Peep this, my friends:

It’s a trailer for a movie called “Proud American” which seems to be little more than a propaganda romp through the good old American Dream, an intentional re-focusing - through media theatrics - on the values which unite us as a nation, as a people. The timing of a movie such as this hitting the media landscape when it is seems hardly coincidental. Economics and finances seem to be falling apart; we’re facing as a people another Not-So Great Depression. People need a hopeful vision they can cling to in troubled times.

Enter “Proud American.”

What aspect of being an American are you proud of? What’s your story, what’s your struggle? Those are the kinds of questions and conversations a movie such as this is intended to inspire.

I’ve been studying lately the history of theatre, and it seems that the modern history of theatre is intimately linked to the development of the nation state. Theatre’s place in culture, not unlike religion, is to bind us together with unifying stories: to give a group of people a common frame of reference, a common set of symbols, themes, motifs and role-models. National theatres rose in importance as nations rose in importance. As nobles and notables stripped power away from regencies, the changes in leadership and attitude needed to be communicated down to the level of the common people. The guillotine as street theatre, very crude, very to the point. Reduce everything to heroes and villains, comedy and tragedy.

The previous American Depression found underneath it a massive flowering of civic and artistic works. It was the era of the megalithic mural painters, men and women who captured the spirit of the common man in America, the worker, the person on the ground putting their shoulder to the wheel which made this nation great. You can see the same thing in Maoist Chinese posters and artwork. Simple stories to unite the people behind. Clear and obvious themes: things which can be communicated easily and repeated with their embedded memeplexes intact whether they are transmitted through the stage, screen or theatre of the street. Of the great dams and other civic structures commissioned during those days, their purpose was to make the common man an actor in the national story, an active character in the telling of the identity of a whole people. A man could go out and build the new America, even if he were just digging ditches along a highway…

Welcome to the new era of American populist media theatrics. Welcome to the new push to define who we are and where we are going. They want you to tell your story through the consumerist theatrics of the marketplace, while they turn around and hand enormous wads of money to one another. It’s the “you” generation, as Time Magazine declared at the end of 2006. Are you a proud American?