There weren’t enough hours to watch all the TV I wanted, even if it was a fifth viewing of “Cannonball Run II” or “National Lampoon’s European Vacation,” which I’d watch while gnawing the pretzel casings away from Combos Baked Snacks to extract the wads of pizza-flavored cheese and mash them into one big ball. I yearned for us to be chosen to be a Nielsen family, and fantasized about keeping a TV diary and having my viewing habits influence ratings, but my parents said we’d never be asked to do such a thing.

It was the year the Iran-contra affair came to light, the year of the Challenger explosion and the “people power” revolution in the Philippines that ousted Ferdinand Marcos after two decades in power, the American government airlifting him to safety in Hawaii. (This last event my parents and I did see on TV, at least the clips the American news deigned to show.) But in prime time, it was “The Cosby Show,” “Dallas” and “Dynasty”; and all day long, there were game shows. I got obsessed with how you could spin a wheel on “The Price Is Right” or hit a button on “Press Your Luck” and win a new car, a living room set or a trip to Switzerland.

I wanted to win the cash jackpot on “Sale of the Century,” to be handed a suitcase of money and showered with balloons. Like the New York Lotto cards my father brought home every week and the Wingo game cards I filled out in the back pages of The New York Post, game shows were pure possibility. Everyone could be a winner; everyone could get rich quick.

James Baldwin wrote that American media is “designed not to trouble, but to reassure.” American movies and TV shows help sustain a fantasy of innocence that masks our country’s violence. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie referred to America’s “addiction to comfort”; Junot Díaz to our commitment to “narratives of consolation.” The soothing myth of American exceptionalism depends on maintaining its comfort and innocence, however false. Perhaps my childhood did, too. After all, my family had the privilege to remain superficially apolitical, to attempt to distance ourselves, mentally and geographically, from the devastation of the Reagan years.

By cranking up the TV, stuffing ourselves with Velveeta and Steak-umms, we were trying to drown out our own fears, our guilt for the relatives left behind in the Philippines, our economic anxieties and uncertainties. What could be more American than this sort of desperate denial? We didn’t need to prove that we were American; we already were.

The relationship between Americanness and consumption was a complicated one. My friend Lori often ate lunch at our house, where she’d ask for seconds of Spam noodle soup, Spam and rice, or Kraft mac-and-cheese with chunks of Spam. “I love Spam,” she’d say. “It’s so delicious.”

One afternoon, she refused to eat. “My mom says Spam is disgusting,” she said, looking at the bowl my mother had placed in front of her. She pulled it closer, then pushed it away. “My mom said she’d never cook or eat it.”