Set your TiVo, America! This country's original heroes are about to stampede through your family rooms with a drum beat that is sure to electrify your patriotic senses. HBO is rolling out its latest historical masterpiece John Adams, and from the looks of the premiere episode, it is sure to sweep every award in the biz. The series is based on the original book by David McCullough, and provides an outstanding and compelling account of the legal, political and bloody conflagrations that forged this great republic. It's the story of a time when personal sacrifice for a collective good superseded personal desires, and even the need for personal protection. It was a time when we celebrated heroes like Adams, Franklin, Jefferson and Washington. They were our first true American celebrities. Men who earned and deserved to be the standard bearers of all we aspired to be.
Fast forward 232 years. By the looks of our cable reports, our cultural heroes today should have us all hanging our heads in shame. For the most part they are drunk, injected, overpaid dreidls, who sleep, go to jail, and party their way across our TV screens daily. American pop culture is now saturated with embarrassing figures like Roger Clemens, OJ Simpson, Paris Hilton, and K-Fed.
What happened? When did we drift so far away from what it really means to be American? When did we stop admiring the selfless figures who lent their lives to establish what we simply overfeed ourselves on today? It not a stretch to suggest that a small minority of American school kids could correctly identify pictures of John Adams or Thomas Jefferson. But supplant a pap-snap of Lindsay Lohan...and it's an instant perfect score.
It's as though we need a national dose of cultural vitamins to restore America's strength of character, and re-introduce our national heroes. Quite simply, we truly need this HBO American history lesson to permeate prime time, and cut through the clutter of today's pop smear.
If we're just too damn lazy to raise our Crantinis and toast our founding fathers now and then, perhaps a good TV show will, at least, remind us of who they were, and what they did for us!
Until then. I just hope President Adams is not spinning in his grave to the toxic beat of Britney Spears.