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2 SOUTHWESTERN LAW REVIEW [Vol. 45
age of industry-controlled content distribution, the U.S. Constitution held an
exalted place in American popular culture. Today, one can easily access
images of the Constitution as toilet paper,
4
being burned or urinated upon by
President Bush or Obama,
5
or placed in the hands of Jesus Christ.
6
The
difference, of course, is in the advent of user-controlled distribution of media
content on the Internet. Without the filter of corporate media ownership and
the public interest obligations that come with broadcasting, the U.S.
Constitution has been re-imagined as it has never been before. What was
once a rather static icon of the sacred secular in American culture has become
a lightning rod of profane dissent and religious fervor on Internet websites
that any child can access.
This study classifies and analyzes representations of the U.S.
Constitution as a cultural icon on American television and Internet websites.
7
For a representation to be iconic it must exploit the image or text of the
Constitution so that the physical document, or its facsimile text, is essential
to the meaning of the representation.
8
To put it in another way, an iconic
image does not merely talk about the Constitution; it presents the
Constitution itself as a tangible element in the representation. Most
commonly, these iconic representations fall into two types: those that exploit
a facsimile image of the first page of the document,
9
and those that exploit
4. Kevin Barrett, It Isn’t the Government Any More, TRUTHJIHAD.COM BLOG (Oct. 29, 2011),
http://truthjihad.blogspot.com/2011/10/it-isnt-government-any-more.html.
5. Jon McNaughton, One Nation Under Socialism, MCNAUGHTON FINE ART CO.,
http://www.jonmcnaughton.com/one-nation-under-socialism-1/ (last visited June 22, 2015);
Zencomix, The Unitary Executive, ZEN COMIX (Jan. 17, 2006), http://zencomix.blogspot.com
/2006/01/unitary-executive.html.
6. Jon McNaughton, One Nation Under God, MCNAUGHTON FINE ART CO.,
http://www.jonmcnaughton.com/one-nation-under-god-2/ (last visited June 22, 2015).
7. Web searches were made at three successive intervals: in 2008, in 2010, and in 2012. The
objective was to see if patterns of representation remained consistent in a period of political change
bookended by the Bush and Obama administrations. As one might expect, research into television
representations yielded results that were much less fluid than their web counterparts. The relatively
few televised representations of the Constitution were located in 2008 through Internet searches of
YouTube and other websites housing video content, like CBS.com. Similar searches in 2010 and
2012 did not reveal additional content, reflecting the scarcity and static nature of the Constitution’s
representations on television over the last fifty years. A second reason for limiting this inquiry to
television and the web is practical. Representations of the iconic Constitution may exist in a film
or on archival radio, and expanding this research to include a longitudinal study of newspapers’
political cartoons may be an important next step. At this point, however, limiting the inquiry to
two media makes for a more manageable project, and offers results that may still say something
meaningful about the changing nature of content distribution in the U.S.
8. See PATRICIA LEAVY, ICONIC EVENTS: MEDIA, POLITICS, AND POWER IN RETELLING
HISTORY 3-4 (2007).
9. See, e.g., Cani Lupine, Tea Party’s Constitution, CHEEZBURGER, http://cheezburger.com/
3900791296 (last visited June 22, 2015).