Textual Poaching

            For as long as I’ve been living, I have identified with being American. With grandparents on both sides of my family having been war veterans, I was raised to love America and respect it; after all it’s the best country, right? It was clear to me weeks ago that American would be the identification of choice for this project because of my deep love for this country and what it means, or at least used to mean, and I knew there would be great material with great remix possibilities.

            Not long ago, I was introduced to a clip from the show, The Newsroom, staring Jeff Daniels who is a news anchor. Please watch the clip HERE (some offensive language). In the clip Daniels character is asked why America is the greatest country ever, to which he answers in a dramatic way that it is no longer the greatest country in the world. One of my favorite things he says is, “with a straight face you’re going to tell students that America is so star spangled awesome that we’re the only ones in the world who have freedom?” he then lists other countries that have freedom and informs the room full of students that out of 207 sovereign states 180 of them have freedom. But after he convinces you that America is no longer the greatest, he talks about how it used to be, and infers that it could be if we went back to what this country was founded on. This was my inspiration both for using some of the most famous quotes in history (and one that is recent because it was too perfect) and wanting to pair something with the quote that was contradictory to it because that’s one of the things I took from Daniels monologue, that there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of Americans out there that believe that America is the greatest country there is, when in fact we trail many, many other countries in things like literacy, health, and labor force. So to get this point across I paired the quotes with something in the present day that directly went against what was being said, for example FDR saying that we don’t need to fear anything but fear and juxtaposing that with a picture of young Muslim girls because a fair amount of Americans fear Muslim Americans for no other reason than 9/11 despite the fact that there have been way more white American men terrorists than any other group in America.

            I was further more inspired by one of the readings we did that were the different depictions of the famous painting “American Gothic”. The one that stood out the most to me was of Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie reenacting it because they were so opposite of the farmer husband and wife that grace the real painting. It was comical because it is such an unnatural thing for them, that they were almost making a mockery of it; this translates well to my current feelings of America. Historically all these speeches have been revered and taught to us as young children and all through grade school, so they aren’t anything that any American would be unfamiliar with. Yet throughout the country we are going against what they have taught us to do. I feel like these sort of ‘America is the greatest’ and ‘look at how awesome our founding fathers were’ is so engrained in our heads while were young but then we grow up and forget that they aren’t here anymore and that it’s our time to be the role models.

            At the end of the day, I still love America and being American. I still wear my American Flag sweater and celebrate Independence Day with revere. But I have taken off the blinders and recognize the shortcomings of this country, and that’s why it was important to me to remix words this country cherishes with what it actually does.