Attention universe:
I am a crappy gift-wrapper.
I just wrapped my husband’s two holiday gifts. The small one turned out okay. Not Martha Stewart-worthy, but not laughable either.
My wrapping job on the large second gift was verkakte. Verkakte is a Yiddish word that roughly translates to “screwed up.” It also roughly translates to “oy, vey, Naomaleh, you’re 42 years old and you can’t even wrap a present!”
There’s plenty of intelligent programming on my TiVo lineup. PBS Newshour. Jeopardy. The Colbert Report. There’s also an embarrassing amount of mindless, patriarchal jibber-jabber on my TiVo—the kind of stuff that smart people say they watch “because it’s a train wreck” or “for ironic pleasure” or “because I’m looking forward to the apocalypse.”
Would we be better off if members of Congress abandoned all vestiges of civility, and instead went after each other with a cruel barrage of insults?
This goes against our modern sense of how politics is supposed to function. In 2009, when a South Carolina Congressman shouted, “You lie!” as President Obama spoke, people were horrified. What has happened, we bemoaned, to civility in American politics? It’s bad enough that commentators are screaming at each other on Fox News, but now, in the House of Representatives?
But then, this past weekend, I went to see Lincoln. And to me, the most fascinating part was watching the Congressmen debating each other in the circa-1864 House of Representatives. These weren’t just any debates. Out of the mouths of these distinguished gentlemen came personal attacks and painfully clever barbs, which were followed by partisan roars of approval. Along with the cigars and spittoons, I almost expected to see these guys with frothy mugs of lager. They may as well have been at the pub.
Okay, readers. Let’s assume that like me, you are a heterosexual married woman. Now, let’s assume that someone sends you a holiday card. It is addressed to you as follows, with your husband’s name in place of my husband’s name:
Now, how would you react to receiving a card addressed in this manner? Select one.
I live in a first-ring suburb of Minneapolis in a house that was built in 1949. In postwar America, my neighborhood was the pinnacle of American normalcy, where people retreated from the madness of the war years into adorable 900-square foot boxes. Women were pressured to abandon their wartime jobs, crank out babies, and make lovely concoctions out of lemon Jell-O and Veg-All. (All of this, of course, was dependent on whiteness.) And no, not everybody subscribed to this notion that conformity was synonymous with patriotism, but many did.
These days, we tend to look at the little houses and shake our heads at the conformity. But have things really changed? You might think so—until you warm up your television and flip the channel (so to speak) to HGTV and House Hunters.
If you’ve never seen House Hunters, the premise is simple. There’s a couple, or a single person, or a family. They want to buy a house. A realtor comes by and shows them three houses in their budget. The pros and cons of the house are weighed, and a decision is made. They buy their house. They are thrilled with their house. Buyer’s remorse does not happen on House Hunters, ever. They are always thrilled with their house.
Occasionally, House Hunters features people who are looking for something a little different, although the “different” people kind of fall into tropes, like the prototypical artsy couple who wants to fix up a 1920s Craftsman. What’s stunning to me, though, is how rare this is. By far, the majority of house hunters essentially want the same house.
So, for the last few weeks I’ve been dealing with some severely painful headaches. Percocet helps, which means I spent quite a bit of time last week planted hazily on my couch, renting old episodes of Modern Family.
I’ve only started watching Modern Family recently. I enjoy it, although I must say that after about ten straight episodes, these people seem excruciatingly whiny. (Which is probably true about spending excessive amounts of time with non-sitcom people too, so I suppose you can’t hold it against them entirely.)
As my Percocet haze has lifted, I’ve found myself thinking about the merits of the show. To what degree is Modern Family a progressive representation of American life, and to what degree is it the more of the same-old-same-old mainstream ideological sitcom formula? I definitely dig the “modern families have changed” vibe that includes a gay family (hooray!) and a multicultural, multigenerational family. This is certainly not the Brady Bunch, both because of the diversity and because this family deals with real issues beyond what Mom will say about her broken vase. (Claire, presumably, would be none too happy.)
So here are my Percocet-laden thoughts on the ideology of Modern Family. Like all ideological thoughts (with or without Percocet), these are up for interpretation, and I’d love to hear what you have to say.
Modern Family and First World Problems
Let’s start with a way that this show doesn’t transcend mainstream sitcom ideology at all, and that is the fact that the three intertwined family are upper middle class. They all have massive homes in one of the most expensive real estate markets in America. Since the onset of TV families, it’s always been very much the norm for families to have lots of stuff. Advertisers have deliberately pushed for that. The consequence is that our sense of what counts as “middle class” and what we need to be normal has become inflated, and consumerism in American life has exploded.
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