What Happened to That America? Part III

"That America" - the phrasing suggests a political answer, doesn't it?  The question is not "What happened to that time" or "What happened to that way of living," but rather focuses attention on the polity rather than the era or what we now glibly call a "lifestyle."

And your Head Trucker would have to say that in large part, what happened to change the political entity comes down, as suggested in the first two parts of this series, to two words:  television and mendacity.  Or to be more clear:  the ubiquitous medium of television exposed and brought straight into everyone's living room the mendacity, the pretenses, the lies which "that America" was based on.

"That America" - the one you see in the old commercials for shiny new Chevrolets and Frigidaires, Cheerios and Doublemint, the limpid vision of little pink houses and chummy small towns we can now conjure up at any time of the day or night to revisit - that America never existed.  It was a sanitized, spiffed-up, heavily censored imitation of the real America:  designed to entertain and reassure us, but also to sell products and prime-time minutes by stimulating our desire for more products, and more fashionable products, even ones we didn't know we wanted.

Now there's nothing wrong with entertainment and theatrical illusion per se - old Aristotle, who wrote the book on Greek drama way back there, and defined art as "the imitation of life," held that even the most gruesome of those tragedies had a beneficial effect on viewers by first causing them to feel pity and terror, and then allowing the purgation of those feelings, which he thought would have a good effect on their character, making the audience wiser, more thoughtful citizens.

But it's very important, especially in this era of non-stop entertainment and illusion by media of all kinds that we be able to distinguish the imitation from the life.  It may be that people who look back uncritically to those TV shows and commercials with a sentimental feeling, remembering at the same time how safe and lovely the world seemed through the eyes of their childhood, are failing to remember the many other facets of "that America" which were deliberately left out.

Continued after the jump . . .

Look back at that Chevy commercial Dinah did in 1959 one more time - what kind of world is that?  Well, for one thing it is entirely a white-person's world, isn't it?  A world where people live in a pretty darn nice suburb of newly-built homes and have plenty of leisure to go joyriding on a sunny day in a brand new car - a convertible at that, which cost extra.  There are no slums in that world, no money worries, no upsets, no disappointments.  Life is just a big, happy picnic for smiling, healthy, smartly dressed youngish folks.  Right?  And if you buy a Chevrolet, why it's all practically guaranteed to be the same for you:  "Nothing can beat her, nothing is sweeter, life is completer in a Chevy," Dinah sang in 1952.

Or look at a much-loved program from about the same time:  the Andy Griffith Show, which now has a number of fan sites on the internet dedicated to remembering and rehashing every fine detail and obscure character and every bit actor who ever had a walk-on part.  If you visit those fan sites, you'll see that a great many people love the show with almost a religious fervor, and often the wish is expressed that they could go back and live in that time, that place.

But of course, Mayberry never existed.  Not in "that America," not anywhere.  It's a fiction, a somewhat remote imitation of the real life of 1960, even in small Southern towns out in the boonies.   It's only a what-if, not reality.  Granted, it can be a very amusing fantasy when we bring to it, as to all works of fiction, what Coleridge called "the willing suspension of disbelief" - in fact, it's that very suspension that allows us to enjoy all kinds of made-up things, from novels to magic tricks to video games; a fun thing about being human.  Your dog may sit faithfully by your side "watching" a sitcom with you; but he never laughs at the jokes, does he?

It's when we mistake the fantasy for reality that we run into trouble.  People who watch TAGS and think they are seeing the actual world of 1960 are sadly deluding themselves; and when we need to think seriously about the world is when we need to switch off the disbelief and see such things as the creative deceptions that they are.  Notice that Mayberry has almost no black citizens; once in a very great while you might glimpse a lone black extra in a crowd scene, but that's pretty rare.  And utterly untrue to the time and the supposed location.  As a native Southerner who was there, I guarantee you that upstanding church ladies like Aunt Bee and her friend Clara, and the others who appear from time to time would have had a colored maid - as we called them then - at least a few days a week, and perhaps had the laundry done by a colored washerwoman too. 

Sheriff Andy would, at least now and then like my own father, have had a colored man on call to mow the lawn, rake leaves, trim bushes, and do other odd jobs.  But blacks almost never appear in Mayberry, even as servants, only as lone, distant figures in a crowd.  And certainly some of Mayberry's infrequent jail population would have been black too, but we never see Andy or Barney taking a single black person into custody, even for jaywalking.

