BY SAM QUINONES | MEXICO CITY -- Now that the Soviet Union has been defeated, American capitalism reigns and this century's great ideological debate has been resolved, we are free to puzzle through other important questions, such as why a show like "The Simpsons," steeped in the inside humor of American culture, is so popular outside America, especially in the Third World.

You could understand the appeal of, say, "Baywatch," another current hit that offers nothing too subtle to lose in translation. But a cartoon about a yellow kid and his loser family doesn't have the elements on paper that would lead a foreign TV exec to exclaim "¡Caliente!" -- a sure-fire hit. Yet there it is, "The Simpsons," caliente as can be, burning its way around the world's television sets.

In Mexico City, where the show has been running for five years with solid ratings, and where "Los Simpsons" paraphernalia has sold nicely along with it, Ernesto Vanegas has an answer -- one that involves the end of the Cold War, Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger, Superman, "Father Knows Best" and the American Dream.

Vanegas is a short, bearded and balding 46-year-old professor of international economics at the National Autonomous University (UNAM) in Mexico City. These days he's probably marginally better known for a slim (119 pages) volume of essays he published late last year on "The Simpsons": "The Little Homer Within Us All: A Literary Adventure with 'The Simpsons.'"

In the book Vanegas finds a way to bring Tom Sawyer, Charles Foster Kane, Alice in Wonderland and the brothers Karamazov, among others, into a discussion of the appeal and subtext of the most mediocre family in Springfield. So far it has sold almost 5,000 copies -- in Mexico a respectable number for any author and large for a rookie, 20,000 being bestseller range.

What Vanegas really likes to do is watch TV. His family bought a black-and-white Silvertone in 1951. He grew up watching "Felix the Cat," "The Time Machine," "My Three Sons." As a child, television colored Vanegas' view of America. The country became a far-off wonderland, a place where everything was perfect, shiny and new. America's Cold War adventurism and the Kennedy assassination changed that perspective, and he shifted his gaze to the Soviet Union: "I found the Marxist idea fantastic. But when I started studying it and seeing it in reality, it didn't seem so great. I read Lenin and Stalin and said, yuck. I decided that there weren't any paradises on earth, only imaginative paradises: books, movies, television."

And that, roughly, is what brought him, years later, to "The Simpsons."

Much of what people around the world see and know of the United States comes from American television and movies, Vanegas says. This is especially true in Mexico, where U.S. programming has always dominated and many locally produced programs are unabashed copies of American shows -- the latest imitations being versions of "Wheel of Fortune" and "The Price is Right." "For many Mexicans, the United States is paradise," says Vanegas, perhaps remembering his own childhood. "Children dream of the United States."

Television, a U.S.-invented medium that grew to maturity in the ideological crucible of the Cold War, became a medium that exalted America, Americans and their values. Americans were not portrayed as equal to everyone else, which would have been more in keeping with our political traditions, but superior.

Abroad, especially in the Third World, people have watched a steady diet of shows like "Starsky and Hutch," "Combat," "Beverly Hills 90210," "Dallas," "MacGyver" and "Lost in Space" -- not to mention endless action and detective movies broadcast on television. Together they form a collage of American glitz, confidence and superiority: high technology, fast cars, precocious teens, big guns, blond women and men with sculpted biceps who always make the right move.

"We've always had this image of big, strong Americans: Superman, Bruce Willis, the Terminator. The mighty hero," Vanegas says. "From the televisions programs, we never really understood very well what happened in Vietnam. I think there are some people who think the gringos won." To the undernourished Third World, it is an intimidating and intoxicating diet -- a vision of Americans as people they cannot hope to compete with.

Enter "The Simpsons."

"The Simpsons" "presents another United States that we don't know," Vanegas says. "They're talking about the president, corruption, religion, God, the real problems of the family, of the American Way of Life -- all very ironically. This is the daily side of the American Dream. Ned Flanders, the neighbor, is a guy who's always trying not to step on worms, who has a horrible fear of religion. He earns a good salary, but his world is full of fears and paranoia. And Charles Montgomery Burns -- for all his money -- can't win a woman. He doesn't like kids or pets. All he has is money and he's afraid of losing it."

Today the U.S. is the world's only superpower, full of itself and its historic victory. The American ideology has won again. So now that the Soviet Union is history, "The Simpsons" in a sense are the world's antidote to U.S. insufferability.

And "The Simpsons" also returns to a major theme of literature through the ages that U.S. television has often avoided: the confrontation with the father. "It's very clear in Freud, but also in Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Shakespeare and the Greeks." Apparently only in U.S. serial television has the father been all-knowing, benign, wise, an all-around wonderful guy: Robert Young ("Father Knows Best"), Fred McMurray ("My Three Sons") and Robert Reed ("the Brady Bunch"). These men are the rugged American hero; he's now middle-aged, he won the girl years ago and he's made all the right moves. The good fathers became metaphors for the United States -- impenetrable, benevolent, unbeatable, all-knowing.

"'The Simpsons' breaks with that," says Vanegas. "Fortunately, the father is more real. He's a slob. He cries. He drinks. He's a clod. He doesn't know how to give advice. He is a man terrified of death because he doesn't know if the hereafter will have television."

In "The Simpsons," "for the first time we don't have this enormous distance between television and reality. We can identify more with mediocrity, with what's normal, than we can with the superhero. We'll never equal the American hero. In 'The Simpsons,' we're not asked to identify ourselves with American nationalism and patriotism, but rather with life's weaknesses, its human side."

And because of that, the Simpsons have made America seem slightly more accessible to audiences abroad at the very time when the country has won the ideological war of the 20th century. "The American way of life is now accepted around the world. This is a different version of it, not so idealized, but something attainable, more real," Vanegas says.

Now that the Cold War is over, Americans can let down their guard and admit they're as blemished as anybody else. Where better to do that but on television -- the medium Americans invented and mastered.

"For the first time," Vanegas says, "gringos are universal."
Salon | March 16, 1998

Sam Quinones is a writer in Mexico City.