X-treme American Home Makeover!

“Starting today, we must pick ourselves up, dust ourselves off,
and begin again the work of remaking America.”

--President Barack Obama, Inaugural Address January 20, 2009

Before noon Tuesday, America was a fat, pasty, gouty, illiterate wretch. She stole her children’s lunch money to buy cigarettes, let her rabid dog shit all over the neighborhood, and shuffled around her ramshackle duplex wearing only a smirk and a pair of worn out dogmas, feeding herself on boxed wine and the moldy crumbs of ideology scrounged from the cracks of her soiled couch cushions. Then the doorbell rang.

“You’re not going to believe this, America, but your friends have nominated you to be on a very special edition of Oprah’s Extreme Home Makeover: Presidential Wife Swap!”

This week’s Presidential inauguration was the greatest reality television program of all time (with Fox’s Man vs. Beast a close second). A three million person live studio audience and hundreds of millions of remote viewers watched America’s newest reality family move into their new home, a lovely white colonial with plenty of yard space for the kids. That ovular office they built for the dad with the head of state-themed carpeting is totally rad. And those men with guns on the roof add a unique twist to the otherwise traditional architecture. Finally, an African-American second-generation immigrant family is finally getting the home they deserve. Thank you, Oprah!

This President swap could really shake up the America household. Why should we think otherwise—it has happened in every other episode. The fitter, more responsible, more intelligent wife instills in the dissolute morbidly obese family of cretins an ethic of self-reliance and the value of love built on care, not credit cards. She makes them exercise and puts them on a budget, and they love her for it. And with a little rational persuasion, she even gets them to drag that hideous old torture center from the basement out to the curb.

The Obamas promise to be a media family unlike any other first family in history. It’s not just because they’re extremely photogenic, affable, intelligent, poised, and lovable people, which they surely are. The Obamas have been positioned into a powerful media narrative that the American public, like a child at bedtime, loves to be told over and over again: the tale of new beginnings.

For a youth-loving nation that worries it is losing its youth and charm, the tale of new beginnings is our favorite myth—the hero of a thousand face-lifts, we might call it. Behold the bourgeois trinity: the makeover, the home renovation, and the wardrobe overhaul! All perform the miracle of faux transubstantiation— transforming the self while still retaining the original.

In that sense, the makeover is the opposite of the revolution. We change in order to fully realize what we already are, to bring our inner beauty to the surface (since everyone knows inner beauty is still ugly on the outside). The makeover allows us to keep a self that in its former form was untenable. Take my favorite program, “Wife Swap”-- the temporary swapping of spouses is the stand-in for an affair that allows us to renovate our marriage rather than terminate it. Why get divorced when you can have a marriage makeover?

This idea of a malleable but permanent self, marriage, and nation, gives us at once those two things we prize most, but rarely encounter together: novelty and security.

President Obama seems like hope incarnate because he has tapped into this dual fantasy. The vision of America he represents is unprecedented, but it is billed as a restoration project. We get to enjoy the comfort of regarding “the work of remaking America” as a time-honored tradition, as well as the excitement of creating a whole new look for ourselves. These things are old. Why did George Washington, when the British were burning the capitol, take the time to dab on that garishly-hued blush? Because, citizens, this country was founded on make-overs!

America is now back from the plastic surgeon, the hairdresser, the tanning salon, the elocutionist, and, wow, she is looking great! People are already treating her differently. And she already feels different. Gosh, when you look at the before and after photos, it’s hard to believe it’s even the same country.