technology America had put its stamp on. “You could be a star tonight,” the jingle seduced, instant celebrity being another major ingredient for a uniquely American experience.

NPR commentator Steven Stark, in an essay called “How ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ tore down our wall,” ties the international events surrounding the show’s release to its grip on the culture. As democracy was celebrated in China, Eastern Europe, and the Soviet Union, “Funniest Videos” was an egalitarian expression of a similar vein: “By making the audience at home the stars, and then giving the studio audience the power to decide the best video of the show, this series was the most democratic show on television – a populist rebellion packaged as programming.”

Stark is bothered only by the show’s cartoonish qualities packaged as family values: “Given the show’s slot in family viewing time, it was vaguely sadistic to focus so strongly on children continually humiliating and injuring themselves.” He quotes LA Times TV critic Howard Rosenberg as leveling a rather serious charge against the ABC network:

As anyone who has been a parent knows, a small boy who walks head-first into a camera usually cries. A small boy getting hit in the face with a shovelful of snow usually cries.... But there is no sound of crying here because each video usually ends on impact with crunched bodies becoming the punch lines.... Here’s a thought that ABC and the producers of this program may not like, but is worth considering: ‘America’s Funniest Home Videos’ inadvertently encourages child abuse.

Aside from the fact that the program’s picture of America was of a land where people’s pants constantly fall down and toddlers whack their dads in the crotch with wiffle ball bats – still the show’s “This is you” promise to introduce us to ourselves was enticing – we were about to look our country in the face in our favorite way possible: video clips, a la MTV. It’s the American way. That the whole thing would be anchored by Bob Saget and his Pez-dispensed canned quasi-humor would not dampen such a patriotic event.

“The America Series” makes a similar claim about what it will accomplish, although I will take pains to spare you Saget-variety cheese. I’m also interested in a variety show of sorts that presents snapshots of America. But I’m looking to plumb the depths of America’s foundational ideals, describe them, and evaluate them. I prefer the style of storytelling best illustrated in the “Glimpses of the New West” essay collection – contrasting old images with the new ones, jumping from place to place, leaving impressions, if not a thesis. Call it postmodern, but sometimes I think you can do more when you rise above an A-B-C scholarly structure.

This isn’t an American history, nor a current cultural overview. That would take a more systematic approach and much more space. No, this is what America means to me, just an American citizen at the turn of the millennium. It will inevitably be strained through my own personal point of view – that of a middle class religious Midwesterner who’s lived in the same state all his life. But America is a nation of mass culture more than distinct communities, and so my scrapbook will have a lot of overlap with those of my fellow Americans.

So I’ll visit what I consider the two most important American meta-metaphors – the mall and McDonald’s. Does America have a major cultural legacy beyond these? In “Glimpses of the New West,” I try to capture the essence of the over-arching American mythology – the Wild West, home of the cowboy - the self-reliant, boundlessly ambitious patriot. I try to look behind the granite faces of Mount Rushmore, beyond the figures of Washington and Lincoln, to find a man who shaped American politics in his own quiet way, wishing all the while he didn’t have to. The Hoover Dam ably represents the American 20th Century – a building project so logistically bizarre and impossible, such a stiff-arm of nature’s fury, and boldly carried out during the Great Depression, no less, in a country that refuses to sulk. My favorite venue is the airport, where life is as overbearingly ordinary and sanitized as the voice recording benignly demanding there be no smoking, and where it’s routine to soar above the clouds.

America, this is you.

Intro: The American T-Shirt
About the Series
Christmas at the Mall
Glimpses of the New West
Edmund Ross
McDonald's
Birthday Cards
Hoover Dam
The Airport
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