Dr. America
Dr. America at WCAL 89.3 FM
Dr. America |
Dr. America Sampler
Dr. America at WCAL 89.3 FM |
The American Studies Museum is as large as the imagination, containing object lessons derived from objects as diverse as Pampers and airline peanuts. Its Home and Garden Center displays virtually all of the items that make a museum of every American do micile. The Knickknack Corner includes items like Beanie Babies and McMemories. The Work Place, including the Office Suite, includes artifacts as illuminating as Window-Lites and day planners and paper clips. The Museum's fully operational Super Market in cludes a complete collection of foodstuffs and other stuffs--like deodorant and toothpaste and toilet paper--that can be found in the miles of American market aisles. Its Mall of Minnesota is jam-packed with the evidence contained in the average shopping center. The Fashion Wing, for example, includes clothes--like Hard Rock Café T-shirts--but also such epiphenomena as mannequins and suntans. The Food Court serves everything from fast food to sloe gin. The Automotive Garage contains cars and trucks and sport-utility vehicles, as well as parking places and such accessories as radar detectors. Advertisements--one of the most important measures of an American mind--are distributed throughout the collection. In the Signs and Symbols Suite, the Bumperst icker and Billboard Wing contains kernels of American philosophy like "Shit Happens" and "Life is a Journey. Enjoy the Ride." And, of course, the Audiovisual Archive contains copies of every movie, television show, and computer display ever shown in the c ountry.
According to what Leslie Prosterman calls "the law of inverse importance," most academics write most about things that most people don't do. Doctor America, on the other hand, is intensely interested in the significance of the insignificant, making the familiar unfamiliar and vice versa. Sometimes he provides what Elizabeth Minnich calls "blinding flashes of the obvious;" on other tours, he probes deeply into the underlying ideas and institutions of American life. In either case, by exploring the meani ngs of the material world, he complexifies our culture, and helps us to see why we act like Americans.
Although he is a professor, Dr. America--who has a Ph.D. in American Culture from the University of Middle Minnesota--is no pedant. His tours are often enlivened by personal stories, when Mrs. America and their all-America children guide him to a bette r of understanding of his own behavior. Too, Dr. America believes that it's hard to be really serious without a smile, and that humor is an essential element of our humanity. In his tours, therefore, he mixes the play of ideas and the play of words, evoki ng, he hopes, both laughter and the sort of amusement that leads to musing.