"Amerika"

At about the time this magazine reaches most subscribers, ABC's 12-hour miniseries "Amerika" will be fouling the airwaves. There is a certain irony in the fact that the "Amerika" chest-thumping call to arms arrives just as the neo-Spartan cult of the mercenary is beginning to crumble in the White House. The networks are always just behind the trends. But then again "Amerika" could be just what Reagan's doctor ordered. "Amerika" star Kris Kristofferson is certainly a more salable "national hero" than Ollie North.

However the series' effects may play out in the current White House tragicomedy, the battle for (and against) "Amerika" has already established some frightening precedents--and a few small but hopeful ones--in the political struggle for American popular culture.

From its very inception, "Amerika" has been a blunt instrument in the hands of America's Far Right propagandists. The idea for the series began with the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner's right-wing columnist Ben Stein, formerly a speech-writer in the Nixon-Ford White House.

Writing in 1983, just before the airing of ABC's mega-death melodrama "The Day After," Stein suggested that if the network was going to scare the public about a little thing like total thermonuclear war then it should also be "balanced" enough to show what might happen in a world without our friend Mr. Nuke. He pitched a TV movie showing what life would be like if the Soviet Union invaded and conquered the U.S.A. Stein recommended the title "In Red America" and eventually sold a 10-page outline to ABC production mogul Brandon Stoddard. The wheels of Hollywood began grinding.

For months, value-free ABC denied that its hot new "pure entertainment" item was purchased from the pen of Stein. But at a 1984 stockholder's meeting, ABC chair Leonard Goldenson, under duress about "The Day After," promised a representative of the Far Right group Accuracy in Media (AIM) that a new Soviet takeover miniseries was in the works that would answer all his complaints. Later an AIM staffer was extensively consulted as part of the research into Soviet perfidy for the "Amerika" script.

As a result, the pure of heart can now be purely entertained by a 12-hour commercial for a fortressed U.S.A. and against the United Nations, feminism, arms control, civil rights, and Nicaragua. The series' propagation of the martial virtues and its denigration of such un-American notions as free speech and equality couldn't be plainer. Explaining why the United States fell to the Red horde, Kristofferson, the Resistance hero, says, "We must blame it on...special interests...minor-ity interests, women against men...." Earlier the hero (ironically, an anti-war Vietnam vet) is told by his father that the Soviet triumph happened because, "You came back from Vietnam tearing it [ America] down."

Obviously the ideological kicker in "Amerika" is contained in its very premise--the preposterous notion that the Soviet Union could, in the late 1980s, invade and subdue the United States. But Brandon Stoddard and writer-producer-director Donald Wrye still insist that their opus isn't really "about" a Soviet invasion of the United States. They insist that it's really a civics lesson "about" our stake in being Americans, the resiliency of the "American spirit," our commitment to democracy, etc. It's nice to see network execs getting hip to structuralist criticism (text, subtext, and all that), but the America in my civics book was one that found its strength in diversity and toleration of dissent.

THE REAL"SUBTEXT" of the "Amerika" saga is the utter collapse of left-liberal cultural politics in the real-life America of the late '80s. A depressing percentage of the "Amerika" creative team comprises alumni of rad-lib-chic.

Back in the mid-70s, when the ideological drift was portside, Brandon Stoddard brought to the small screen some very effective pop-populist items including the "Roots" saga and that Vietnam-syndrome classic "Friendly Fire." Similarly Donald Wrye, a self-proclaimed Kennedy liberal, was responsible back in the glory days for the TV movies "Hearts of Steel" (about displaced steelworkers fighting back) and "Face of Rage" (about rape victims doing likewise). "Amerika" leading man Kris Kristofferson has been a staple on the politically correct demos-and-benefits circuit for more than 15 years. And Christine Lahti, the prominent female actor in "Amerika," has a considerable feminist reputation.

In interviews all of the above have defensively disassociated themselves from the "Amerika" Far Right taint. Stoddard and Wrye offered the aforementioned civics class defense. According to Mother Jones, Kristofferson said, "Somebody will take the part if I don't....I hope to be able to soften some of the lines." (So much for the lessons of Nuremburg.) In American Film magazine, Lahti was more straightforward, admitting, "I hadn't worked in seven months and this was the best thing offered."

The good news is that at last "our side" is learning to take pop-culture seriously as the most important political arena of our time. Peace groups (especially the Fellowship of Reconciliation and the American Friends Service Committee) have generated a quite respectable protest campaign against "Amerika," demanding not censorship but that old democratic standby, equal time. While equal time is unlikely, the campaign has at least ensured that the controversy about "Amerika" will be two-sided. And it's still not too late to complain to your local ABC-affiliate station.

Danny Duncan Collum is a Sojourners contributing editor.