A city bewitched into kitsch
SALEM
I HAVE ALWAYS liked this old seaport town from which Yankee traders sailed to the far reaches of the world when the republic was young. Citizens of faraway places from Amoy to Zanzibar got their first glimpse of the American flag, and America's exports, from Salem ships. Today its once mast-forested harbor is relatively deserted. The commerce of the sea has departed.
Salem is best known for the witch trials of 1692, however -- a fascinating case of mass hysteria as teen-age girls, one by one, fell into convulsions while their parents feared demonic possession. The girls accused their neighbors of witchcraft, and 19 women were hanged while one man was pressed to death by stones.
Although the tragedy was a drop in the bucket compared to the wholesale witch burnings and hangings in Europe at the time, the Salem story has never died. The tragedy has been the subject of numerous books and plays -- most notably ''The Crucible" by Arthur Miller.
With the sailing trade gone, tourism has come to the rescue, and, inevitably, witch kitsch has taken its hold. Even the police wear witches on their uniforms, and who wouldn't be charmed by taking a wrong turn on a street name Witch Way?
Tourists can choose among the Witch House, the Witch Dungeon, the Witch History Museum, the Salem Witch Museum, a Spellbound Museum, a Haunted Footsteps Ghost Tour, and a Ghost Encounters walking tour. My favorite, however, is the bike shop, Salem Cycle, with a sign showing a witch riding a broom with two wheels.
Given all of this, I was surprised at last month's controversy over a statue on the corner of Essex and Washington of actress Elizabeth Montgomery riding a broomstick with her heels on the moon. Montgomery played Samantha, a modern housewife witch who could perform magic by twitching her nose on a 1960s TV show called ''Bewitched," soon to be a major motion picture, as they say in Hollywood.
Some people thought the statue was making light of a three-century-old tragedy. ''We don't make fun of the Holocaust. We shouldn't be making fun of the witches," Bill Burns told National Public Radio. Others thought it was a shame to memorialize a TV show while there was so much real history in Salem. Mayor Stanley Usovicz, however, said that with all due respect, ''we have to recognize that there is a popular culture and that we are part of that popular culture."
No doubt, the Samantha statue does trivialize history, but the real message here is the tremendous and pervasive power of movies and television, undoubtedly America's most influential export, rivaled only by pop music. For many years after the breezy comedy series ''Cheers" had ended, the bar on Boston's Beacon Street that served as a model for the fictional bar was the most sought-after tourist site by overseas visitors -- much more so than the historic places associated with the birth of this nation. The Cheers bar still remains near the top, according to Boston's Convention and Visitors Bureau.
In Scotland I once went to visit the Scottish Nationalist Party, and members told me how recruitment had jumped after the movie ''Braveheart" exploited the deeds of William Wallace fighting the English in the 13th century. The party thought of building a statue of Wallace, but since no one knew what Wallace looked like, the obvious thing to do was make it look like the movie's star, Mel Gibson.
And although the Austrian city of Salzburg tries to play up its local hero, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, with kitsch only slightly more sophisticated than Salem's, there are legions of tourists who come to see the city of the ''Sound of Music," rather than the birthplace of Mozart.
America may have world-class symphony orchestras, some of the world's best museums, as well as poets, painters, playwrights, and writers, but love it or hate it, American culture has long been defined by its movies. My father, visiting Paris in the '30s, was accosted by a small boy pointing a stick and saying: ''Je suis le gangster avec un tommigun."
The power of Hollywood has crossed all frontiers since then, and I have no doubt that in many a town between Amoy and Zanzibar there are reruns of ''Bewitched" to be seen somewhere. Old sitcoms never die. They don't even fade away.
H.D.S. Greenway's column appears regularly in the Globe. 