And rarely is there any serious crime in Mayberry.  Otis is regularly locked up on Saturday nights for being drunk and disorderly, theoretically, but that's more of a running joke than a serious disturbance of the peace.  A number of plots revolve around various out-of-towners hauled in for violating the speed limit or some other minor infraction, nothing too serious.  Ditto with a few transient con artists trying to fleece the unsuspecting rubes in the town.  Once in a very great while, Mayberry's finest get a bulletin to be on the lookout for an escapee from the state penititentiary, and you know he must have done something really bad to be locked up there - but exactly what his presumably heinous crime was, we are never told.  One whole episode is devoted to the ongoing domestic dispute between a husband and wife, which consists entirely of yelling insults at each other, and breaking the odd dish.  The insults are inventive, but never a curse word is spoken, in their house or indeed anywhere in Mayberry, ever.

Men never hit women; spouses are never unfaithful; sex must happen somewhere, sometime, as evidenced by various children and babies, but it is never, ever referred to, except once, very obliquely, when Andy and Barney are combing through the city dump and happen to come across a centerfold-style magazine; Andy takes a long look at the picture - discreetly hidden from the camera - and exclaims jokingly, "Why, that young lady ought to be ashamed of herself!"  Which is as close to what was called "the facts of life" as the show ever got.

Rape never happens in Mayberry, nor murder, nor bloodshed, or even a good fistfight.  One episode revolves around a series of punches-in-the-nose among Floyd the Barber and his old cronies, but the actual punches always occur off camera.  Violence is never seen in Mayberry, nor prositution, though a couple of still-popular episodes center on the arrival of "the Fun Girls" who are just passing through, obviously from a big city somewhere; they are loud and flirtatious, dress in hip styles and love to dance, causing considerable jealousy to Andy and Barney's girlfriends - but exactly what other kind of "fun" these girls are available for is never stated.

No wonder Sheriff Taylor can afford to go gunless nearly all the time:  rarely does anything ever occur to disturb the domestic tranquility of the peaceful, happy citizens of Mayberry.  Some of them may be a little hard up for cash or work at low-paying jobs, but there is no serious poverty there.  Even the backwoods types who occasionally venture into town are for the most part sleek and well-fed, apparently, even if their clothes are tattered.  Nobody goes hungry in Mayberry; no one is disabled or homeless or jobless; people sometimes marry, but no one ever gets divorced; and nobody ever dies.

A happy fantasy, like many others we could name, both then and now.  Nothing wrong with it, as long as when you are done watching, you remember to hit the "off" switch on the disbelief machine.  But I'm afraid that when people sign longingly for "that America," the switch is stuck wide open.  And the problem with that is, it distorts and colors all your thinking.  Which is why some people, let's say, think Sarah Palin is the greatest, and Rick Perry sits at the right hand of God.  Both of them - and many others, too numerous to mention - either explicitly or implicitly promise to bring back "that America" and make all the world a sunny day.  For "real Americans," anyway.  Who, it turns out, look just like the good citizens of Mayberry, strangely enough:  middle-class, happily-married, church-going, patriotic, unquestioning, well-fed, contented, straight white folks.  Just look at the crowd pictures at any Republican convention, and you'll see what I mean.

But "that America" is a lie - a beautiful lie in some ways, but nevertheless a lie.  And "real Americans" come in all shapes and sizes, and all colors of the rainbow.  Which is true now, and was true even back then in the world of 1960 - only it did not look nearly as clean and neat as Mayberry, nor was it nearly as sweet and charming to live in.  And I know because I was there - a little fellow, true, but I remember a lot, and I have since learned a lot more.  Entertainment is one thing - every play need not be a tragedy, there is plenty of room, and need, for comedy in the world as well.  But it's important, very important, when the show is over, that we base our thinking on reality, not fantasy.

So to wrap up this very elementary analysis, which maybe you could have done without, here's the reality of "the America I was born into," to use John Boehner's own phrase, as it really was between, say, 1955 and 1970.  Take a good look, won't you, at "that America" - the real one, that Boehner and his ilk very conveniently forget.  What happened to it?  It changed; it had to change, because people couldn't put up with the mendacity, the polite, entertaining lies anymore, not with real people being killed, real blood being shed, real pain being inflicted, real lies being told wholesale by their own elected officials, north and south, local and national.  The pictures say more, and say it better, than I can.