All in the Family at 50

 Archie, get the fuck out of my living room!

All in the Family premiered on TV 50 years ago.
It was launched by liberal producer Norman Lear starring liberal actor Carroll O'Connor as the “loveable” right wing racist.

The USA TV viewers apparently liked to hang around with Archie. They would invite him into their living rooms week after week and let him shout of his racist, right wing garbage. His show was top rated for the first 4 years.
The intention of Lear and company was to ridicule the right winger, the program intended as a satire, a send up of beliefs and values that the producers did not share, and presumable, that none of their friends shared.
‘As Lear recalled later that year to Variety, “There was no advance publicity, no promo, as a nervous network didn’t quite know what to do with a show in which the hero is a bigot. The web expected an avalanche of protests and hired extra operators to handle them. There was an avalanche, but 99% of the callers liked the show.”’
So the network was nervous about a bigot hero but once it sold and was a hit everyone was happy.

You can’t center a show around a bigot and sell me on the idea that you are doing something good for the culture. Presenting Archie every week normalized his type and just part of the family “All in the Family” and therefore welcome. The whole idea was backward and Lear would have known it would backfire and I’m suggesting it did.
If Archie Bunker was part of my family I wouldn’t be welcoming him into my living room week after week for 12 years. If he did have to come around I would tell him to “shut the fuck up and watch the football game or get out, I don’t want to hear your shit.” Yet Norman Lear, and CBS dumped his shit into millions of homes week after week.
What was the result of this? Was it an incredible swing to the left and the marginalization of bigotry? The original run of All in the Family went from 1971 until 1979 and guess what? Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980 sending the nation into a dive into right wing power. Ronny was lovable too as he was telling us how the government was our enemy while taking power away from union workers and giving it to the corporations.
Reagan was a slicker Archie Bunker character elevated to the presidency.

But these things cannot possibly be connected can they? After all everyone knows that TV is just harmless entertainment and has no impact on real life. That is probably why corporations dumped billions of advertising dollars into it. But maybe they studied the effects of TV and advertising and its power to persuade.

On the heels of Archie and Reagan’s destruction of the Fairness Doctrine which regulated that broadcasters had to present both sides of an argument came Fox News in 1996.
Then in 2004 NBC launched The Apprentice, a phony reality competition program with Donald Trump as the great wise billionaire genius.
This ran for 15 years. Trump’s TV run was even longer than Archie’s.

In 2016 Trump was elected president. And millions of TV Fox News viewers still think he’s a genius who won by a landslide even though he lost a close race for reelection.

Yeah, bring Archie’s Ronnie’s and Donny’s right wing hate and corporate wealth loving mindset into our living rooms. It has no effect at all.

Get Me Roger Stone (2017)

Get Me Roger Stone (2017)
Written and Directed by Dylan Bank, Daniel DiMauro, Morgan Pehme


“Get Me”? The thing is, Roger Stone doesn’t need to be call on, he is one of these people, like his mentor Roy Cohn, that hang around on the sidelines of mainstream politics for decades, he can’t be got rid of.

This Netflix documentary film does a fine job at illustrating is troubling side of political influence which arose in the mass media age. Roger Stone is shown to have connections to one of the progenitors of the Dirty Tricks, Cohn, and the win at all costs, type of lying manipulation of the public mind that is plugged into the lowest common denominator electronic media outlets.

When I say he and his type won’t go away, I mean that he is simply a feature of the individualism that has arisen to the controlling position of the national and global dialog. I believe this is a feature of 100 years of multi-generational conditioning by commercial mass media culture. Stone knows how to manipulate electronic media.  This type of media manipulation is why reality TV host Donald Trump managed to become president. Sorry to say, these trends will continue and we will see more of this in perhaps even more bizarre manifestations than the election of Trump, if you can imagine that.

Is this a change from the past even the recent past of 100 years ago? It might very well be. The social structure as far as I know was quite a bit different back then. Religious institutions, for what they are worth, had more influence on people’s behaviour. Now is seems, the bottom line is the bottom line. Money is power. The control of it by individuals, the family, and the gang-like corporate syndicates are what is influencing the day with accompanying philosophical underpinnings which are an odd reaction to any other form of collectivism as generated by the likes of emotionally damaged Ayn Rand and the divide and sell influence of Madison Avenue advertising psychology.

Stone is shown to have no particular ax to grind personally other than a strange attraction to Republican power. He calms libertarianism while pimping himself out to any thug dictator willing the drop cash on his lobbying company Black, Manafort, Stone, and Kelly. (Will we hear move about this from the investigations of Trump campaign manager Manafort getting pay-off of Russian money? Stay tuned folks.)

The documentary is a “give him enough enough rope” sort of thing. Stone has never met an camera or a mic that he doesn’t like. Although he might be hanging himself in the eyes of some, he is wise enough to know that others will be attracted to his self-aggrandized bravado and see him as a type of trickster superhero. He is a flashy old dude, with his lovely hats and his clownish pin stripped suits. There is a fascinating array of hairpieces on display over the years in the archival clips shown.

While Get Me Roger Stone is instructive in showing what he is and why he and his type have the influence that they do. The power of his media distortion manipulation, will likely attracted a certain type to him. The type who are wannabe wiseguys. A comic book powerful villain  will be attractive to some at the same time that others will be repulsed.