Archie Bunker at the Tea Party
From the start, the MSM has been determined to trivialize and/or demonize the Tea Partiers. Although the Tea Party movement has been consistent in focusing almost entirely on fiscal matters and small government, one of the most consistent and favored charges against them has been the race card.
So they have always been called bigots by the MSM. The original favored meme was that they are blue-collar, ignorant, unlettered, extremist, angry white male bigots. But just for variety—and as a result of a Times/CBS poll) the MSM has switched lately to accusations that they are privileged, well-educated, extremist, angry white male bigots. Make up your minds, MSM!
That original characterization of the Tea Partiers kept reminding me of something, though. Something very familiar, from the past. Who or what could it be?
And then I realized the answer: Archie Bunker, of the 1971-1979 TV show “All in the Family.”
Archie was created by noted liberal Norman Lear as a typical blue collar conservative, bigoted and narrow-minded and selfishly out to protect his own pocketbook. Archie was heavy and red-faced, and his speech was studded with mispronounced words and malapropisms.
Enlightened viewers were supposed to look down on Archie and his highly vocal racism—as well as all his viewpoints, expressed in his gritty New York accent. But Bunker was brillliantly played for laughs by liberal actor Carroll O’Connor, who somehow conveyed that you were paradoxically supposed to sort of like him too, because underneath all the bluster he had the proverbial heart of gold. O’Connor walked an exquisitely fine line in conveying both ideas simultaneously—very different from the undiluted rancor of today’s Tea Party critics towards members of the movement.
What’s more, the liberals on the show such as Archie’s foil and live-in son-in-law Michael Stivic (portrayed by Rob Reiner, another liberal in real life) aka “Meathead” were not portrayed as faultless, either. Those were the days.
I loved the show at the time. Glancing back via You Tube, I am surprised to find myself now thinking the old guy scored a couple of political points, too (although not the racist ones). Take a look for yourself at Archie expounding on gun control. When he makes his over-the-top suggestion on how to foil what were then known as airplane “skyjackings.” think of 9-11 and its aftermath, and note why there have been no airplane hijackings since Flight 93:
And now, here’s Archie on Democrats, speaking during the Carter years. Plus ca change, plus c’est la meme chose:
[NOTE: Here’s an interesting factoid about O’Connor and the creation of the show:
Wanting a well-known actor to tackle the controversial material, Lear had approached Jackie Gleason and Mickey Rooney to play Archie; both declined. O’Connor accepted, not expecting the show to be a success and believing he would be able to move back to Europe. (In her book Archie & Edith, Mike & Gloria : the Tumultuous History of All in the Family, Donna McCrohan noted that O’Connor requested that Lear provide him with a return airline ticket to Rome as a condition of his accepting the role, so that he could return to Italy when the show failed.) Instead, the show became the highest-rated television program on American television for five consecutive seasons until the 1976-1977 season (the sixth season).]
I read this somewhere.
“Racism is the first refuge of a scoundrel.”
As I remember the show, Meathead was an unemployed perpetual college student mooching off the productive member of the family, his father in law, Archie. But because Meathead had gone to college, he always felt compelled to explain to Archie why his worldview was morally superior to Archie’s.
An unproductive liberal telling a productive member of society how to live. Some things don’t change.
Liberals tried to vaccinate viewers against conservative ideas by having many of them espoused by Archie Bunker, and linking him with clearly unacceptable views. Nevertheless, Archie often spoke a lot of common sense.
Al Bundy for President!
I’ve read somewhere – someone else have the source? – that O’Connor’s great characterization was based on Archie being an Irish Catholic, but Lear and the rest made Archie Protestant.
Scott,
“An unproductive liberal telling a productive member of society how to live. Some things don’t change.”
And remember, which of the two was supposed to be held up for ridicule? Oh, yeah. Archie.
It’s almost as if the writers were intentionally undermining Lear’s vision…
I recall a hilarious scene where Gloria was chiding Archie over all the horrible gun deaths. To which Archie replied “Would it make you feel any better little guh’yell if dey all jumped outta windows?”
I was watching TV alone in the television room of a kibbutz on the Golan Heights when suddenly a large numbers of Kibbutzniks entered in order to watch the next show. When I asked which program was so popular with them I was told that it was about an Israeli living in the US.
It was All in the Family.
Did you all read Richard Fernandez today? He talks about time and remembrances of youth.
http://pajamasmedia.com/richardfernandez/2010/04/21/risk-averse/#more-8707
This post was an How Green Was My Valley moment for me. Those were indeed the days.
The criticism that the crowd at tea party demonstrations lacks blacks is nonsense. There is no admission fee or bar to participation for anyone. Blacks vote over 90% Democrat and 95% voted for Obama. They favor big government and lots of spending. They are waiting for some of that Obama money. Why would they attend a rally supporting fiscal restraint and smaller government?
