Adam Ruins Everything (Season 2, Episode 9: Adam Ruins His Vacation): American history gets ruined in farcical retelling

Jeff Chan, “Adam Ruins Everything (Season 2, Episode 9: Adam Ruins His Vacation)” (2017)

At last didactic comedian Adam Conover has something in common with most Americans: he’s unable to relax on vacation but, to the chagrin of new girlfriend Melinda (Punam Patel), keeps working and manages to demolish three cherished shibboleths most of his fellow US citizens hold about Mount Rushmore, poker machines and the history of how Hawaii came to be annexed by the United States. A pity though that the presentations of how the Mount Rushmore monument and Hawaii’s downfall from proud indigenous kingdom to an over-priced tourist destination turn out to be bizarrely camp and amateurish, as if even the producers  behind “Adam Ruins Everything” could barely bring themselves to treat these topics with the respect they deserve. Here is one episode where an animated treatment of two historical subjects would have worked better than two teams of hokey actors engaging in nonsense.

The episode goes as far as it dares in revealing that the Mount Rushmore monument was built on land stolen from the Dakota (formerly known as Sioux) nation after years of US army repression and genocide against it. The show also admits that President Theodore Roosevelt was included in the monument because he happened to be a close friend of the sculptor Gutzon Borglum. What the episode doesn’t say is that before working on the Mount Rushmore monument, Borglum had worked on Stone Mountain in Georgia state to create a monument to Confederate heroes that would have included an altar to the Ku Klux Klan and that Borglum himself had been a member of that organisation.

The segment on poker machines and how, thanks to a combination of computer digitisation and psychology, they are designed to keep players hooked on playing them for as long as possible is both informative and entertaining if at times a little disturbing. Even a hammy Patel can’t quite dispel the sinister implications behind slot machine addiction: if humans can be hooked onto pouring more of their hard-earned money into machines with a mix of intermittent reinforcement and mesmerising visual effects and ringing bells, what other machines could people be persuaded to attach themselves, limpet-like? Something like … a smartphone?

The story of how Hawaii was annexed by the United States ends up confused and shallow in its treatment, even with the addition of a university professor to supply details. American and European business classes supported a group of conspirators who deposed Queen Lili’uokalani, overthrew the monarchy and then sought annexation to the US in 1893. Some years passed, a change of government in Washington occurred and the Spanish-American War broke out before US Congress eventually passed legislation to annex Hawaii in 1898. The context of war encouraged many Americans to view Hawaii and Pearl Harbor in particular as an asset projecting American power into the Pacific region and shielding the US West Coast from invasion.

After an uneven and rather disappointing and shoddy presentation that did two of its three topics an injustice, no wonder Adam was feeling worn out and dejected. Someone please send him on another holiday, preferably in a place where the history is not so dark … but there are very few such locations in the world these days whose histories don’t involve groups stealing others’ lands and resources and turning the original owners into impoverished slaves through brutal violence and political, economic and social institutions that discriminate against them.