When I logged out of Hotmail on Sunday morning (yes, I still use Hotmail, though only for lists and personal email), an odd thing happened: I was taken to a rather boring Bing page telling me about movies in the Madison area. This is not what’s meant to happen. Usually, and despite living outside Canada since 1999, Hotmail logout has led me to an MSN Canada page.

I usually click off that page in a few seconds, largely disinterested in and by the news of Canadian Idol contestants, small political rumblings in Saskatchewan, and news of the latest exchange rate between the US and Canada. It’s not an important part of my media diet, in other words. Or, rather, I didn’t think it was.

But the experience of having this tiny bridge to my nationality unceremoniously destroyed has bothered me. I’m realizing how important that page was for letting me feel Canadian in very small ways for very small time segments (which, after all, is how Canadian nationality tends to work, no?). I’ve long lectured about expat, transnational, and hybrid media in my classes, usually popping in the opening scenes of East is East or Salaam Namaste, discussing my enthusiasm for CBS’s airing of Flashpoint (a sniper procedural in which guns rarely ever get used: how Canadian can you get), or talking about international sporting events. But now I see the lynchpin that this simple website plays in helping me feel Canadian.

For all the interest in grand national statements, we might also ask about the least amount of media that expats need to feel connected. I used to think I just needed to be somewhere with a hockey team, not because I actually or necessarily care to follow the team, but because it means that my everyday life will occasionally involve seeing a hockey jersey, hearing someone talk about an amazing deke, or so forth. There’s very little Canadian content that I actively seek out. I feel, instead, that I just want a faint background of Canadianness. Here, Colin Tait’s 1/5 rule comes into play too (he notes that usually 1 out of 5 cast members in any TV show is Canadian). And now I have the very mundane, frequently full of nonsense, MSN Canada homepage missing.

Which makes me wonder if we’ve been approaching transnational engagements with media from a limited perspective. For all the interest in using foreign media to immerse oneself in a foreign nationality – an interest expressed both by academics studying transnational media consumption, and by racist critics who think that Univision or Cinco de Mayo celebrations aren’t “American” enough – perhaps what a lot of us want/need is simply a background, faint, weak, unobtrusive ambience. Put another way, if any given individual’s experience of national identity may be ambient, appreciating a national dish here, a hat-tip to local knowledge there, perhaps much transnational media use is similarly about encounters with the ambient and the mundane, not (just) the big and showy?

For all overt nationalism on show during the contest and on the hundreds of message boards and millions of Twitter feeds that reflect Eurovision’s smooth transition from the broadcast to the convergence era, last Saturday’s Eurovision in Oslo [those who missed the contest can watch the complete broadcast here] once again underlined the Eurovision as a truly transnational media event that sometimes purposefully, but more often unwittingly undermines nationalism by championing its two natural enemies: silliness and inclusiveness.

As the great Charlie Chaplin realised more than 70 years ago, nationalism – like fascism – relies on being taken seriously: sport in its overt display of masculine chauvinism is not coincidently nationalism’s favourite vehicle. The small shoulders of the often young and hardly known performers at the Eurovision carry this heavy ideological burden less well. Can a Moldovan sense of nationhood really rest on a Eurodance-y Roxette rival band (watch out for the cameo by a young Bill Clinton)? Will the linguistically torn Belgium really rally around Tom Dice – who as a fellow viewer rightly (but rather unhelpfully only after I had placed a £2 bet on a top three finish) pointed out to me is more James Blunt than David Gray, as I had mistakenly assumed? Who would really believe that Spain hoped that a performance so surreal that the appearance of pitch invader Jimmy Jump could have easily gone unnoticed would garner acclaim and triumph? And did hapless Josh Dubovie who built on a recent run of last place finishes by the UK really add to a sense of British pride?

