American Media and the Denial of History

‘Our nation held a vigil by our television sets.'.

A European travelling across the United States can find staying at a chain of budget motels a disconcerting experience. After driving several hundred miles - say, from Detroit to St Louis - you find yourself in a room not simply similar, but identical to the one you left at the start of the trip, down to the reproduction painting on the wall, the throw-rug by the bed and the placing of the bar of soap in the shower stall. The management may intend to give you a comfortable sense of familiarity; instead, you experience an unsettling displacement, a spatial deja vu. To spend all day travelling from one room to its identical twin must make you wonder if your journey was really necessary. Inside either room the distance between them becomes indeterminate, incalculable; so does the time it took to travel from one to the other. Such an experience makes explicit the encounter with homogeneity which is commonly produced by the American media