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A MAN WITH A MEMORY LOOKS AT ARCHIE BUNKER


The media were full of the news that Carrol O'Connor, star of the 1970s sitcom, "All In the Family," had died. Everybody talked about how popular his character on that show, Archie Bunker, had been. Not one single person dared mention WHY Archie Bunker was so popular.

Nice people would NEVER mention how Archie Bunker got his huge appeal.

Which is why you've got me.

In fact, my sister made mention of this very connection just a few days back. She said I am the Archie Bunker of the Internet. This was a compliment. The producers of the show certainly didn't mean it to be.

Norman Lear, who adopted "All In the Family" from a British sitcom, certainly did not mean "Archie Bunker" to be a compliment. Like Jane Fonda and other Hollywood leftists, he hated working class white people and he had never met any. That is why it was so easy for him to believe that white working people hated black people and had never met any.

So Archie Bunker was totally bigoted, loud, ignorant, and mentally retarded, the very picture of white working people in Hollywood eyes.

The last thing Lear expected was that Archie Bunker would become an instant hero to America. Bumper stickers blossomed out all over the country, "Archie Bunker for President." One of the most popular books of the time was "The Wit and Wisdom of Archie Bunker."

Everybody instantly discounted the fact that Archie was retarded, loud and ignorant. All non-liberals on television back then were loud, ignorant and retarded. There were only three networks, and all three were hard left. There was Public Television which, like everything the public finances, was far to the left of mere liberalism.

In those days, a "fair and balanced" discussion on television had liberal Republicans on one side and liberal Democrats on the other. Liberals, being totally out of contact, didn't realize that everyone had long since taken that for granted. Anybody who said anything that  Americans were dying to say to the Hollywood Left would be characterized as a dolt, a hater, and an ignoramus on television.

But in this standard guise, they actually let Archie speak. He was the only person on television who ever spoke to the liberals on his program the way a lot of us had been aching to speak to people who mouthed the media line.

We loved Archie, and being compared to him is a compliment I hope I can live up to.

 

 

 

ARCHIE BUNKER AND GEORGE WALLACE


"All In the Family" premiered in 1971, right in the middle of the George Wallace phenomenon.

The reason that Lear was so upset with working class white people in 1971 was because liberals had completely tamed the Republican Party, but they were terrified of Governor George Wallace of Alabama. Wallace got ten million votes for president in the 1968 election, and he very nearly took the Democratic nomination for president in 1972.

The year after "All In the Family" premiered in 1971, Wallace won the MICHIGAN Democratic presidential primary with a solid majority. He was far ahead, and leading in the Maryland primary. If he had not been shot, there would have been no left wing McGovern candidacy in 1972.

Republicans were happy in 1971 because the military was enormous and Nixon was defending the interests of business, and those are the only two things Republicans really care about. Working people's kids were being bused and ethnic neighborhoods were being broken up, but that didn't matter any more to Republicans than it did to Norman Lear.

The only people who were upset at liberal policy were Southerners and Northern ethnics. Lear had always hated white Southerners, but a Northern white person who deserted the liberal Democrats was even more Evil in media eyes. The Archie Bunkers had been obedient little leftists under union supervision, but now that the unions were betraying them, they were leaving the Democrats and going to Wallace.

And their names were not like "Archie Bunker."

I met hundreds of them, and they were Sullivans and Kowalskis and everything else that was white but not Anglo-Saxon. They actually represented diversity. Lear had to rewrite that, so he had Archie hating Poles and Italians and all the other groups he actually represented. No liberal can ever allow reality to intrude too much.

For example, Archie as always hating "pollacks."

A man represented as a Polish-American leader was talking to him and spoke of "We Polish people."

In 1968, I lived in a campaign headquarters in the Polish steelworker section of Chicago. Almost everybody voted for Wallace. Not once in all those months did I hear a single person there refer to himself as a "Polish person." They were Pollacks and proud of it.

No, they did not tremble at the idea that someone was calling them "Micks" or "Wops" or "Pollacks." What they were afraid of were things like this:

1) that soon there would be hardened minority quotas in hiring that would exclude white working people from jobs,

2) that, as a matter of public policy, the government would enforce the breakup of white ethnic communities,

3) that busing white working people's children into ghettoes would become routine nationwide and no one would seriously object but the parents.

4) they knew a lot more was coming, but they couldn't have guessed, as one example, that anyone who objected to giving welfare benefits to known illegal aliens would be portrayed as anaziwhowantstokillsixmillionjews by the media in the future.

In fact, the only people who really saw the future in 1971 were those who were fans of Archie Bunker.

 

 

 

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Issue: June 30, 2001
Editor: Virgil H. Huston, Jr.
© 2001 WhitakerOnLine.org


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