Mr. Frank: You are spot on.The Gallup Poll says that Blacks constitute 6% of Tea Party Supporters. “Tea Partiers Are Fairly Mainstream in Their Demographics.”
Tea Party Supporters
Non-Hispanic White 79 %
Non-Hispanic Black 6%
Other 15%
All Americans
Non-Hispanic White 75%
Non-Hispanic Black 11%
Other 15%
BTW, compare the percentage of Blacks among Tea Party supporters (6%) to the percentage of Blacks among McCain voters. (1.1%)There are quite a few blacks who voted for Obama and who support Obama who are Tea Party supporters.
http://www.gallup.com/poll/127181/Tea-Partiers-Fairly-Mainstream-Demographics.aspx
Yup, Archie doesn’t seem the ignorant fool I thought he was in my callow youth. I remember the show where two black robbers broke into the Bunker household. Mike tried the lib explanation- root causes et al. The robbers responded by calling Mike a LIBERAL, with the scorn just dripping from their voices.
(Those screenwriters were not fooling. I once stopped the black living with the mother of a childhood friend from breaking into a car to steal a six-pack. While I was on good terms with him, he responded to my stopping him with the LIBERAL label, like a curse, just like the robbers. He later went to AA and kept his alcohol habit at bay.)
One of my favorite TV programs of all time. Lear failed miserably at indoctrinating me, though.
The AITF episode featuring Sammy Davis, Jr. is one of the greatest sitcom episodes in history, imo.
I loved that show as a teenager, and I did fall for the indoctrination, for many years. Nowadays it takes my breath away to realize just how much indoctrination there really was in that show.
I also can’t help thinking that in real life, Archie Bunker, a blue-collar union member in a lower middle class neighborhood in the NYC suburbs, with racist views, really would have been a Democrat.
expat:
I haven’t looked yet at your Wretchard link, but I am moved by your How Green Was My Valley evocation. I loved that movie in my childhood, having seen it on TV (late at night, with my Dad). I grew up in southwestern Pennsylvania coal country, and we were Presbyterian to boot, so the old Welsh hymns hit home. The movie is fine, and the book is matchless.
How green was my valley then, and the valley of them that have gone.
One of the interesting things about Archie Bunker is that, in that time period, they still had to conform to reality. So, in the end, Archie ended up being right most of the time. I think that we, the audience, were also supposed to get angry over that too. That somehow Archie was correct because he was Evil(TM) and manipulating the world. I think that we were supposed to somehow see the perpetual loafer in Meathead was *supposed* to be the one making the money and Archie is stealing it from him by unfairly making reality what he wants to be.
Still, it has one of the funniest scenes I think I have seen in political TV. Archie is out for Nixon to win, Meathead out for McGovern. The show ends with Meathead glowingly talking about the new revolution coming and McGovern ushering in a new age in a landslide. Since I was seeing this in the ’00’s I always wondered what the next show said about it.
Finally I’ll end with something I’ve also never understood (possibly because I was born in ’75 I do not know the culture at that point) but that has to be the most depressing time in television history. The comedies – Archie Bunker and Good Times for instance – were some of the most depressing shows I’ve seen. I recall watching The Hulk as a kid and pretending to grow into the green giant, but that is also a *really* depressing look at that story too.
Archie Bunker, a blue-collar union member in a lower middle class neighborhood in the NYC suburbs, with racist views, really would have been a Democrat.
What else would he have been? Union member Democrat racist. See tautology.
Sorry, that should have read “union member ~ Democrat ~ racist.”
Even at the time, I thought Archie was right on quite a few points. The attempt by Lear & Co. to make him and his ideas look utterly ludicrous was so ham-handedly obvious that it didn’t really work. And the writers and O’Connor were good enough artists that they actually rose above such intentions and created a three-dimensional human being with color and depth, even when he was being absurd.
I always loathed Meathead, one of the most annoying characters ever to tread the boards (and that ACCENT! my God).
I recall one episode that was very touching: Meathead and ditzy Gloria decided their baby boy wouldn’t be baptized in the Church. Archie, distressed about this, and wanting to do right by his grandson, sneaked out with the baby and took him to church and tried to do the baptism himself. It was heart-wrenching.
Meathead exploded with whiny, nasty self-righteous fury when Archie returned with little Joey. And it was all about him, of course: HIS beliefs (or atheism, rather) were being overruled. If he’d been an atheist with any grace and humor, he wouldn’t have worried about it — they don’t think Christianity is anything but voodoo anyway, so why make a fuss if the old man does something like that? makes no difference, right?
Right?
Oh, and I never got that ARchie and company were Protestants. They were obviously from Roman Catholic backgrounds, it seemed to me. (It’s damned hard to find us Protestants in NYC.)
betsybounds,
I’m glad you liked my use of How Green Was My Valley, but Wretchard deserves credit for bringing it up in connection with how we remember. I’m not that creative.
