On 15 October 2009, the talk show host Glenn Beck cried on national television. 1 Of course, crying on television is nothing new. Think of the tears shed on daytime soaps; think of Oprah. Beck's tears, however, were shed neither on a soap opera nor on Oprah. This spectacle of suffering took place on an evening news program available to over one hundred million US households. He was moderating the program, as he had been every night for nearly a year. While there may always be occasion to cry given the general content of the nightly news, more disorienting than a newscaster crying on national television was the proclaimed reason for Beck's tears: namely, nostalgia for simpler times in America. In the sense used here, the notion of America elicited by the word “America” refers not to the continental geography known as America, nor simply to the United States of America in its physical, political and historical specificity, but to a fantasmatic projection at once bound to material and historical specificity while also free from it. It is to this impossible space of an always-already lost innocence or wholeness that Beck wishes to return: an other space conceptually structuring the setting and giving form to a plotting of historical events in a dramatic story of innocence lost and, potentially, regained.

In the span of Beck's first year with Fox Television, as well as those to follow, it was not unusual for the moderator to become visibly agitated. Being moved to tears, though, had yet to become a fixed part of his repertoire. On this particular evening, Beck's tears were prompted and aesthetically punctuated by an old Kodak commercial staging a middle-class, ethnically discrete, suburban American familial idyll stylized as being from the 1950s and 1970s, and accompanied by Paul Anka singing “Times of Your Life.” That is to say, what purportedly drove Beck to tears had nothing to do with the inhumane misadventure that all too often characterizes the spectacle of suffering in news media. It was an advertisement staging a cliché of nostalgia intended to evoke the sensation of nostalgia in its audience that had done the trick.