....But Mostly, America
Muppets, Doozers, and Democracy
In 1991, a short film called MuppetVision 3D opened in Walt Disney World. It was a major collaboration between Jim Henson and The Walt Disney Company, and it was one of Muppet creator Henson’s final projects before his untimely death. In the film, amid the typical Muppet backstage chaos, Sam “the American” Eagle is tasked with planning the grand finale. “It’s called, “A Salute to All Nations, but Mostly, America,” he deadpans.
“Mostly, America” describes my brain at the moment. Today, Americans go to the polls to vote for a president, vice-president, governors, senators, congressional representatives, state representatives, and more. We are not the center of the universe. But today’s results will be consequential for the whole globe.
As has become my tradition, I went to vote this morning wearing a tee-shirt with a picture of Sam the Eagle.
Sam the Eagle’s patriotism is funny precisely because he is such a stick in the mud, so different from the other groovier, more free-flowing Muppets. Once, I had my high school friends in tow on my family’s spring pilgrimage to Disney World. We were all Model UN types, already cynical about how little Americans knew of the world beyond their shores. Sam’s “but mostly, America” line sent us into gales of laughter. (I even used it as the caption for my scrapbook section on EPCOT’s World Showcase.) Sam is so stoic and myopic in his affect, so rigid in his pride, that I can’t help adoring him. Somehow Muppet jingoism is different from the real thing. It’s certainly more hapless.
Growing up, I did not display Sam the Eagle’s unequivocal pride in American history. I was the kind of kid who was morbidly fascinated by its historical horrors early on. One elementary school project was about the Trail of Tears. In junior high, I read Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee (not a perfect book, but a heavy one at that age, and available in our house). In high school history, I researched the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II. I was not getting a Pollyanna take on U.S. history.
So I always knew that the America Disney gave me was not the whole story, something the company itself increasingly acknowledges. Of course, that’s also why I loved it so much. Just as Fantasyland let me soar on Dumbo, The American Adventure pavilion gave me permission to be patriotic. It was ok to cry during the soaring chorus of its Golden Dream finale (I’m sorry, I did, I really did), because I knew I was in a simulation of the nation—not the one where real people really suffered.
Even there in the darkness of a theatre in EPCOT, at the close of a 30-minute patriotic spectacle written in the early 1980s, we can find glimpses of self awareness, a resistance to Disney’s omnipresent nostalgia. In the show’s closing dialogue, audio-animatronic Ben Franklin tells audio-animatronic Mark Twain, “the golden age never was the present age,” as they fret over the nation’s future.
Today, November 5, 2024, a lot of Americans report feeling scared as they go to the polls. If you were going to pick two emotions in the driver’s seat for this election, it might well be Fear and Anxiety, with Anger doing a lot of backseat driving. Joy has not been absent. But across the political spectrum, voters seem united, primarily, by fear.
And so, I turn once more to my Sam the Eagle shirt, which says “Runners Are All Weirdos,” purchased in 2019 while I was training for my first marathon. For me, the Muppets were always a space for fear and joy, for holding emotions, for comfort, and for the laughter that defeats fear. For every worrying Bert (that’s me), there is an optimistic Ernie. For every uptight Sam the Eagle (also me), there is an uninhibited Gonzo.
The original Kermit puppet—not yet officially known as a frog— is held by the Smithsonian at the National Museum of American History. “This is one of the museum’s most treasured objects alongside George Washington’s uniform or Abraham Lincoln’s hat,” according to entertainment curator Ryan Lintelman. “I would make the argument that Kermit has had as much influence on American history and culture as these other iconic objects.”
Indeed, for me, the Muppets are as important as Abraham Lincoln. I am part of the Muppet Generation; I grew up at a time when they were omnipresent in U.S. culture. Born in 1978, it wasn’t just the classic Muppets—-I’m also part of the late Gen X Fraggle Rock micro-generation. The original Fraggle Rock (1983-1987) was quite literally a show about coexistence and world peace. Somehow, groups of three very different sizes—the medium-sized Fraggles, the gigantic Gorgs, and the tiny, workaholic Doozers— all had to get along. (It has since been rebooted on Apple TV+). It was an idealistic vision. It was a promise I wanted to believe.
