A Day In The Life Of Donald Trump
Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner And Who’s Not?
Tuesday night the most exclusive gathering in golf and perhaps all of sports took place in Augusta, Georgia. It’s called the Champions Dinner and it’s a 75 year old tradition. The attendees are all past winners of the Masters Golf Tournament which begins today. No wives or partners, no other golf luminaries, only those who have won the Masters are seated at the table and entitled to continue coming every year for as long as they are alive.
The most recent champion is always the host and has the privilege of planning the meal. This year that honor fell to the Northern Irish player Rory McIlroy, whose dinner menu in addition to grilled elk sliders and yellowfin tuna carpaccio…
…included a selection of wines reported to have cost $50,000. At a press conference McIlroy was asked why he chose not no have any traditionally Irish dishes…
“People keep asking me, ‘Why didn’t you go more Irish?’ And I said, ‘Because I want to enjoy the dinner as well,’”
Although the reigning champion also foots the bill for the dinner McIlroy can indeed laugh it off. He is 36 years old and at the peak of his golfing career which has earned him over $110 million so far. Only one other golfer has made more money than he has and that man is a past Masters champion named Tiger Woods. Woods was conspicuous by his absence from Tuesday’s fete. His recent and latest DUI arrest was presumably a topic of conversation among his peers.
Professional golf today is extremely lucrative for the very few who excel at the game. Palatial estates, private jets, staffs that include caddies, swing and putting coaches, trainers and psychologists are part of the lifestyle for even fewer. It wasn’t always this way. A century ago touring golf professionals and even local pros responsible for running the courses at private golf clubs were not even allowed in the facilities used by club members. Opportunities to compete in professional tournaments existed but prize money was paltry.
Subsequent history has turned that situation on its head but the Augusta National Golf Club which has hosted the Masters tournament since 1934 is about as patrician a throwback to the early years of American golf as can be imagined.
Although financial details of how the club operates and the list of its members are private, membership is thought to number around 300 and is believed to include present and former CEOs of prominent American companies. Warren Buffett and Bill Gates belong to Augusta National as do executives running America’s largest banks, airlines and even Amazon.
A number of sports figures are members like former NFL quarterbacks and brothers Peyton and Eli Manning. But others whose accomplishments or notoriety have been achieved through endeavors beyond business and sports are notably absent from any of those easily spotted as Augusta National members this week. The members wear green jackets and are only allowed to wear them on the premises. That’s right, the jackets cannot not be taken off the property.
Traditions have both their perks and their quirks and often pasts that sometimes can be remedied but not erased. The club was notoriously slow in admitting Blacks— the first was a television executive named Ron Townsend in 1990. And no woman was ever invited to become a member until 2012 when two finally were— a financer named Darla Moore and the former Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
The only American president ever to have been a member of Augusta National was Dwight Eisenhower. Ike was a dedicated golfer and played over 200 rounds there during his eight year presidency. He vacationed at the club so often that a cabin was constructed on the grounds for his and his wife Mamie’s use when they visited. Why have no other presidents been accorded even membership let alone such respect?
If being a golfer carries any weight, recent presidents Clinton and Obama certainly would merit consideration for inclusion but they have not yet been invited. It appears that a fondness for the sport is not enough even if you were once president. Being asked to become a member at Augusta National seems more closely aligned with the process of joining a college fraternity. Just like fraternity “rush”, it is a matter of how those who are already members perceive you might “fit in” with them.
The movie actor Bill Murray of Caddyshack fame is obsessed with golf but he’s also a compulsive funnyman, an odd duck among corporate titans many of whom may not have gotten their jollies watching Ghostbusters. Murray would never fit in. Neither might serious golf enthusiasts like Justin Timberlake and Michael Jordan. With their outsized personalities, they could be viewed as potentially more unnerving than deserving. And how about the man who in his spare time when he isn’t playing golf is the current president of the United States?
It is believed Donald Trump seriously yearns to become an Augusta National member and one who has known him for much of their lives was asked just a couple days ago whether he thinks Trump will ever get his wish. Butch Harmon has been a coach to Tiger Woods and a long list of the best golfers of this era. His father Claude Harmon was the pro at Winged Foot Golf Club where Trump’s father Fred was once a member. So why does he think Fred’s son won’t be making the drive down Augusta National’s Magnolia Lane entrance road anytime soon?
