America on Display

No place like home

Yesterday, being Columbus Day, we had a few hours of downtime, and being in Washington DC, we thought we would go over to the Corcoran, where they were having a photo exhibition on the impact of oil.

Alas, the Corcoran is closed on Mondays, so we hoofed it over to the Smithsonian, a place I have not been in years, and went to check out the National Museum of American History.

The last time I went to the Smithsonian was when I was about 10 years old, so a lot of American history has transpired since then.  They also moved the American history stuff from the castle to a new building next to the Air and Space Museum.

The museum speaks volumes about America, but most of it not so good.

The building is enormous, cavernous in fact, but most of it is empty space.  Marble floors, white walls and high ceilings with banks of leather chairs scattered about, it reminded me of nothing so much as an airport departures terminal.  Lots of empty space.  Which is odd, considering what it is supposed to contain,

The exhibits are sequestered off into the corners of the museum, and arranged by topics:  America at War, The Presidents, Immigration and so on. A bit like an 8th grade American studies text book.

The exhibits themselves are…. well, perhaps the kindest way I could explain them is, designed for idiots,

Giant blow up photos, extremely simple text in big print, blaring music or narration and the occasional reliquary: Abraham Lincoln’s desk, Abraham Lincoln’s hat, the masks that covered the faces of Lincoln’s assassins when they were hanged.

It was history meets USA Today, and in this case, USA Today wins.  A comic book version of American history.  Nothing particularly demanding or complicated. No deeper explanations.  No conflicts. No issues. Not much of anything really. Just a barrage of junk.

The more I looked at it and passed through it, the more I came to understand that what I was looking at was  a TV version of American History. Big on images, big on ‘celebrities’.  The Presidents wing is dominated by a few well-known Presidents and a few of their artifacts. The underlying principle of the museum seems to be ‘let’s not get too complicated here’. 

And let’s have lots of big pictures and lots of noise all the time. Nary a silent moment.

Well, you take a society that spends 4.5 hours a day watching TV for 40 years, and this is what you get. TV culture.

Lots of the exhibits were pretty empty as well.  There is a stuffed Bison in the “Westward Expansion” wing.  There were once millions of them on the Great Plains, the exhibit tells me, but most of them were killed for food or use of their pelts for warmth or sport.  (I think it was mostly the latter, as well as trying to starve the Indians into submission and the western reservations). A woman on a cell phone was yelling to her friend to meet here near the “big stuffed animal’. Other than that, this exhibit was pretty empty.

There was, however, a massive line waiting to get into the American Culture wing.  

Now THIS was popular.

And what were they waiting to see?

The Ruby Slippers from The Wizard of Oz and the chairs that Archie and Edith sat in for All in the Family.

One room.

A few bits and bobs from well known movies and TV shows.

That’s it.

And the line is out the door.

So what spoke loudest to me at the Museum of American History was the general emptiness of the building.  Yes, I think the folks at the Smithsonian have captured American Culture at the turn of the 21st Century perfectly.

Sorry to say.