This is not to say that the Eurovision, as many other areas of popular culture, is not utilised in the articulation of a plethora or political and historical discourses. In recent years, the arrival and success of former Warsaw Pact states (and successor states) has lead to hostile reactions of Western European audiences suggesting such countries should hold their own “Soviet Song Contest.” This year, the victory of 19 year old Lena Meyer-Landrut (only Germany’s second victory, and first since 1982) over bookmaker’s favourite Safura from Azerbaijan lead to equally angry reactions from Eastern European viewers alleging that Germany’s economic power had swayed juries and voters and noting that voting for Safura was one’s antifascist duty as illustrated in such fan craftwork:

The point is not that the Eurovision doesn’t allow for such discourses – only, as everything else surrounding the contest, they are very hard to take seriously (see, for instance, the detailed discussions on the YouTube pages linked above, with one viewer claiming that “my parents sent a SMS for Azerbaijan to win yesterday, so only my family sent 3 SMS-s for Azerbaijan but we all saw that Safura didn’t gained [sic] a single points from Albania when the results were announced. It’s FAKE”). What matters is not whether Azerbaijan did or didn’t win; whether the Cypriot entry is from Cyprus or Swansea (it’s the latter); nor whether many in the German diasporic community share my profound sense of embarrassment over the heightened exposure of Meyer-Landrut’s at best spasmodic command of English grammar, syntax, and pronunciation following her victory. What matters is that the European Broadcast Union’s inclusive membership policy allows for a contest in which Azerbaijan as much as Germany, Israel as much as Iceland, Turkey as much as the United Kingdom share a common European stage, creating a European landscape that in David Morley’s word’s is “more than a nation-state writ large”: a Europe that is many ways the opposite of the nation state: inclusive and hard to take seriously! To me, that’s as much as I could ever hope for of Saturday night television.

With all the talk of Jay being canceled, Conan being unwilling to leave his time slot, Google leaving China, and Raimi and Maguire leaving Spidey, so far we’ve missed the week’s other big divorce: Simon Cowell is leaving American Idol.

Ellen DeGeneres joked about his departure, but then noted seriously, “I am going to be very, very sad to see him go, because I think he’s made the show what it is.” She’s right about that last part. Indeed, I want to make the argument that American Idol needs Simon, or at least an angry, pompous, belittling Brit judge like him.

It’s not that he’s angry, pompous, and belittling, though those are all qualities that work for the show too: just as the writers of Glee could probably tell you, if you want to get away with all this schlock of people singing and crying, a large dose of ironic distancing can help some of the audience to stomach it, and Simon is integral for that.

But the key part is that he’s all those things and British. This is *American* Idol, after all, and so central to its pitch is that it’s just so darn democratic, just like this beautiful country of ours (oops, sorry: “yours”). Contestants succeed despite the odds. And those odds may be a complete lack of talent in some cases, but they’re also framed as being centered on Simon, the nasty Brit elitist who insists on getting in the way of all these American dreams, leading to him being booed, and “shut up” by the voters (who Ryan Seacrest grandiosely refers to as “America”), and forced into submission by the eventual success and popularity of the idols. Even when he has nothing but compliments, there’s supposed to be an air of the Great American Talent having silenced the nasty aristocratic European through pure brilliance. In a show where sound is so important, Simon sounds so very British, and so very alien. And just as in countless other items of Hollywood in which the Brit is the stuck up jerk, so too do we see a weekly or nightly telling of the fable of American nationality – democratic, accepting, optimistic, cool, can-do, hopeful and persistent in the face of Old World aristocracy, hierarchies, and meanness. The Revolutionary War didn’t end – it just became a reality show on FOX with singing, egregious product placement, and Sanjaya.

Without Simon, therefore, it’s not American Idol – it’s just a version of Idol that happens to be in America. He’s quintessential for its nationalist pitch (and, as an aside, he shows the degree to which America’s never quite gotten over its love and fascination with Britain, try as it might. Heck, just listen to the tune for “My Country, ‘Tis of Thee”). And while I’m sure it could still do well in the ratings without him, unless they replace him with another ne’er-do-well Brit (or perhaps a cold German or Frenchman, but American TV hasn’t shown itself ready for Germans or Frenchmen), I’d expect to see those ratings dip, as the national resonance dwindles.

Or would supporting the show in spite of his absence be the final way to show those pesky Brits that it’s USA all the way, baby?