Gilligan Unbound by Paul A Cantor

...Thus the globalization of America pivots, Cantor muses, on "a more fundamental Americanization of the globe...

...More important, Cantor hints that the "Americanization of the globe" and the "globalization of America" are two moments in a single process: the unprecedented internationalization of capitalist production and finance, and the myriad upheavals it triggers...

...Despite the presence of martial skill (the Skipper), wealth (the Howells), knowledge (the Professor), and beauty (Ginger), it's still Gilligan's island...

...As Cantor writes, albeit facilely, "prophets are continually displaced by profits...

...Essential as it is to the economic and civic life of Springfield, Apu's convenience store is part of a conglomerate headquartered in the Himalayas...

...While Apu is accepted in Springfield, his acceptance rests on an entrepreneurial spirit that he proudly defends as "the freedom to say, and to think, and to charge whatever I want...

...Cantor also recognizes that Springfield's pronounced disenchantment with politics complements its "strange combination of being both open and closed to the rest of the globe...

...If the "normal course" for Homer Simpson is the doughnut run to the Kwik-E-Mart, the store's ownership by an Indian immigrant named Apu exemplifies what Cantor calls the "globalization of America...

...Incorrigibly inept to the undiscerning eye, Gilligan emerges in Cantor's reading as a hybrid of Rousseau's natural man and Tocqueville's democratic citizen, whose amiable con-formism and lack of distinction constitute his claim to superiority...

...domination...

...As it turns out, far from being another exercise in exotic pedantry, Paul Cantor's new book is timely, readable, and provocative...

...Rather than rehearse the overworked account of "The Simpsons" as a satire, Cantor emphasizes its unlikely celebration of family life, its serious attention to religion, and its multicultural, polyglot texture...

...Cantor's unmistakable fondness for his material indicates the evolution of the American right's relationship to mass culture...

...This open sensibility outshines the cliches about "the sixties" or "the nineties" that fly fast and tedious in this book...

...Eugene McCarraher Like so many other intellectual confections whipped up in the last two decades, a study of television culture might appear frivolous and tasteless in a time of war...

...Focussing on Apu, Cantor observes that, in "The Simpsons," globalization is a two-way street...

...A professor of English at the University of Virginia and the author of scholarly books on Shakespeare, Romanticism, and literary theory, Cantor is a frequent contributor to the Weekly Standard, American Enterprise, Reason, and other conservative publications...

...While Cantor argues that the TV show implied only a muted and sporadic ambivalence about imperial ventures, the Star Trek films exhibited a growing unease at the prospect of Federation/U.S...

...Where the Americanization of the globe is a humane and comic process among the castaways, it assumes an arrogant, bellicose, and ultimately tragic form among the crew of the Enterprise...

...The Pacific locale and the castaways' unfazed resilience convey, Cantor believes, cold war America's "sense of its global mission as the chief representative of democracy...

...I suspect that Cantor doesn't make more of his insights because he's reluctant to discuss the forces encapsulated in the buzzword "globalization...

...Eugene McCarraher teaches humanities at Villanova University...

...Cantor mars this ingenious ideological reading with an implicit equation of democracy and mediocrity that both echoes Tocqueville's overrated canards about "leveling" and ratifies the self-conceit of the boboisie...

...Cantor's remarks on "Star Trek" capture the imperiousness and ambivalence of the Americanizing enterprise...

...Focusing on four television shows that together span four decades, Cantor traces a conflicted metamorphosis of American national identity...

...Although the famed Captain Kirk prohibited interference in the affairs of other planetary civilizations, he routinely violated this rule in order to put misguided or miscreant beings onto what he called "the normal course of social evolution": unimpeded scientific and technological progress, the rule of benevolent experts, and the advance of representative institutions- the imagined and eventually star-crossed trajectory of the New Frontier and the Great Society...

...The program's "fearless crew" is a microcosm of the confident and genial democracy once central to the American imagination...