“I think you can answer that yourself – because he’s Trump, I think he is who he is. He’s full of himself. He’s the type of person that I don’t think fits the profile of an Augusta member.”
I’d guess there’s a chance Donald Trump might soon be calling out or calling up Butch but not about a golf lesson.
So what is that Augusta National member profile? Beyond wealth and power it might also embody dignity and discreteness and I’d also hope integrity, honesty and morality. If you weren’t already aware, Donald Trump is a notorious and documented cheater at golf who claims baselessly to have won the club championship at just about every golf club he owns. And perhaps the real deal breakers here for him are that requirement about not taking that green jacket off the property plus another facet of golf that makes it unique from other sports.
Unlike baseball umpires and basketball and football referees who oversee that the rules are followed in those competitions, golf is self-policing. There are rules officials at golf tournaments but in the vast majority of situations players are responsible for upholding the rules and calling violations on themselves even if no one else has observed an infraction has happened.
In a legendary incident many years ago a famed player saw that his golf ball had moved while he was just about to hit it. It resulted in a one stroke penalty he called on himself. The man ended up losing that tournament by one shot. Later when responding to the praise he received he said, “You might as well praise me for not robbing a bank”.
Donald Trump certainly spends a lot of time on the golf course. During his first term he completed as many rounds as Eisenhower had in his two. As of today, President Trump has played golf on 103 days out of the 444 he has served so far in his second term. Even the war with Iran which began at the end of February has not interfered with his flying to Florida to play golf nearly every weekend.
But let me finish this post with a story that’s hopefully, more uplifting and ties in with golf and one of its most respected and revered players…
My mother had a friend whose husband was an ardent and very good golfer. Angela was considerably older than my mom and once told her about attending a party when she was younger. Angela and a man she had just met had disappeared and her husband found them on a bench outside by themselves. The husband was startled but not because of discovering anything untoward…
Angela: “Bill, I want you to meet Robert Jones. We have been having the most enjoyable conversation about books we have been reading.”
Angela’s Robert Jones had a degree in literature from Harvard but he was more widely known as the golfer Bobby Jones. Today he is still considered the greatest amateur who ever lived. In 1930 Jones won the U.S. Open, U.S. Amateur, British Open, and British Amateur. Since then this feat has been known as golf’s Grand Slam. Following his retirement from competitive golf Bobby Jones co-founded both the golf course and the tournament where the Masters is being played today.
Oh, and that player who lost a U.S. Open championship in 1925 by a shot because he had penalized himself? Yes, it was Bobby Jones.
If you are a subscriber to the The New Yorker, here’s a link to an article from some years back all about Augusta National that will fill you in on the place far more thoroughly than I have. It is truly worth a read…
J.D. & Don’s Not So Excellent Recent Adventures
And this isn’t even a full week of them!
Roll the film…
APRIL 7— American Vice President J.D. Vance’s travels to Budapest, Hungary for a visit to support Donald Trump’s ally and ideological mentor Viktor Orbán. On April 12 Orbán loses his bid for reelection and concedes defeat after 16 years in power as Hungary’s Prime Minister.
APRIL 11— No, President Trump is not viewing Julia Child and Fred Rogers fighting on PBS. Instead Trump attends a mixed martial arts event in Miami with his Secretary of State Marco Rubio. While watching men battering each other silly in a cage, it is unclear whether he is informed that the United States negotiations with Iran taking place in Pakistan have broken off in failure.
APRIL 12— J.D. Vance flies back to Washington adding to a growing list of missions on behalf of Donald Trump that have been personally humiliating.
Recently, at a White House event, Trump asked Vance for an update on the preliminary negotiations with Iran. The vice president remarked that things were “going good” and Trump followed up by asking whether the efforts would resolve the war. Vance then said he’d brief the president later.
“So if it doesn’t happen, I’m blaming JD Vance,” said Trump. “If it does happen, I’m taking full credit.”
APRIL 13— In a social media post over the weekend Donald Trump lambasts Pope Leo XIV in reaction to the Pope’s criticism of America’s war with Iran and the Trump administration’s immigration policies. Trump calls him weak, terrible and a radical leftist who “needs to get his act together”.
The transatlantic spat with the Holy See continues on Monday. Pope Leo states he will continue to “speak out loudly against the war” and declares that he has “no fear of the Trump administration.”
Back at the White House Trump tries to explain away to reporters a photo he earlier had posted of himself robed as a Jesus-like figure.
