Archie Bunker: If your spics and your spades want their rightful share of the American dream, let 'em get out there and hustle for it like I done.
Mike Stivic: So now you're going to tell me the black man has just as much chance as the white man to get a job?
Archie Bunker: More, he has more... I didn't have no million people marchin' and protestin' to get me my job.
Edith Bunker: No, his uncle got it for him.
A few days ago I told a conservative friend/email debating partner with whom I’d been discussing the Imus affair that I feel as if he is forever playing Archie Bunker to my Meathead. (And I had to laugh when two days later Nobody in Particular contributed to the flood of comments on this Shiltone post with a reprise of the plot of a relevant episode of All in the Family. Great minds, and all that...)
My reactionary friend – let’s call him Archie Jr. – was less than pleased with my analogy. And to be honest, the comparison was unfair. Archie Bunker is an overt bigot. His prejudices are almost always overcome by his experiences on the show, but while the scripts leave us with no lack of confidence in Archie’s good heart, they also allow him to express his bigotry with a clarity that is clearly unacceptable in America today.
Yet the analogy struck a chord with me. While Archie Jr. is not an obvious bigot, he almost uniformly adopts a reactionary position on the myriad contemporary political issues we discuss from day to day. So when I came across this terrific Matthew Yglesias post, of course I emailed it right over to my friend. Here’s the good part:
There's this huge block of people out there, primarily reasonably prosperous middle-aged middle class white men, who in all genuineness seem to believe that what went down [in the Duke rape case] is emblematic of broad-based social problem. They see the Imus controversy through the same lens – the lens that makes them think the issue here is Al Sharpton or hip-hop. It's a mentality that believes – deeply and sincerely – that the middle-aged white dude just can't get a fair shake in this country. Not in this day and age. What with the Sharptons and the feminist bloggers and all. Next thing you know, there'll probably be dudes marrying dudes, and women and black folk running for president!
And, well, I just don't know what to say to a mentality like that. I certainly think that lots and lots of people in this country – including, naturally, lots of middle-aged people and lots of white people and lots of male people – do, in fact, have a hard time getting a fair shake in the contemporary United States. But the idea that middle-aged white men as a class are being persecuted, well, well, not so much. [sic]
(Yeah, sure, I’m a prick for sending this post to my pal. In my defense, though, Archie Jr. has on occasion sent me David Brooks columns. Fight fire with fire, I say.)
The Archie Bunker cohort has come of age as the shock troops of Karl Rove’s political movement. Archie’s irrational but deeply felt and held resentments of the 1970’s have been carefully cultivated successively through the Reagan Democrat stage, through the Clinton-hating, vast right-wing conspiracy stage and into our current, poisonously media-savvy, Texas GOP-dominated, “Democrat” Party-despising Cult of Bush stage.
Archie Bunker has been institutionalized!
Or am I just completely full of crap? Please fire away in comments – agreements, disagreements, Archie Bunker reminiscences or Archie Jr. sightings. But be warned – speak now or forever hold your peace – Archie Jr. may become a recurrent character in my posts here.
[Tom, thanks for raising me up from comments. I’ll try to live up to your blog’s high standards. Tom’s audience, I’ll tell you right up front that this was not my idea.]
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