Popular Culture Review Vol. 5, No. 1, February 1994 | Page 9

Hypervisual Standard

Popular Culture

view, when the English, for example, would have immediately fixed
the bell so that it might sound. Thus we discover that it is no accident
that New York Harbor features the newly refurbished Miss
Hypervisual Liberty, with torch held high, in greeting to all our
visitors and immigrants, rather than offering some traditionally
chiming and temporal Big Ben. For the same revolutionary reason, we
know it is no accident that the Englishman is caricatur^ by "Oh, 1
SAY, old chap"; whereas the American, from Casablanca to Tango
and Cash characteristically remarks, "See ya', kid" or "Here’s
looking at you, kid." We thus escape the accident of believing that,
like the Oxford professor, our dissertation director wants
scholarship, research and brilliant thinking, when in reality his
greatest approbation comes in the encomium, "This really LOOKS
GOOD!" Emerson simply put the irrevocable New-World nosethumbing thus in a popular bon mot: "Eyes wait for no introduction;
they are no Englishman" (Home Book 597).
It is no accident, then, that our national anthems exult in "the
dawn's early light" or in the ocular sortie of "Mine Eyes Have Seen
the Glory"; or that our national seal sports an "eagle-eyed" American
Eagle of 6X vision and, obversely, a "mystic eye" upon a pyramid; or
that our best-known poem begins in unforgettably anti-verbal fashion,
"I think that I shall never s e e / A poem lovely as a tree"; or that
Benjamin Franklin was quick to "improvt the street lamps of
Philadelphia" so that, via open panes, they might outshine the
"poorly illuminated streets of London" (1:135) or that, like Emerson’s
famous "transparent eyeball," he conjoined the macro- and
nucroscopic lenses into bifocals so that he might "see all"; or that
Thomas Edison was so obsessed with finding just the right filament
for his electric light-bulb; or that American scientists demand the
most powerful telescopes in the world in order to produce the most
detailed pictures yet of the Milky Way; or that even our telephone
companies stress the superiority of "fiber-optic" cables or the visual
screening of numbers before you answer any call.
Indeed, it is not necessary or technically productive for General
Motors, for example, to offer their customers sixteen different shades
of "blue" on their Oldsmobiles, or for the American supermarket or
mega-mart to attempt to overwhelm the shopper with barrages of
competing colors—Crest’s blues against Colgate’s reds and whites—but
this apparent excess of eye-options obviously comforts and assures the