Breakfast in America — Uncle Tom's cultural histories

This advertisement for motor oil as a symbol of the American way of life is one of the exhibits in Marshall McLuhan's 1951 study of American cultural myths, The Mechanical Bride. ¹ The picture shows a pastoral idyll in the form of a country picnic whose everyday accessibility has been temporarily cut off by the demands of the wartime economy. It features that peculiarly twentieth-century peacetime institution: the two-parent, two-child, white 'nuclear family', possessed of at least one car and a pet, with their harmony troubled only, perhaps, by the presence of a flattened female golliwog in the foreground. ² While Junior brings up the radio and the cat, the all-providing Mom holds up a plate of sandwiches for the genuflecting couple of pigtailed daughter and beaming Pop. It is he who figures in the text as doing what comes naturally, exercising the prerogatives of the vaunted 'Freedom . . . American Style': such rights —wittily analysed in McLuhan's commentary — as 'whistling before breakfast', or having a fight with the bank manager.