Farewell to Mike Stivic's World

All in the Family was a sensation when it premiered in January, 1971.  Unlike all previous American sitcoms, it dealt with serious topics, including politics, war, sex, and race, and was rudely funny, too, setting the tone for many other 70's sitcoms to follow - and for the decade as a whole.  The look and feel of modern life changed noticeably around 1970, as elements of the counter-culture became the dominant culture.  I remember it well.

It was never my favorite show, but was good for some laughs at the expense of blue-collar conservative Archie Bunker, a buffoon character who was continually skewered for his out-of-date attitudes by his smart-mouthed, oh-so-liberal son-in-law, Mike Stivic - who, however, was not too proud to live off Archie's hard work and generosity while attending college.  (Hypocrisy comes in many guises.)

I haven't seen the show in many years, bur recently YouTube offered up this never-aired pilot episode from 1969.  Carroll O'Connor and Jean Stapleton play the parents, but Mike and his wife Gloria are played by two other actors, and it's interesting to see the show performed without Rob Reiner and Sally Struthers.  It's also much more risque than the broadcast show was, at least initially.  See what you think.

Notice that the "liberal" talking points Mike brings up are identical with the talking points of today, almost as if they've been, um . . . scripted.  And as if no progress whatsoever has been made since the 1960s.  Odd, isn't it?  And yet I vividly recall the segregated South of my childhood - separate schools, libraries, hospitals, movie theaters, restaurants, bars, hotels, and gas station bathrooms.  (And no homo, either - anywhere.)

The worldview Mike Stivic was preaching so stridently is now in its closing days, it seems to me.  The broadly liberal movement of Western culture of the last 200-plus years - that is to say, an enlightened progress in politics and society towards freedom and fairness, liberty and justice for all - or as the French put it, liberté, égalité, fraternité - that movement has gone to seed, and picked out favorites for special treatment.  (Some animals are more equal than others.)  Consequently, there has been a great reaction against what liberalism became in the last 50 years.  Somehow, it's gone off track.

I read once where Bill Clinton said, "There are two kinds of people:  either you think that what happened in the 1960s was great, or you don't."  I remember the 1960s rather differently from the majority view, having grown up in a small Southern city (not a small town), which never had any civil rights protests; all that stuff was on TV, not where I lived.  There were two colleges there, but I only ever heard of one protest, probably after the Kent State tragedy, when the local paper reported a "die-in" on the college green.  The Vietnam War was just not a topic of conversation among us high-school kids, nor as far as I can recall, among the adults. There were military bases in the area, but antiwar protests were, as I said, far-away stuff you saw on TV.

The placid tenor of the 1950s lingered long in the South - politeness was the rule, not politics.  Apart from the newspaper headlines and the evening news on TV, the 1960s were a time of sunshine and blue skies, little homework and light household chores for a schoolboy, and should have been much happier for me - but sadly, my parents divorced in the middle of the decade, with all the tears and conflicts you might expect to follow.  My mom and I moved to a big city, and for the rest of the decade I was lucky to get to ride some of the fine old streamliners before Amtrak took over, as I shuttled back and forth between parents, about a thousand miles round trip.

It was on one of those long train rides that I applied my mind to solving the conundrum of what the big kids were doing - why all those protests, screaming and shouting?  What was that all about?  Of course I knew from TV, newspapers, magazines, that Civil Rights and Vietnam were the push-button issues, but I didn't really "get" the whys and wherefores.  All I saw were a bunch of older teens acting like babies, throwing tantrums and causing lots of trouble.  (It wasn't until many years later, when I read an oral history of the war, stories told by soldiers and nurses who were in it, that I finally "got" what the shouting was all about.  And yes, it was a sickening horror that was justly protested, though to little avail, it seems.)

After staring out the window of the train for many miles as I cogitated, it finally came to me:  they don't want to grow up.  They don't want to act like adults, but just stay kids.  That seemed to be a sufficient answer, so I quit puzzling over it.  Now you may smile, gentle reader, at this simplistic thought - but there is in fact an element of truth in it.  

The groovy kids of the 60s (the noisy minority, living in the NY-LA axis) did not, in fact, want to become adults in the sense that their parents were, settling down to routine jobs, living quietly in suburbia, doing conventional grown-up things in conventional ways - wearing suits and ties, makeup and high heels, joining the PTA and the VFW.  In fact, many of them seemed to despise all that their parents stood for - if you try, you can easily google up journalistic references in the period to the "parent-hating generation" of that era, no doubt penned by reporters and columnists who were sick to death of Mike-Stivic style lectures from their offspring at home.  (Oddly enough, those same despised parents were later idolized as "the greatest generation," but that's another story.)

I never had that attitude.  This only child loved his parents dearly, and they loved me; they just couldn't live peaceably together under the same roof.  A great tragedy; an enduring grief.  My family was disintegrating; I tried in my childish ways to be a peacemaker, not a prosecutor.  So I never thought much of the counter-culture.  I was trying to hold things together, to grow up into a mature, capable adult and keep the train on the rails - not blow up the tracks, as many of my peers (in TV land, anyway) seemed to think was a very cool idea.

It's all water under the bridge now, and what's done is done.  I am not blaming anyone, just reporting what the view was from my corner of the world in the morning of my life.  Your mileage may vary, and that's just fine.  It is darkly ironic, however, to see that the groovy guys and gals, the fair-haired children of flower power who led the way to the Age of Aquarius, are now the despised, gray-haired, clueless "boomers" to today's young hipsters.  (What goes around, comes around.)  And yet I well recall hearing the young in the 60s raging against "the world our parents made."  

Well now, here we are at the end of the world Mike Stivic and his generation made, or so it seems.  What is there to say about that?  The curtain is rising on a new era, and we helpless spectators can only grip our seats and await with bated breath the entrance of the rough beast.  Be it good, bad, or ugly, this old man is near the end of his journey, anyway.  I'm just glad I have no descendants to worry about.

Things fall apart, the center cannot hold.  

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