AMERIKA: A Panned 1987 TV Series was the Crystal Ball for Today’s USA and the Story isn’t Pretty
I’ve been watching the unravelling of the United States since my departure in 2009.
By the time I left, Twitter had already morphed into the 21st century Mesmer. Words spewed from Twitter’s maw like a fusillade of rotten teeth. Everyday interactions of the hello-how-are-you-how-are-the-kids-school-work-husband-wife kind were supplanted with Nicorette gum, emojis, and bone fragments.
Timing had a lot to do the success of social media. Twitter, case in point, arrived at the perfect moment when institutional inequality and corporate hegemony were creating social and economic schisms the likes of which hadn’t been seen in 80 years. Twitter sauntered in, knocked out some useful parts of our frontal lobes, and took up residence where spinal columns used to be. Causality ceased to be a thing.
Twitter’s arrival may have nailed shut the coffin of critical thinking in the United States; but its disintegration started a long time before, during the faux-blanc Reagan presidency (1981–1989).
If the American nous can be measured by the content on offer on the country’s most widespread mass media — at the time, network television — then by the late 1980s, groupthink had already arrived.
In 1987, I lived in Fresno County California, where I taught public high school in a town called Kerman, population 5,448 for a year. Kerman was a cotton-and-cantaloupe town 20 miles west of Fresno, in the west side of the San Joaquin Valley.
To many people, even many Californians, you can’t get more nowhere than here. Vast swathes of fields, of orchards, of tumbleweed dominate the landscape. In the distance, if it’s not too dusty, you can see the Sierra Foothills.
Crop dusters spreading insecticide buzzed overhead daily spring and fall in a gratingly discordant refrain. In the winter, fog as thick as pea soup coated the Valley floor. School often closed for days when poor visibility made it dangerous to drive.
Despite its racial and ethnic diversity, the Valley’s social strata are a fixed diction. The real power guys are the cotton and truck farmers (field vegetables and fruit like melons, lettuce, tomatoes, squash.) These are mostly Anglos, people of northern European descent. Their holdings amount to hundreds of thousands of acres, particularly on the western side of the Valley. Many of the great-great-grand parents of these men were homesteaders. It is this group who holds the most sway in the never-ending water rights feud. For them, the aphorism: “In the west, whisky is for drinking and water is for fighting” is a governing principle.
The cotton and truck farmers employ most of the Mexican migrant workers found in central California. Generations of Mexican families lived in work camps on their vast holdings. Although Mexicans do all the work on these farms, they have little social standing. Many are undocumented. Ethnic slurs trail this group as they do wherever the local citizens cleave to rigid class and ethnic divisions, like this one:
Q. “What is a Mexican backhoe?”
A. “An hombre with a shovel.”
Armenian immigrants planted the almond and stone fruit orchards in the foothills generations ago. The writer William Saroyan was a notable native son.
Hmong farmers from Vietnam grow strawberries and string beans on small leased fields.
The Azoreans, like the family of Devin Nunes were dairymen.
In February, the middle of the school year, a much anticipated and controversial 13-episode television series hit the airwaves. It was called AMERIKA.
The show flopped. It was panned. The Washington Post described it as a “virtual viewer endurance test.” Viewed through a 2020 lens, however, it’s prescience was uncanny.
The plot of AMERIKA was a disconcerting mirror of life in rural California: rich white farmers, wanna-be-rich white school board members, authoritarians, conformists, nonconformists, and kids getting caught making out in the hall. No farm workers though. You can view it on YouTube.
The cover caption of the February 14–20, 1987 TV Guide read:
“Controversy over AMERIKA. Could a Soviet Takeover Happen This Way?” There’s a photo of Kris Kristofferson who portrays character Devin Milford, right arm raised, fist clenched. Kristofferson plays a reformed politician who once dared speak the truth about the Soviet conquest of the United States. In Episode 1, he’s undergone forced rehabilitation, and is released back into society.