...And while the book went to press before September 11, Cantor also owes us more about the emergent moral and cultural economy...

...His debt to that genre is apparent in his choice of subject matter, his easy and enthusiastic familiarity with popular TV programs, and his assumption that sitcoms, cartoons, and science fictions "offer us a window into ideological developments in America...

...Cantor also contends that "The X-Files" relates an account, not only of an evil global order, but of a struggle over "who will tell the story of our time...

...Opposition to what has been euphemistically obscured as "modernization" takes many forms-not just terrorism-and the more promising divisions run within and across the Western and non-Western worlds...

...While Cantor notes the paradox of FBI agent Mulder who both champions the paranormal and whines when bereft of his cell phone, he perceives that the heart of "The X-Files" lies in its fear that the triune juggernaut of nation-state, technology, and corporation has produced a species of soulless automatons...

...Cantor even avows his reliance on the "cultural studies" often considered by the left and the right as the cost-free radicalism of baby-boom academics...

...In Cantor's melancholy gloss on Fukuyama, Star Trek's "end of history" is the "homogenization of the galaxy," an erasure of genuine diversity, the loss of heroism, the containment of culture in a "vast museum, or rather supermarket...

...Cantor might also have discerned a basic contradiction of Wilson-ian internationalism: the coexistence of "self-determination" and the commitment to liberal democracy as the "normal"-and presumably enforceable- course of human history...

...As if Christopher Lasch had been a series scriptwriter, "The X-Files" pits the tale of "progress" told by the planet's new ruling elite against a narrative whose bearers "fight the future" armed only with "the potent force of memory...

...But if capitalism is the source of the disruption and malevolence depicted in "The Simpsons" and "The X-Files," then Cantor owes us more than boilerplate about the market's "efficiency" and "rationality...

...By concentrating on episodes devoted to immigrants and Native Americans, Cantor demonstrates how "The X-Files" bemoans the destruction of tribal, ethnic, or religious attachments and their replacement by science and money...

...In the book's final and most absorbing chapter, Cantor identifies the show's main subject as "the globalization of modernity, the relentless advance of bureaucratic rationality into every corner of the earth...

...Unlike the paleo-cons who reject mass culture as a sinkhole of sin and democracy, a new, Reaganaut breed of conservatives revels in its pleasures and meanings...

...Though "skeptical" and "doubtful," Cantor asserts with cheery banality that globalization has "on the whole been a positive development for humanity...

...If "The Simpsons" takes a relatively benign view of contemporary world developments, "The X-Files" projects a far more sinister and despairing vision of global integration...

...The American right increasingly caters to the ascendancy of what the Standard's senior editor David Brooks has dubbed "the Bobo," who fuses capitalist avarice and bohemian style...

...This spring, he is a visiting lecturer at Princeton.ng lecturer at Princeton...

...Drawing on Francis Fukuyama's proclamations of "the end of history," Cantor interprets the starship's intergalactic mission as a macrocosm of democratic imperialism and secularism...

...In the first (and weakest) chapter, Cantor reads the popular sixties sitcom "Gilligan's Island" as a study in "the Americanization of the globe...

...Cantor notes that "television programs are corporate products" and hints that the shift in TV's center of gravity from network to cable has corresponded somehow with a shift in ideology, but neither of these points receives any sustained attention...

...This economy has ignited resistance not only in the Islamic world but in the West as well, and not only among those lazily and contemptuously derided as "fundamentalists...

...For a conservative, though, Cantor seems pretty insouciant about the conflict of progress and memory...

...There are many in the world who are deeply troubled by a political economy and consumer culture that treats everything they value-their communities, their religions, themselves-as vendable and expendable goods...

...Cantor is especially insightful on how "The Simpsons" affirms the nuclear family in Homer's hapless devotion, Lisa's nest-bred resistance to corporate villainy in the city of Springfield, and opposition to therapeutic intrusion by bureaucrats and counselors...