Trump & All in the Family

Note: This was written during the Republican primaries in March 2016


The 1970s saw the airing of a television series unlike any other seen up to that time. The series was "All in the Family," and it showed us ourselves complete with bigotry, fears, prejudices, racism, and all, but usually in a lighthearted, comedic way. Unlike the later "political correctness police," who wagged fingers in faces, or yelled and screamed in an apparent attempt to humiliate those deemed to have violated their codes (thus often so angering people, as to lose them forever), "All in the Family" usually got in your face in a funny way. We saw how silly some of our fears and prejudices were, but without anyone ever leaping through the television screen with index finger pointed at us.

So .... what does all of this have to do with Donald Trump? Well, when Trump began his campaign for president, I thought he was blatantly showing us how bigoted, fearful, prejudiced, and racist many of us still are. Some of his statements were things we might well have heard uttered by one Archie Bunker, the main character in "All in the Family" all of those years ago.* At times Trump seemed to smirk when making his pronouncements, making me wonder if indeed he was thinking, "What a bunch of dingbats we have voting in this country."** The thing is, I no longer think he was doing an Archie Bunker imitation to show us our flaws, but rather he was deliberately stoking the fires of bigotry and racism in a bunch of Archie Bunkers in the country for his own self interest. Trump has been compared to Hitler, but my use of Hitler here is not "necessarily" intended as such, for if I were going to refer to Hitler in some comparative way, I'd be writing about Ted Cruz. Anyway, what Trump really thinks is unknown to me, for as I said, he seems to use derogatory and inflammatory language for his own ends. Once seemingly many Germans thought the same about Hitler; that he used bigotry and racism to further his political career, but that he didn't mean it. Germans and the rest of the world found out something though, HE MEANT IT! While I've sort of given Trump the benefit of the doubt so far about using bigotry and racism, I'd rather NOT find out if he means it.   

* Archie Bunker was played to the hilt by actor Carroll O'Connor.  

** For those unaware, "dingbat" was what Archie called his often slow on the uptake wife, Edith.

WORD HISTORY:
Bee-For such a common word throughout the Germanic languages, with relatives in other Indo European languages too, the history is a bit sketchy. It "seems" to go back to an Indo European form "bhi," with a notion of "shaking, quivering," or perhaps, "humming, buzzing." This gave Old Germanic a form of something like, "bion," which was applied as the name for the "buzzing" ("humming," "quivering") insect. This gave Old English (Anglo-Saxon) "beo," which then became "bee," where it has remained for centuries. The other Germanic languages have: German "Biene," Low German Saxon "Bee," Dutch and West Frisian "bij," Danish and Swedish "bi," Norwegian "bie," and Icelandic "býfluga" (literally "bee fly").