Archie Bunker Lives On

This was first published in April 2012

I suppose some people might not know who Archie Bunker was, although unfortunately, they probably know someone very much like him. Well, Archie was a character, played by Carroll O'Connor, on the highly popular CBS television comedy "All In The Family," which originally aired during the 1970s. At the end of the decade, the show, which had lost important cast members, was renamed "Archie Bunker's Place," and continued its run into the early 1980s. Reruns of the show have been on ever since. The show was set in the Queens section of New York City with Archie as a working class, socially and politically conservative guy who felt besieged by the changes taking place around him. He was a bigot who saw race, ethnicity or religion in all matters. He was Protestant and thought of himself as a religious man, although he rarely attended church, and his actions and statements towards others were usually anything but Christian. I suppose he could be called, "THE angry white man."

Other important characters in the show were Archie's wife, Edith, who was a bit scatterbrained, but always understanding, with a perception into other people's psychology, including that of her difficult husband, who called her a "dingbat." Then there was Gloria, their liberal daughter, who was married to Mike, a hippie-type liberal, whose Polish heritage was a waiting target for the bigoted Archie.

The show stunned many people back then by its treatment of long taboo subjects, like sex* and gay issues, and by its treatment of race, ethnicity and religion. Middle-aged and older people I was around back in those times seemed to view the show as too pro-liberal, but I think they often missed some of the digs at liberals. While the show's creator, Norman Lear, had the writers poke fun at Archie's bigotry and beliefs, he also had a sort of "soft spot" for Archie, which showed viewers why Archie was so angry at the world. In what was one of the best episodes, in my opinion, Archie is little seen (he goes to the neighborhood bar), but his presence is there, and the episode also took some shots at liberal Mike, and by extension, at many liberals. Edith, Gloria, Mike, plus black neighbor, Lionel, and a Catholic neighbor couple, the Lorenzos, get together at the Bunker home to play a game where a drawn card tells the player to give their true feelings about a certain other person. Mike and Lionel are paired back to back, and they are supposed to push against one another while telling each other their real feelings. Mike, always concerned about race relations in America, was always telling Lionel about race issue stories he had read or seen on television. Lionel tells Mike he doesn't always want to hear this kind of thing, and Mike says something like, "What do you want me talk about with you, the weather?" Lionel replies, "Yes, black people have weather too!" Thus the game begins and others take their shots at Mike, too. Edith tells him that he acts too stuck up at times (a shot at what conservatives see as "elitism"), and that she doesn't think it is right for him to make fun of Archie. Mike explodes and says everyone is picking on him. In just a great scene, Edith takes Mike into the kitchen to smooth over his hurt feelings. The usually happy Edith turns serious, and when Mike says something to the effect that he doesn't want to hear what she has to say, Edith gets firm and says, "You will listen!" She tells him that Archie is jealous of him because Archie had to quit school early on in his life to help support his family, and that "he's never going to be anymore than he is right now. But you're going to college and you can be anything you want to be; that's why Archie is jealous of you." A chastened Mike now gets it. All of these years later, and after seeing the episode in reruns, that one scene sticks in my mind above all others.

Archie Bunker lives on in some, if not many, of the views of untold Americans; I suppose in all of us to varying degrees, but I hear some very disturbing comments coming from zealots in one political party, especially.** We're jealous and afraid, real human feelings. We see people who look or sound different from us doing well, and it scares us or makes us resentful. The question is, will we let these feelings inside of us hold us back, or indeed, take us back in time, or will we try to overcome our fears and live together as a true nation.

* For those too young to have lived through those times, you can't even imagine how groundbreaking "All In The Family" really was on many topics, and watching reruns or DVDs can't convey the attitudes that had prevailed up to that time. Sex topics were so restricted on television back then, that married couples were shown sleeping in separate beds and women had to cover their navels. All In The Family's creator, Norman Lear, also had other hit shows after All In The Family's initial success: "Sanford and Son," "Maude" (from a character first introduced to the public on All In The Family and played by the great Bea Arthur), "Good Times," and "The Jeffersons."

** A Michele Bachmann comment about doing away with the minimum wage to reduce unemployment is very troubling to me, and it should be to you, too. I think such talk would even shake Archie's conservative beliefs, and he might even have called her a "dingbat," a term far too kind for a person of her nasty ilk.

Photo is from the 2002 Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment DVD

WORD HISTORY:
Earnest-The ultimate origin of this word is uncertain, but Old Germanic had "ernustiz," which indicated "vigorous, intense feeling, seriousness, zealous in battle." This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "eornoste," with essentially the same meanings, but the meaning began to be altered and confined through time to the present "serious." This later became "ernest," before the modern version. While I am not totally certain of this, apparently forms of the word have died out in North Germanic (Norwegian, Swedish, Icelandic, Danish), but the West Germanic part of Germanic still has forms, all with the meaning "serious": German has "ernst," some Low German has "eanst," (no "r"), some Low German has "eernst," West Frisian "earnstich," and Dutch "ernstig."