This episode begins with Homer sorting through the junk mail that so many of us receive in the mail every day. He tosses mostly everything, but the one thing that he does end up getting out of the junk mail is a free issue of The Readers Digest. Ironically enough, Homer becomes obsessed with reading the magazine, and eventually comes across an essay contest in Washington D.C. for children 12 and under. Needless to say, Lisa writes a very patriotic essay called “The Roots of Democracy,” which goes to name some of the most wonderful things about America. The Simpsons win a trip to Washington, and one night while the rest of the family is sleeping, Lisa takes a late-night tour of the Winifred Beecher Memorial. It is there that Lisa catches a Congressman secretly accepting a bribe to give another man a logging permit to cut down Springfield Forest.
Lisa’s imagination gets carried away the next morning before the contest, and she sees politicians as pigs eating money and cats scratching each others’ backs. She then changes her essay to let everyone know that she thinks America “stank back then and it stinks now.” Lisa exclaims that she saw the Congressman accept the bribe, and she then adds, “One nation under the dollar with liberty and justice for none.” The Congressman is investigated and arrested.
Not surprisingly, Lisa’s second essay loses the contest, however, I found it surprising that her faith in democracy was so quickly redeemed after the Congressman was arrested. It is hardly a secret that there are lots of payouts and bribes in politics, and I believe that this situation happens more often than we know. I would have definitely expected the episode to end differently, especially since the creators took the time to name the hotel that the Simpsons stayed at "The Watergate Hotel." It just seems to me like the creators were trying to say something about their own faith in democracy through these characters, and I didn't think they would give up the joke so easily.
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I was actually thinking the same thing about how suprisingly quickly Lisa's faith and beliefs in Democracy were changed. I think they should have ended the show slightly differently because most of the episode was actually pretty powerful, or seemingly so. Lisa obviously wrote a great essay illustrating all the best points of Democracy, but you are right in that it is no secret that there is always corruption somewhere. However, Lisa has always seemed like more of an extremist so maybe it was more appropriate to have her either all in or all out.
ReplyDeleteThis was a good episode of The Simpsons. Lisa wrote an awesome essay to win the contest, but I feel she did a better thing by exposing the corruption in government. Lisa liked to look at Democracy as being ideal, but the truth is that nothing in reality is perfect. In this episode, that is what Lisa learns. The only way to make democracy better is to weed out the evil and encourage good people and values.
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