“I thought it was me as a doctor,” he says and blames news organizations for misinterpreting the image. “It’s supposed to be me as a doctor, making people better, and I do make people better.”
What can possibly be next? I can’t imagine. Can you?
As difficult as this might be, how about a laugh? I certainly need one. Click on the link below and I think you may…
How Did We Get Here?
Can TV Sitcoms provide a hint?
I have had this cartoon thumbtacked to my bulletin board for at least 40 years. When I cut it out of The New Yorker, I found it to be funny. Now, I think it was prophetic and only needs to be updated to include the other screens that we’ve had added to what has become an addiction evolving toward enslavement.
Since getting my first desktop then laptop and subsequent tablets and smartphones, I’ve offered little resistance to becoming a cyber serf-er. For decades I have survived stretches without sitting in front of my computer screen but every time this has occurred it has been because I’ve been far away from it.
The idea of not taking my iPhone with me everywhere with the exception of into the pool at the Y isn’t conceivable. At this point my abdomen may as well have a pouch for it like a kangaroo’s. And it’s on screens that my life is now largely informed, organized and entertained. It’s often how I buy and pay for things and is essential for performing tasks many of which I’m not even conscious I’m looking at a screen when I perform them. I’m even informed weekly of how much time I’ve actually spent looking at my desktop, tablet and ubiquitous smartphone.
And there are increasingly so many other screens popping up everywhere and required for doing more of everything. There’s the car’s dashboard, the self service supermarket checkout, the restaurant menu that’s only accessible by QR code, The ATM, the gas station pump, the parking meter and the TV screen so large I can’t stretch my arms around it. There’s a screen on my coffee maker and a screen in front of my seat any time I’m on an airplane…
I admit in numerous ways screens have made my life more convenient. News is at my fingertips as is banking, getting driving direction and ordering almost anything from the Steelcase chair I’m sitting in to boxes of Kleenex that will be delivered to our door. You may feel the benefits of screens far outweigh the drawbacks and I admit you can make a convincing case.
But it’s undeniable that screens have and are taking the place of real people and not necessarily making my own life always that much easier. Have a problem? Companies don’t want me to talk to an actual person for help but claim a “virtual” one on a screen or a digitally generated voice in my ear can serve as a substitute. Although I’ve actually gotten into an argument at home with Siri, I now try to never lose my cool if and when I succeed— after climbing a phone tree as high as giant redwood —getting an actual human being on the line.
But despite my occasionally being reassured that there are still people with jobs to interact with, more and more if I’m not looking at a screen, I’m in the presence of others who are. In restaurants maybe you’ve seen parents and their kids all sitting at a table each left to their own devices on their own devices. That depresses me. And if you think you may interact more with screens than other human beings in the course of a day, you’re likely right. Studies last year revealed that Americans in 2025 spent on average seven hours— some of us even the majority of our waking hours —every day in front of one screen or another.
For me and likely you, our screen gazing all began with television and we boomers were the first generation to grow up with what we used to call “the tube”. Sure, going to the movies and sitting in the dark looking at the “silver screen” had been possible and popular with our parents and grandparents for some time before televisions were in American homes but “going” was the operative word.
With TV you didn’t have to go anywhere and by the 1960s, 90% of American households had televisions. A decade later one was turned on an average of over eight hours a day in our living rooms. We even bought more of them so we could watch in the other rooms. For the past two decades the average American family home has contained more televisions than people.
As a kid who grew up outdoors and free to roam the neighborhood, I don’t remember that I watched all that much TV but I did have one regular weekly appointment with ours. That was when I planted myself in front of a black and white Magnavox with a screen that was smaller than the one that I’m typing onto in front of me. At 8 o’clock on Wednesday evenings it was time for The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet and although I haven’t seen all 435 episodes of the show’s 14 year run, I’ve seen a lot.
Perhaps I had never gotten over whatever it was that watching the Nelson family provided for me growing up in the 1950s. And whatever the pull was then, it tugged at me again unexpectedly a half century later in a Best Buy store in Los Angeles. I spotted a package of DVDs and purchased a dozen episodes of Ozzie and Harriet.
Here’s a typical scene that included a “laugh track” that was added to alert viewers something funny had just happened to encourage us to chuckle along at home.
After Jo bravely watched all dozen shows with me, she offered her opinion…
Jo: “These are terrible.”
Me: “I know but I love them. They’re like comfort food.”
