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InTRODUCTIOn TO T~~ PAP~RQAC~ ~DillOn IN THE BRIEF SEVEN YEARS SINCE I FINished writing this book in 2005, popular culture has continued to change at a dizzying pace, vastly expanding the number and variety of options as well as ways to access them. Familiar patterns remain, certainly. Corporate behemoths keep jockeying for position and profits. New technology relentlessly brushes aside old systems and devices. Interactions between mainstream amusements (in the tradition of the circus's fabled big tent) and riskier, marginalized sideshows continue to reshape boundaries of respectability , acceptability, and controversy. Themes of centralization and homogenization persist. But, more than ever, fragmenting, disintegrating forces are apparent. These fracturing, splintering tendencies pose urgent new questions about the role of entertainment in a nation beset by disturbing expressions of disunity, acrimony, and resentment. "If you don't know where you are going, you might wind up someplace else," said Yogi Berra, the former New York Yankees catcher turned street sage. By the twenty-first century's second decade, America's sprawling amusement culture seems adrift-as confused and disparate as the nation itself. Entertainments have never been uniform or synchronized, of course, but the rapidly proliferating sideshows make the big tent harder to find. "We have become a nation of niches," asserts media commentator Neil Gabler.1 This trend has gathered momentum against a backdrop of jarring events: the nation's longest war, the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression, a technological upheaval of revolutionary proportions, and a bitterly divided political environment. Responding to what President George W. Bush labeled the "war on terror," popular culture created a take-charge, laconic hero in the John Wayne tradition: Jack Bauer, a fictional counterterrorism expert who time and again saved the country, even if he sometimes had to use torture. He viii INTRODUCTION TO THE PAPERBACK EDITION was so popular that leading officials such as Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia praised him, prompting one journalist to wonder "if they were aware that Jack Bauer is a character on a TV show, 24." By 2012, after ten seasons on Fox (2001-2010), Bauer was gone from TV, and the seemingly endless war was at last winding down. On May 2, 2011, U.S. Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden, and in December, the last American combat troops left Iraq. Soldiers in Afghanistan are supposed to be home by the end of 2014. The wars produced grim statistics: by 2012, their costs had soared to over $2.5 trillion. American deaths alone surpassed 4,600. Tens of thousands of veterans returned home with severe physical and emotional injuries . Yet 63 percent of young adults could not locate Iraq on a map. Such numbers help explain why the entertainment industry has had difficulty finding wartime narratives with wide appeaP Identifying and courting audiences became even more complicated as the Great Recession struck the United States with unexpected fury in mid2007 . Over the next frightening months, as Americans lost homes, jobs, and businesses, the amusement industry took a pummeling. The challenge was not simply that of "competing for people's entertainment dollars," according to one chief executive: "We're going up against milk and orange juice." By 2009, 25 percent of the wealth of average American households·had disappeared. Consumer confidence was shattered. Income and wealth inequities worsened. "The banker grows fat I Working man grows thin," lamented Bruce Springsteen on his 2012 album Wrecking Ball. The "epic breakdown" began to stabilize only after federal actions bailed out the banking system, rescued the auto industry, and injected almost $800 billion into an economic stimulus program.3 By then, however, the combined effects of the economic catastrophe, the controversial rescue programs, and the slow recovery had stoked public rage. While the 2008 election of the nation's first African American president raised hopes that the United States had turned a racial corner, it also injected an additional dose of bitter partisanship into American politics. On talk radio, Rush Limbaugh communicated the rising level of vitriol when he asserted that Barack Obama's election would encourage black kids to assault whites on school buses.4 The ravaged economy was critical to Obama's election, but popular culture also played a role. In 2010, when Oprah Winfrey was sitting next to Obama at the Kennedy Center, comedian Chris Rock joked about "the most powerful person in the world. And right next to her, Barack Obama! Hey, he didn't get her a job-she got him a job." The...

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