All in the Wakefield family

First published in the Wakefield Daily Item, June 15, 2021.

It started with a brainworm.

Sort of like an earworm is a tune you can’t get out of your head, a brainworm is a meme you can’t dislodge from your brain. In this case, the meme was an image of Archie Bunker, a character from the hit 1970s sitcom, All in the Family. Accompanying the image – Archie giving a wiseacre, sidelong look while holding his trademark stogie – is the caption: “To all of you ‘offended’ – you wouldn’t have made it through an episode of me without having a meltdown.”

The meme was posted in a Wakefield Facebook group and elicited lots of Likes and hand-clapping GIFs and approving comments. “Precisely!,” one person exclaimed. “Everything is inappropriate or potentially offensive…Why did we permit our culture to get so soft? You can't even make jokes anymore. Geez!”

I understood where these folks were coming from. I loved that show. As a kid growing up in the 70s, I used to watch it all the time with my siblings and parents. In particular, my father got a real kick out of Archie Bunker, as brilliantly portrayed by actor Carroll O’Connor. He and O’Connor were about the same age, born in the mid-1920s and growing up to become the World War II-generation. (My dad had been at Marine Corps boot camp at Parris Island when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.) I’m sure Dad identified somewhat with Bunker, a conservative, traditional white male with simple values surrounded by a fast-changing society, and by family and friends whose more progressive views reflected that change.

But there was something about the meme’s sentiment and its relation to the context that didn’t sit quite right.

The brainworm wriggled through my head and got me thinking. Did the Likers on Facebook actually applaud and approve of Archie Bunker? It’s important to remember that Bunker was a fictional character created by writer and producer Norman Lear, a liberal activist. The show didn’t venerate Archie, but with honesty and humor showed his narrow-minded, racist, chauvinistic views in conflict with the more progressive views of his daughter, Gloria, and her husband, Michael Stivic (“Meathead,” as Archie called him).

Lear got the idea for All in the Family after reading about a popular British TV show in which the father character reminded him of his own father. As Wikipedia helpfully explains, Lear “incorporated his own family experiences with his father into the show. Lear's father would tell Lear's mother to ‘stifle yourself’ and she would tell Lear's father ‘you are the laziest white man I ever saw’ (two ‘Archieisms’ that found their way onto the show).”

Now, looking back almost fifty years, I see my own father more fully. He was not a racist in any kind of hateful or negative sense – far from it. As the grounds supervisor at the University of Maryland, where he had been a student and where he worked his entire adult life, his long-time foreman was Black as were most of the crew. I only ever saw him interact with these men with natural respect, civility, and fairness. (And back then, they were all men.)

But Dad probably felt some generational tensions and issues similar to Archie’s. It was a progressive time, coming off the political and social activism of the 1960s, and no doubt Dad shook his head at some of the change and yearned for simpler times. I remember him laughing so hard at the interactions between Archie and George Jefferson, a Black man whose family had moved into Archie’s white neighborhood in Queens, New York. These interactions highlighted Archie’s unselfconscious racism, but in ways that seemed to assume a broader unity. We were all in t his together, the show seemed to say.

Archie made my father laugh, and also, I am certain, made him think. Me, too. All in the Family had this effect on all who watched; that’s why it became the most popular show in America. It topped the Nielsen ratings for years and won countless Emmy awards. Looking back at the show and those times clarifies some things. One is that people’s basic nature hasn’t changed – it never does and it never will. There will always be Archies – prejudiced, close-minded people, suspicious of change and forever complaining about it.

Another clear insight is that the nature of our conversation as a country has changed – profoundly. Back then, there was no social media and only a few TV networks, so we were all watching the same sitcoms and buddy cop shows and news programs – and actually talking to each other.

Lear understood this, and knew the power of his platform. His brilliance was in using the show to highlight generational and cultural differences and change in ways that were funny and moving, and that would spur us to think. In this sense, besides being just a great show, All in the Family was a vehicle or tool, a kind of mirror to hold up, frank in its reflection, so we could see and understand ourselves more clearly.

Who am I talking about when I say “we”? The show’s title says it was about a “family” – the differences that cause friction, the love that keeps it together. But the unmistakable intent was larger: family is community; family is country. Indeed, the deeper assumption underlying the show is that we are all one country, one family, and that while of course we have differences, we find ways to talk to each other and to live with each other.

This underlying assumption has been weakened to the point of near invisibility. All the zillions of current channels and shows and “content” do plenty to highlight our differences, but there is no assumption of togetherness. In fact, the intent of so much media seems only to divide and segment, to capture and motivate specific groups or “markets,” whether consumer or political, to the exclusion of different ones.

I miss that big conversation and I think lots of other folks do too. Is it even still possible? What holds us together now? Are we family?

The point of this question isn’t about wishing for some kind of warm and fuzzy state of kumbaya. Everyone knows family isn’t easy. And some things you can’t change: Archie, at his core, was not going to change. Neither was my father. My own fundamental values and personality are steadfast.

But, are we family? The point is about questioning who we are and how we can be better. How do we treat each other? How do we talk to each other? What do we owe to each other? How do we reestablish and reaffirm that underlying assumption of togetherness?

In America and in Wakefield, we’ve always had our differences, some of them deep. We always will. But we have allowed ourselves to be wedged and pulled far apart by leaders in pursuit of political power and by media in pursuit of market power.

Only we can change this. What and who we give credence to – as citizens and as media consumers – is up to us. We need leaders who tell us the truth and who bring us together. And we need media and art and entertainment that reflect a shared reality, no matter how difficult or painful. How can we get along or make progress if we’re living in different worlds, alternate realities? We need leaders and thinkers, artists and writers, TV producers and podcasters and music composers who assume and encourage and prioritize our commonalities, and who take it as sacred, self-evident truth that all people are created equal.

Most importantly, all of us must think as we take in what is being said and done all around us. Is leader A telling the truth about what happened? Is cable news program B reporting all the facts about the situation? Is TV series C appealing to the better angels of our nature or merely to our baser instincts? Is opinion columnist D proposing a solution and a way forward, or, Archie Bunker-like, merely complaining and cutting people down?

The theme song to All in the Family was called “Those Were the Days” and the lyrics describe the backward-looking, reactionary caricature that was Archie Bunker to a T. It’s funny, and a little ironic, to now look back favorably on the show and that time – in a sense, to say those were the days.

I’m not romanticizing the 1970s – there was plenty of bad stuff going on back then. But in order for us to have any hope of moving forward as one country, we have to find a way back to that big, shared conversation, where we are watching, listening, thinking, talking, arguing, feeling…together.

© Jeff Kehoe