Perhaps I wished to be Ricky or David’s brother because my family wasn’t like theirs. Unlike Ozzie Nelson, I knew what my father did for a living and why he wasn’t at home all the time nor able to attend my basketball games. Unlike Ozzie, he had a discernible job and was at work. And unlike Harriet, my mother didn’t emerge from our kitchen smiling day after day carrying a plate of cookies she had just baked. I don’t think the Imbers were unhappy but the Nelsons sure seemed happier. I suppose you had to be if a family crisis was running out of tutti frutti ice cream.
After Jo and I moved to Maine I decided to explore my Ozzie and Harriet fix; not to cure my habit but to explain it to myself. As I was growing up, I felt very secure to be a kid in America but the 1950s and 60s were also a time when the threat of a nuclear war had some of our neighbors converting their basements into bomb shelters. So in the process of thinking about those sitcoms that were a diversion from the Cold War, I decided to explore the history of television sitcoms and discovered that America’s sitcoms were providing a lot more than just that.
to be continued…
How Did We Get Here? (Part Two)
Can TV Sitcoms provide a hint?
We have a network of what are called Senior Colleges in Maine— 17 of them —in which volunteers can create and teach a course to seniors. It’s a no homework, no credit, no pressure and nearly no tuition opportunity. Jo and I discovered the one near us in Belfast upon moving here in 2010 and were surprised by the variety of offerings.
What we also quickly realized is that Midcoast Maine has attracted an amazing number of accomplished retirees and not just those who spend only their summers here.
Constructing a course around my nostalgia for the sitcoms I grew up with was only partly a stroll down memory lane. Perhaps by exploring the history of television sitcoms, I believed I might better understand why after 50 years I had so enjoyed again watching those episodes of The Adventures of Ozzie and Harriet I had purchased on impulse.
I titled my course Laughing Matters (Yes, the “matters” was intended to be both the noun and the verb.) and for six weeks I presented my thoughts about the significance of American television sitcoms.
If I thought my lectures were the attraction— I had over 40 attendees taking my course — I might have been deceiving myself. I talked but with the help of video clips I had been able to find and download from the internet, I entertained the class as well with memorable moments like the one below from I Love Lucy.
There are lots of ways to measure how the United States has changed in my lifetime and my exploration of sitcoms revealed more to me than scenes to laugh at. It didn’t take much insight to see that the programs were mirrors reflecting who we were as a country at the time the shows were produced and broadcast.
That episode of I Love Lucy for example was more than just Lucy and Ethel failing at their task to keep up with candy on a conveyor belt. They wanted to prove that they could get their own jobs after their husbands claimed housework was easier than any work outside the home.
When the couples reversed their roles, Desi and Fred were spectacularly unsuccessful in their own attempt to do domestic chores. And for me the storyline, coyly if unintentionally, hinted at the dissatisfaction many American housewives felt about being deprived from having careers beyond housekeeping.
So many of the episodes of I Love Lucy were about Lucy Ricardo trying to get into husband Ricky’s nightclub act and being rebuffed. Lucy was hardly a feminist but she was portrayed as a woman who desired to be more than a homemaker when so few were able to get hired as other than teachers and secretaries in the 1950s.
Whether intended or not, the idea that Lucy and American women needed to have a larger and more important role in society was consistently framed and highlighted inside that rectangular screen for millions to see.
Jackie Gleason’s Ralph Kramden on The Honeymooners actually threatened to physically harm his wife— “One of these days, Alice… Pow! Right in the kisser!” —which looking back now is unfathomable and hopefully, despite the far right’s desire to turn back the clock on women’s equal place in America, will remain that way.
The bus driver who never made it out of his job’s uniform or his cold-water flat was portrayed not just as a bossy and bellicose man who bellowed that he was the “king of his castle” but also as a frustrated low wage earner without the means to afford the modern conveniences that others ascending into America’s postwar middle class were acquiring…
In hindsight, Ralph Kramden just may have foreshadowed an angry white American male who in a few decades was going to feel left behind and alienated when millions of middle class manufacturing jobs here were exported overseas.
Sitcoms in the 1950s and 60s may have subtly but presciently served as portents for grievances that would emerge and impact our country’s future but on sitcoms they were also powerfully counterbalanced. I called it the era of the “Happy Perfect Families” as portrayed on shows through families like the Nelsons of Ozzie and Harriet, the Andersons of Father Knows Best, the Cleavers of Leave It to Beaver and the Stones of the Donna Reed Show.
