The Soros of Comedy

 

Photo via Yiddish Book Center.

On a hunch, I asked Dr. Google to find out for me if National Review had published a memorial tribute to the late Norman Lear. No, apparently, the closest they came was this, by their then TV critic Kyle Smith (he moved on to Wall Street Journal last year), from 2019, when the great producer was a still-lively 97, reviewing an ABC experimental restaging of a couple of old episodes, one from All in the Family and one from The Jeffersons:

Edith is a simpleton, Archie is a bigot, and Mike and Gloria are mouthpieces for grindingly dull liberals like the show’s creator, Norman Lear. Occasionally the show would allow Archie to score a point, which was the only time things were a bit surprising, hence a bit funny. Far from being “brave,” All in the Family was mostly content to tread water, returning to the same tropes week after week.

Interestingly, Smith liked, or claimed to like, The Jeffersons better, but not mentioning Lear had a role in that one too:

George is much more complicated than Archie, and much funnier. George has issues. Archie’s just a racist.... George has moved on up, and yet he’s still full of frustrated resentment. He’s got money, but the world around him still feels wrong. He’s earned respect, so why is everyone always insulting him?

It's hilarious that Smith can't see that that's what Archie is about, a dreamer of the American dream who has done well for himself and his dependents in that really nice house getting constantly mocked as uneducated by the perpetual-student son-in-law who's forced by poverty to mooch off him—by the end of the series a full-on petit-bourgeois with his own saloon, while Michael has lost his hard-won academic job and he and Gloria are divorced.

It's obvious where I'm going with this, right? He can't see it, he especially couldn't see it in the Year of Our Trump 2019, because of the way it clashes with the mythology conservatives have constructed to account for the Trumpery, that it was brought on by the haughty college-educated élites who rule the world, with their contempt for poor (white) working class folk, forcing them to lash out in response with their intemperate voting behavior. But the Meathead is no élite! He's not even resourceful enough to take care of himself, and he and Gloria must submit to Archie's patronage (which seems, by the way, pretty generous—Smith can't bring himself to notice the complicated love that binds the members of the Bunker household together, or the Jefferson household either, but it's an essential element of both shows).

Something else Smith says is relevant to this, when he waxes nostalgic for the days when the show was produced as "the last era before political correctness", which seems off key: don't conservatives hold that the Lear shows were the engine through which the Hollywood élite began to impose its ideological perspective on all the media? But he has something else in mind: the fact that the original Jeffersons sometimes used the N-word right there on TV, and in the 2019 reconstructions it had to be bleeped out (in a discussion with a white character on whether he might ever utter it):

I’ve no desire to hear the word in question, much less say it, but the censorious approach imbues the word with an eerie power it doesn’t deserve, makes it the Lord Voldemort of epithets, the Word Which Cannot Be Named. Opposition to political correctness need not be (as progressives seem to think) a disguised wish to hurt people’s feelings. More often it’s a wish that bombs be defused.

Sure you don't, Kyle. You don't want to say it, you're just full of compassion for its desire to be heard.

But no, the late 60s and early 70s were not some kind of Golden Age of racist language in which the word flowed freely: when it was used in print (Dick Gregory's 1964 autobiography) or on sound recording (John Lennon's and Yoko Ono's 1972 feminist anthem) it was meant to shock, with the "eerie power" a writer or lyricist or rapper wanted it to have; its casual use by white people in the way Smith seems to miss has been gone since the early 1940s.

But it strikes me, further, that the idea of the "era of political correctness" as an era of censorship is another conservative falsehood, and that's the source of Smith's confusion on when it got started. In fact it was the era of mass media talking about things conservatives didn't want to talk about, from Mike and Carol Brady's double bed to Maude Findlay's abortion; the vocabulary policing conservatives complain about was a kind of byproduct of that, alongside the luxuriant permission structure that nowadays allows Elon Musk to tell all the advertisers to fuck themselves (William F. Buckley would not have been amused) and Stephen Miller to put the word "vermin" into Donald Trump's mouth.

Also, that conservative story is another story about the Hollywood élite ruling everybody's lives, culture upstream from politics, and that, of course, is a Jewish conspiracy—everybody in Conservativia knows Jews run the entertainment industry, and of course Lear was Jewish, and of course in his Depression youth he made himself a crystal radio:

LEAR: Radio, yeah, yeah. You make yourself, and it's a little cat whisker wire that circles a crystal. And I discovered Father Coughlin in bed one afternoon or evening. And suddenly, I'm listening to a man condemning one of our great heroes, FDR, you know, in my family, and speaking kindly of the Nazi movement, about which we were just learning in Germany and his dislike of Jews.

RAZ: Did it scare you?

LEAR: It scared the hell out of me because it was the first time I learned that I was, quote, "different." And I started to pay a lot more attention to people who were even more different in the eyes of people like Father Coughlin. And I think my political interest and sensitivities started there.

From this early encounter with fascism Lear made himself a Jewish conspirator, the George Soros of comedy. Sometimes you almost wish a Jewish conspiracy story really was true, or something like it. But don't tell Elise Stefanik.