Dispatch

The 10 American Ideas of the Decade

By Derek Thompson

10. Rumors of the Mainstream’s Demise are Greatly Exaggerated

Image credit: imaginaryfriend.blogspot.com

Is there such thing as an American culture any more? It’s now rote to observe that today’s world, what with 1000-channel cable and so on, is exponentially nichefied, spinning off from the mainstream like space particles fleeing the Big Bang (“Where have you gone, Uncle Walter Cronkite?” and so on). So perhaps it bears repeating that a center still holds. Practically every household in America has a Harry Potter/Twilight fanatic (and most have more). Sarah Palin universally fascinates, even where she infuriates. We are a part of all we have seen, even if we don’t even watch our TV on TV anymore (see Idea #1). We all watched Michael Phelps win by a hair in Beijing and saw Obama’s hair-raising acceptance speech in Chicago. We all remember Halle Berry’s tears and New York’s twin towers, Tom Cruise’s couch-hop and John Kerry’s flip-flop, Eliot Spitzer’s U-face and Terry Schiavo’s vacant smile, President Bush’s banner and Janet Jackson’s boob.

And if you don’t ... well, shame on you, because the rest of us do. A visual graph of U.S. pop culture might resemble a massive Venn diagram, a lotus with a thousand petals, but there is an overlapping center stuffed with spectacle and scandal.