Sunday, June 2, 2013

Archie Won

I liked Jean Stapleton's work and, from what I've read about her she seems like she must have been a very nice lady and a good colleague to her fellow actors.

Her most famous series, All In The Family, which ran from 1971 to 1979, is another matter.  I didn't like it because it mocked blue collar class people in an all too familiar way.  I also don't like it because it normalized a form of bigoted discourse during the decade which began with an attempt present positive depictions of African Americans in popular culture, including on All In The Family, and ended with the election of the racist Reagan administration and liberalism falling off of the cliff from which it has never recovered.  All In The Family was the number one show in the ratings for a long part of its run, it was a popular program during all of it and in syndication after it went out of production.

Media people, producers, directors, writers, .... actors, when someone raises the possibility that what they produce has real life effects will pooh-pooh the idea.  "There's no evidence that...." is the mantra resorted to when someone brings up that issue.  It's a mantra that is generally spouted on the libertarian, pseudo-left. I used to mouth those words, myself.  Well, there is evidence that watching violence and other malignant things do have an effect but, as is often the case with soc-sci research, you can pick and choose what you focus on to argue what you want to, commissioning it if you have the resources.

That is until it comes to selling commercial time during those shows which are said to have no effect.  As soon as it comes to selling commercial time, then what people see for less than a minute on TV is sold as having enormous effects on peoples' behavior and thinking.  You wonder why they don't have the same faith in their programming.  That discrepancy is hardly ever discussed though its hypocrisy blazes like the sun.

I look at the decade of All In The Family and, as I've said before, I see the decade that set things up for the right-wing to end progress in virtually the entire program of the real left - providing a decent, sustainable life for everyone on an equal basis, of ending discrimination, of expanding the common range of access to an unharassed private life in a clean sustained environment.  I saw that ending as hate speech increased, especially towards the end of the decade, hate talk radio, shock jock programming, hate talk "comedy" are all  "entertainment" products of the decade.  It is absurd to think that the hate speech that flowed out of Archie Bunker in the #1 rated TV show is unrelated to the increasing acceptance of hate speech.  It is absurd to believe that is unrelated to the rise of right-wing politics during that same decade.

The one and only part of the official program of liberalism during the 60s and 70s that was accepted and adopted by the Republican right and which flourished beyond the dreams of such liberals,  were "free speech" and the deregulation of the media.  They saw a golden opportunity to promote hatred, hatred for poor people, for women, for minority groups that was an essential part of their backlash politics.  Reagan-Bush imported the putrid Rupert Murdoch  from Britain,  made him a citizen on an expedited basis so he could swing politics farther to the right and, in exchange, they would allow him to do so much to turn the American media into a sewer of old line sexism, racism, and a place from which to make things such as torture sexy and, so, desirable.   Adding to the obscene wealth of the Murdoch family and his investors.

All In The Family, as so many American programs of rather doubtful help in making political or social progress, was an adaptation of a British program, Till Death Do Us Part.  All In The Family was  a somewhat toned down version of that rather putrid BBC production - and I've seen several of them.  That the period of its production just about immediately preceded  the rise of Margaret Thatcher might have been a warning of what was to come here, though I certainly hadn't learned enough to be thinking in those terms back then.  That the related programs have a similar position in the history of the countries they were seen in seems to me to be more than a coincidence.

One of the most offensive aspects of All In The Family was the presentation of Archie Bunker as a typical example of blue collar men of that period, when he wasn't.  I grew up among people of that economic class, my father was a factory worker from the low income suburbs of Philadelphia.  His family had a number of members who could have been featured on the program.  But a lot of them were certainly not racists, a none of them were the fountains of hatred and ignorance that Archie Bunker was written to be.  I don't know anything about the writers for the show or what instructions they were given.  I'd like to know how many of them really came from that milieu, though it was clear they didn't have much respect for the people in it.  Someone who was as much of a jerk as Archie Bunker wasn't all that common, he certainly wasn't Everyman in 1971, though he'd been promoted to such by the end of the decade.

Edith Bunker was certainly a much better character, though she was entirely too silent in the face of Archie's awfulness.  I'm sure all of the people involved with All In The Family thought they were presenting her,  Gloria and Mike as more of a role model than Archie Bunker but that was a complete and total misunderstanding of what they'd produced.  History proves that Archie Bunker won the fight. No matter how much the writers tried to humiliate him.  That he was created just as the progress of the Civil Rights movement was gaining hold should have allowed them to see that the forces he was supposed to represent were still strong and present.  For the love of Mike, NIXON WAS IN OFFICE AND ABOUT TO RUN ONE OF THE FOULEST OF RIGHT WING REELECTION CAMPAIGNS IN OUR HISTORY UP TO THAT TIME.   You would have thought they'd have seen how things lay outside of New York city and the media-arts milieu in which they lived.  But like Pauline Kael, they didn't know any of those people who voted for Nixon and they proved unable to see what they were aiding. The rise of Reagan and the far right was aided by the media and the similarly unaware groups that constituted the "left" during that period.  They unwittingly provided the bigots of the late 70s and beyond acceptance for a form of discourse and, even more stupidly, the civic-religious dogma of "free speech" that produced the terrible Buckley vs. Valeo decision, the predecessor of Citizens United and the deregulated media that produced a gold mine for the far right.  You tell me who were the fools and who benefited from those "freedoms" in the end.

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