AITF is part of a time when things were a little simpler, when you could be liberal or progressive without hating Archie, even if you thought he was dumb or uncouth. It was a time when the young still believed that liberal changes would make things better and when our shared memories of Glenn Miller (in my case they came from watching old movies) could be enjoyed without guilt. It was a time when it was OK to be silly, even as we protested Viet Nam and racism. It was a time when the negative effects of achieving all our demands were still partly hidden.
And today it seems that very many want to substitute masochism for joy. Too many don’t even want to allow children a time to enjoy being kids, but instead try to saddle them with the job of saving the planet. As kids we were only expected to name the planets in order of their distance from the sun. We grew up catching lightening bugs on summer evenings as the Archie Bunkers we knew sat on the porch watching over us. Archie didn’t warn us that they might become extinct. He let us be kids, but he fully expected us to grow up. It took some of us a very long time.
As kids we were only expected to name the planets in order of their distance from the sun.
Even that has become more complicated, with the discovery of objects like Chiron, Sedna, Quaoar, Eris, etc. Now some say that Pluto really shouldn’t be considered a planet at all!
I was vaccinated against the worst of liberal pieties because by the time I got out of high school I had figured out that the Viet Cong were not an Asian version of the Americans for Democratic Action. Looking back I can see some change in my thinking at about the time the show was on. One night after it I realized that Meathead was living in Archie’s house (I would guess without paying rent), shtupping his daughter, eating the food off his table, and all he could do was tell Archie how stupid and backward he was.. I realized that if it weren’t for Gloria Archie would have, and should have, told him if he couldn’t at least be properly grateful he was welcome to live elsewhere.
Given the age of the character, you could guess he’d been in the service during World War II and probably in something like the infantry. I’d also bet that it never would have occurred to Meathead to cut him a little slack on that account.
Given who produced the show, it was one of the many times I figured out that most liberals love the people in the abstract; it’s just actual people for whom they have disdain.
Archie had real life experience. Meathead had pie in the sky intellectual theories. I think we can safely conclude that the Meathead’s side gained the upper hand to put us in the dire condition we’re in today.
I said almost at the time the show was airing originally, that except for the usual exaggeration to make the character funnier, Archie Bunker and I agreed on most things political. It was amusing that the liberals thought they were making Archie out to be a bumbler and total airhead, apparently thinking they were showing up conservatives in general, all the time they were showing liberals, through Meathead, to have irresponsible, unworkable ideals.
How can anyone have a _right_ to something that _must_ be provided by someone else? Health care may be an entitlement stemming from enacted laws, but it’s hardly a right.
AITF was suppose to be Liberal indoctrination? Well, I guess it worked at the time but now their are two shows a night to reveal the stupidity of Meathead. My aunt recently started watching the reruns so I’ve seen a few visiting and was struck by how Archie, while brash and bigoted, is always the one who fixes things and the hero. Even if it means he has to come around and apologize to Edith.
strcpy, yes, the ’70s were a depressing time. Bad hair, bad music, bad clothes, bad movies, bad economics, bad presidents, bad politics and bad hygiene. At least from the perspective of someone who experienced it from 3rd grade to graduation. Really, Star Wars was such a major change, and relief, from the swill of movies of that decade. Ronald Reagan was such a breath of fresh air bringing and delivering both hope and change.
On the other hand, the experience gives perspective that eventually these negative nabobs will be replace and good times will return.
Don’t forget Jefferson, the white-hating black man who mirrors Archie in every personal aspect. Rev. Wright writ small (no pun intended).
Hagiobuktonoktonos Says:
“Don’t forget Jefferson, the white-hating black man who mirrors Archie in every personal aspect. Rev. Wright writ small (no pun intended).”
Except, you forget… George Jefferson was portrayed as a black Republican .
Yeah… the ’70s were a depressing time.
Some have nostalgia for that era, but I just keep remembering it was the decade the left made us disgracefully abandon South Vietnam and Cambodia to the Communists… and then gave the Communists about five more years of running rampant before Reagan finally saved the day.
The dreariness of the sitcoms that strcpy refers to is the endemic malaise that gripped the nation in the post-Watergate and Carter era. It was not at all a good time in America, and yes, the coming of Reagan was like a bright dawn after an especially stormy night.
Which begs the question, what represents the enveloping malaise that we are now experiencing? Where in the media can we find examples of Obama’s gathering influence?
Perhaps it is the cheerfulness of the tea party rallies, much to the consternation of the political and media elite.
I’ve read somewhere – someone else have the source? – that O’Connor’s great characterization was based on Archie being an Irish Catholic, but Lear and the rest made Archie Protestant.
Archie’s demographic construct was pure fantasy. There was nothing Anglo-WASP about him, and yet that is what Lear figured he had to make him — sort of. The only other American “type” who would fit the Archie mold and not be an ethnic Catholic would be Scotch-Irish. While NYC was a big enough place to contain some such people, it was an absurdity, since Archie was intended to be typical working class New Yorker.