isclaimer – I have not watched this show. I’ve seen the ads on the mindless-drone TV at the dealership and rolled my eyes.

Okay, this is some sort of program where they have contestants from everyday people (i.e. stupid) compete in an unlikely and over-engineered obstacle course. But that’s not what I’m deconstructing here – I’m looking at the name they’ve given this wasteland show.

American Ninja Warrior.

So, first up. “American”. What has this got to do with anything? Is there a Polish Ninja Warrior game I need to know about? Or is this a way to stick a bit of nationalism to an otherwise tedious effort to bring in the flag-waver rubes. Should I try to sell “American paper towels” or “American cat-box sand”? What sort of people are they trying to hook with this?

And the next word — “Ninja”. So that’s two dissimilar cultures, coupled together. Can anything be more different that free-acting Americans and society-centered Japanese? Were there American Ninjas at Valley Forge? At the Battle of the Bulge? Isn’t that why we have a gun culture? Because maybe ninja skills take years and a scatter gun takes a pull of a trigger? Americans are a culture of convenience and the closest thing you’ll see to actual training is a movie montage of someone training.  Batman decides to fight crime – there is a series of scene of him building his muscles and training under masters, and twenty seconds later he’s a superhero.

Wait? There is more? Again the coupling problem, this time with the second and third word. “Ninja Warrior”. Okay, ninjas are assassins. They climb over rooftops and along rafters. Their desire is the clean kill, not so much as a gasp of a garrotted sentry or the cry of the master. Usually it’s only discovered the next day when the geisha opens the sliding door and finds a lot of blood and the master’s head rolled clear of his body. But “warrior” means fighting, hack-n-slash stuff. A ninja who is a warrior is a ninja who fucked up, who tripped over a door frame or dropped his car keys, who has been discovered and has to fight his way clear. If your ninja comes back from his mission you commissioned him for, all cut up and covered with sentry blood (and even some of his own), well, that is a ninja you probably don’t want to hire again. You might as well have a ninja who carries an accordion with him or something.

So, when you think about it, “American Ninja Warrior” is an inane collective of words, just some studio exec reaching into a bag of low-class image-toggle words. He might as well have called it “Patriotic Kickass Sluggers” or “Dunk tank clowns” (which would be more to the truth, given the obstacle course in the show). The point is, don’t just let things like this pass (or, worse, influence you). Really think about what the words say, and what the person saying them thinks of you as a target audience.

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