Archie Bunker, Fifty Years Later

 

On January 12, 1971 – fifty years ago next week – Norman Lear’s revolutionary sitcom All In The Family debuted. There was literally nothing like it on American TV at the time, and it was quite a shocking departure from Green Acres or whatever family friendly show it replaced. I remember my family never missing an episode when I was a kid. I had cool parents.

 

I broke out my DVDs of the first season of All In The Family tonight and watched the series premiere. It’s been at least ten years since I watched that show, and given that we’ve had Archie Bunker’s more evil twin as President for the last four years, I wasn’t sure how I’d feel about it. Surprisingly, Carroll O’Connor and Norman Lear’s comedic genius is just as relevant now as it was fifty years ago. No two ways about it, Archie Bunker is a bigoted asshole, but he’s funny. In spite of myself, I laughed until I had tears in my eyes. The thing is, I was laughing AT Archie, not with him. Played to perfection by O’Connor, and based on Norman Lear’s own father, Archie is not a sympathetic character, and I hear echoes of Archie’s rhetoric in the worst of today’s political dialogue, especially on social media, where Trump supporting politicians and commentators bloviate, and anonymous incel keyboard warriors reign. Jean Stapleton is equally as funny as Archie’s long-suffering wife Edith, and – at least in this episode – she isn’t the pushover that I remembered her being later on in the series.

 

Archie represents the worst of the Nixon era – ignorant, uninformed, and bigoted. Lear never meant for Archie Bunker to be a role model (I hear sympathetic nonsense occasionally from people who seem to be nostalgic for Archie’s racial epithets, not realizing that Lear wrote them as ironic commentary on Archie’s ignorance), and Carroll O’Connor (who was politically liberal in real life) was just a really good actor who made Archie believable. The first few seasons of All In The Family hold up well both as comedy and social commentary, but neither Norman Lear nor Carroll O’Connor meant for Archie to be a modern day politically incorrect anti-hero, either. Archie Bunker is an ignorant bigot whose attitudes are sadly still with us today, fifty years later.

John Prine and Me

 

My acquaintance with John Prine’s music started fairly inauspiciously with the album Prime Prine: The Best of John Prine, an okay introduction to Prine’s music, but not the best. I inherited that used LP indirectly from one of my sister's college roommates in 1979, when I was fifteen. I liked it well enough, but I listened to it only infrequently because I hadn’t yet developed the empathy and patience that Prine’s music required. However, because of Prime Prine, I did become acquainted with Sam Stone and a plethora of other great Prine musical characters.

 

Sometime between 1979 and 1988 I became a genuine fan of John Prine’s music. I bought the album John Prine Live in the summer of ‘88, when I was working for the US Forest Service. It’s a great album - John Prine duets with Bonnie Raitt on the definitive version of “Angel From Montgomery,” and it also contains my favorite version of his classic, “Speed of the Sound of Loneliness.” I love John Prine Live. That summer my dad became gravely ill and we weren’t sure he was going to make it. Fortunately he was with us another twenty-one years. Prine’s music was a part of that awful time.

 

For over a decade after that, whenever John Prine released an album, it became the soundtrack of whatever was going on in my life at the moment. The Missing Years reminds me of my last winter at USU in Logan in 1991-92 and my last summer of working for the USFS in 1992. I bought the two disc anthology Great Days in September 1993 and listened to it almost non-stop that fall, my second year of teaching. Great Days introduced me to Prine’s back catalog, especially the 1973 album, Sweet Revenge, which became my favorite John Prine album. From the cover photo – one of my favorite album covers ever – of Prine with a screw you cynical smile on his face and his cowboy boots propped up on the passenger door of his convertible, to the title song, to “Grandpa Was A Carpenter,” to “A Good Time,” Sweet Revenge is classic John Prine.

 

Lost Dogs and Mixed Blessings came out in the spring of 1995. I bought it at my favorite record store at the time, Rock’s, in American Fork, UT. The album – especially the song “Lake Marie,” one of Prine’s greatest – reminds me of teaching at Midway Elementary that year. In Spite of Ourselves came out fall of 1999, right after I got married. In Spite of Ourselves is an album of country duets between John and a variety of great female singers. The high points of the album were two songs that he did with Iris Dement, George Jones and Tammy Wynette’s “We’re Not The Jet Set” and Prine’s original “In Spite of Ourselves,” another of his greatest (and funniest) songs. It’s a paean to a couple who love each other in spite of their foibles. That was something I aspired to in my marriage, but wasn’t succeeding at very well.

 

In 2005, at the height of George Bush’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, John Prine released Fair and Square. I was working as a principal at a charter school in Midway, UT, and I was separated from my (now) ex-wife, not for the first or last time. That album contains the song, “Some Humans Ain’t Human,” probably Prine’s most overtly political anthem. In it Prine sings:

“Have you ever noticed?

When you're feeling really good

There's always a pigeon

That'll come shit on your hood

Or you're feeling your freedom

And the world's off your back

Some cowboy from Texas

Starts his own war in Iraq”

Prine said one of his reasons for writing the song was “Jeez, if I get hit by a bus I would sure like the world to know that I was not a Republican.” I could definitely relate to that.

 

John Prine died on Monday, April 6, 2020, from complications from COVID-19. I cried when I heard about it, because it felt like I’d lost a friend. But John Prine’s songs - sad, funny, and supremely humane - will always be there for me. Vince Gill best described how Prine’s music makes me feel in his 2006 song “Some Things Never Get Old”:

“Makin' sweet love to that gal of mine

My first taste of bluebird wine

Eatin' watermelon down to the rind

Any old song by brother John Prine”

 

That’s a pretty good legacy.

Thank You and Happy Veterans Day, Sergeant J

Kind of a preachy blog post today. Normally I try not to preach; it makes me feel hypocritical in a major way. However, what I have to say today is near and dear to my heart, so I’m gonna preach:

I have two little girls - stepsisters - in my class this year. Their father and step-father, Sgt. J, is a master sergeant in the army. In September he was severely injured by an IED - what used to be called a booby trap - in Afghanistan. Sgt. J’s job in the army was to actually defuse IEDs. For the last two months he has been recuperating in various military hospitals between here and Afghanistan. Tomorrow (on Veterans Day, no less) Sgt. J finally gets to come home. Like other returning Iraq/Afghanistan veterans in our area, Sgt. J will be escorted by the local fire department, and the main road into town will be lined with American flags. My class, along with several others, will be waiting by the roadside to cheer and demonstrate our appreciation as his entourage pulls into town.

I’m proud to teach this brave soldier’s children, and proud that he lives in our town. America wouldn’t have survived over the past two hundred and thirty-four years without men and women like Sgt. J and his family, who are prepared to make the ultimate sacrifice. I honor our country in a million little ways, but compared to heroes like Sgt. J, my efforts seems pretty inadequate.

This Veterans Day, let’s truly remember and appreciate Sgt. J and all the other brave men and women who have served - or are serving - our country. No other country in the world offers the freedoms and opportunities that we have here in the USA. The men and women serving in the military are prepared to lay down their lives to safeguard those freedoms and opportunities.

As the holiday season nears, let’s not forget we’re still fighting two wars. It doesn’t seem like a day goes by that there isn’t news of someone being injured or killed in Afghanistan and Iraq. There are also hundreds of thousands of servicemen and women who won’t be with their families on Thanksgiving later this month because they are sacrificing that time with their families to serve our country. 

Let’s not ever take any of them for granted.