AMERIKA depicts life in a fictional United States after a bloodless annexation of the entire country by the Soviet Union. The Soviet occupation wraps AMERIKA’s United States in a suffocating blanket of inertia. Alethea Milford, Devin’s sister is played by Christine Lahti. Alethea carries on a loveless sexual liaison with the local occupation commander and teaches at the local high school. During Episode 2, Alethea has a confrontation with the Soviet appointed school administrator, Herb, over his treatment of two students who are caught sneaking a kiss in a corridor. He threatens to have the offenders — one of whom is Alethea’s nephew, Justin Milford — arrested or expelled.
“Let me tell you the time is past when the Milford’s owned the county,” he proclaims. “The Milfords of the world are no longer better than the rest of us. I think the subject of the Milfords is the subject for the next advisory committee meeting.”
Alethea replies: “Herb, I think not having to teach shop anymore has really affected your sense of reality.”
“I’ll tell you what is reality and what isn’t!” Herb explodes. “I’m declaring this a political matter.”
At school, teachers deliberated the possibilities presented by the AMERIKA series in the teachers’ lunch room. Should we discuss it with our kids? Should we ignore it?
Then I assigned my Grade 10 Advanced Placement English class the novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I had a set of 24 books stacked in my supply closet which had been there since the start of the school year. The book was listed on the California state curriculum for grade 10 AP English as “optional.” Teachers who cared to could assign it. So I did, because it was easier to assign what was in the closet than to try to order other books from the district warehouse.
Brave New World depicts a world in which sexual reproduction is a thing of the past. Eugenic engineering determines gender and social caste. Gestation takes place in vitro. Technicians calibrate the amniotic nutrient broth in artificial wombs in order to foreordain intelligence and physical ability of the children who will emerge.
Sex is recreational. Those who value lasting social bonds are considered deviant. One such misfit is the beautiful and sexually promiscuous Lenina Crown, a technician who works at the Central London Hatchery and Conditioning Centre where fetuses are incubated. Lenina maintains an exclusive relationship with Henry Foster, a conventional Alpha male, for four months. Among his other Alpha male characteristics, Henry uninhibitedly discusses Lenina’s body with his coworkers.
Assigning Brave New World was, I soon learned, a bad decision. A week or so later, the principal and my department head called me in.
A group of parents and school board members were concerned about the implications of the book and wanted to have a meeting with me. The principal had showed them my résumé to reassure them I wasn’t just an imbecile.
“Do you agree with what’s in this book?” demanded one woman at the meeting a few nights later. Her daughter had showed her a few passages.
“Where did you get these outrageous political ideas? Back east? Ivy League?”
“It’s a novel,” I said. “It’s a made-up story. Stories are about ideas and possibilities. Different ideas exist all over the world. My students are learning about ideas outside their own lives. They might find new ideas interesting, or repellent or worth exploring.”
But an intellectual exercise in critical thinking through vicarious experience — reading a book — was not this crowd’s cup of tea. A woman with a blonde beehive hair do snarled: “If you’re so damn smart what are you doing in Kerman?”
By way of mollification, I suggested that those kids who objected to Brave New World could read any other available curriculum-consecrated book instead.
No one mentioned the latest must-see television serial. All was well in TV land, apparently. Books were the problem.
The 1987 school year wound to a tragi-comic close.
Or else, it was merely oracular.
In May, my department head was denied tenure and fired by the Kerman school board when she was framed by someone who revealed her undisclosed homosexuality. She filed a lawsuit, which was eventually settled out of court.
In June, the California State Board of Public Instruction wrote me a letter informing me that my degrees from Stanford and Brown (Comparative Literature and English respectively) and my State of Oregon teaching credential, where I’d done a year of teacher’s training, did not qualify me to teach Language Arts in the State of California after the first year. If I wanted to obtain a California Language Arts credential, I would need to undergo right-think California-style teacher training. And — my crowning achievement of that year — I’d failed the reading comprehension portion of the California Basic Educational Skills Test™ (CBEST®), a defect which could be remedied by taking a (paid) course, and re-taking the exam. As a proud product of the California Public School system of my day, I can only observe things must have changed. Perhaps I should give back my academic degrees, and my National Magazine Award, since I fail to comprehend the written word.