Because I am teaching a first year seminar, many of my students are 18. They are voting for the very first time. The course is called “Sensing Religions.” Yesterday, we read David Chidester’s essay, “The American Touch: Tactile Imagery in American Religion and Politics.” Chidester points to both the haptics and the untouchability of these worlds. “Religious tactility is ultimately the capacity to handle the challenges of living in the world, especially the challenges posted by what cannot be seen or heard.”
It is a challenge to live in the world right now, to fathom America and what it will be. America is a mirage in the desert. Try to grasp it and it disappears. But we are parched for it nonetheless.
I never, ever discuss specific candidates when I’m teaching, but I asked my students if they could share the earliest memory they had of an election. For many, it was the 2016 election, when they were in the fifth grade. A few recalled the 2012 election. Many spoke about mock elections at school. Others had more poignant, and more painful, stories.
Although I was alive during the Carter administration, my first election memories are from 1984—- Reagan/Mondale. I remember hearing one of the candidates at the New Jersey State Theatre in New Brunswick. I remember they mentioned education and thinking, with my six-year-old brain, “I go to school! That means me! They care about me!”
Most of all, though, I remember a tactile ritual of democracy: the old metal voting booths. Schools were closed because most voting happened in our cafeterias. My mother always took me with her and showed me how to push down all of the levers for each candidate. Sometimes, she let me pull the big lever at the bottom—the one that cast your votes and re-opened the privacy curtain.
This is what democracy felt like. A red, heavy metal lever resisting my small arms; the whoosh of the plaid curtains swaying aside.
Today, I cast my vote in Pennsylvania, as I have done since 2015. I marked a paper ballot carefully and fed it into the scanner. It felt fragile to me. I realized I was pressing extra hard as I filled in one of the last bubbles, for my congressional representative, and worried that if I broke through the paper, I would somehow invalidate my vote.
I was voting in an Islamic Cultural Center, and the domelike stencils on the windows were a comfort to me. They made me think of sanctuary. Places where you can kneel down and touch the the sacred with limbs and torso and forehead. Other years, I have passed children’s bible drawings on my way to vote in churches. Or midcentury signage when I cast a ballot at the midwestern City Hall when I lived in Wisconsin.
Outside in the parking lot, a volunteer directing traffic wore a brown sweatshirt that said “Find the Good” on the back.
They weren’t perfect people, nor, I suspect, did they vote identically, but I think Jim Henson and Walt Disney each, in his own way, would have liked that message. (Sam the Eagle might find it lacking in rigor). Finding the good is ineffable (And, to quote Stephen Sondheim—who decides what’s right? who decides what’s good?). Stories, though, bring us just a little bit closer to those breadcrumbs of light.
We cannot touch America, and yet, it is material, made up of those who have lived and died and celebrated and suffered here. And all of the people—and ecosystems—the U.S. has harmed and helped the world over. These are all tangible, even when we want to close our eyes.
Sometimes, we really do need to stop and close our eyes. Just for a moment. But we must not shut our hands. We must build and build, and try to give, like the Doozers, even if a Fraggle comes along to snack on our meticulous construction.
Democracy feels like that, too. Endless building. No matter what happens. “For we don’t know the starting, and we don’t know the end, but we know that our building makes the whole world a friend.”
Postscript:
In 1962, Henson made a PSA (for the US government) about democracy in the Dominican Republic. Lots to unpack there. But I found it evocative for today. “Nothing will happen if you just sit around and talk about it,” says one puppet (in Spanish). At the end, it turns out the chief talking head hasn’t voted yet, and he scrambles off to do so.
If you are a US citizen and you haven’t yet voted in this election, please VOTE!