All were exemplary promoters of what we were to know and aspire to as the “American Dream” and all lived in homes in the suburbs with husbands who brought home the bacon for their wives to fry.
In a prospering post war America the stars of these shows often did the commercials for the things a middle class family needed to buy to make their home and lifestyle complete. Harriet hawked Hotpoint appliances and Ozzie kvelled about Kodak cameras. Others praised Campbell’s Soup and Purina Dog Chow.
By 1980, advertisers in the United States were spending over a billion dollars on television commercials. TV screens had become the greatest marketing and selling tool in history.
But these shows were selling something else, too. Their weekly presence on our TVs were often half hour morality tales offering lessons in manners and guidance on how to behave as many of our families like my own moved into our new homes and new communities.
Take this scene from a Leave It to Beaver episode where doing the right thing didn’t excuse the Beaver from punishment for having done the wrong one first…
Doing the right thing and accepting that we in America were “all in this together” were intrinsic parts of the message portrayed on the sitcoms of the 1950s and ‘60s. The fact that there were only three American broadcast television networks significantly contributed to reinforcing these ideals. As a nation we were literally watching these shows together.
Sure, all these families were white married heterosexual couples with two children— the Andersons of Father Knows Best being the exception had three kids —and this archetype also consisted of the husband whose sole income supported the family, while the stay-at-home wife did the dishes and the laundry.
Early television sitcoms certainly reinforced what were then the traditional and expected roles for men and women of the time even if sometimes conveying dissatisfaction with them.
And these early sitcoms quite conspicuously were devoid of minorities. The rare exceptions— The Beulah Show, which was the first American television program to cast a black actor in the leading role, and Amos ‘n’ Andy —had previously been hits on radio and repurposed for TV.
Ironically, Amos ‘n’ Andy was created and acted by two white men and in the 1930s was and still is the most listened to program in American radio history. On television in the 1950s black actors played the roles and what had been amusing and acceptable on the radio became a target of the NAACP and other civil rights groups who held that the show presented a distorted and demeaning image of African Americans. The protests succeeded in getting the TV version of Amos ‘n’ Andy taken off the air.
Change beyond the boom in housing construction and the growth of the American middle class was underway and soon there would also be tragedy. With the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the country would come to grips with the reality that all was not Camelot in the United States let alone in the neighborhoods of homes with green lawns, picket fences and happy perfect families.
to be continued…
I Stood With One Who Stood Up And Still Do!
I was told my letter of support was in the queue to be published in the Portland Press Herald any day. I intended to actually make an endorsement of Janet Mills’ candidacy on June 9, a month before Maine’s primary on The Pawned Accordion— my first ever on this Substack.
Maine’s Governor Janet Mills pulled the plug on her campaign today and I’m saddened. Janet will move on. We all will and here’s what I wrote and am posting here anyway:
Those of us in Maine are lucky. It’s a beautiful place to live. Civility is still a touchstone of our way of life here. And if you’re a voter, the candidates we more often get to support are qualified to serve in the positions we get to vote for them to fill— good people motivated by what is in the best interest of all of us who live here not self-interest.
It is an unprecedented time in American history when as a nation we have been urged to hate one another, duped by conspiracy theories, debased by a president’s behavior, and witnessed epic incompetence and corruption in an administration that has been abetted and absolved by the cowardice of a Republican Congress in Washington.
Many of us are drowning in disillusion if not despondency. But as our luck would have it, here in Maine we have attractive and capable candidates running in our state’s primary election in June for the United States Senate and state governor.
The Pawned Accordion has an editorial board of one— me. If you have followed my Substack, then you know I often express my views but I’ve never before made political endorsements. Why am I now? Because I believe it is important and I favor candidates who I trust and support as the right choices.
I believe character is key and that experience and courage count. I am voting for Janet Mills for Senate candidate to defeat Susan Collins.
Many of us remember that Janet Mills told Donald Trump to his face at the White House “We’ll see you in court!” when he threatened to withhold federal funding for Maine schools. Later Mills rejected a demand from Trump for an apology and reaffirmed her stance on the “rule of law.”
Courage is when one speaks up when it would have been easier to be silent. Janet Mills has courage. That is who she is. And for those of you who think her age might be a concern, let me ask you a question. How many times have you been impressed with someone young but inexperienced who excited you with his or her facade and flamboyance but later became a disappointment and not who you had thought he or she to be? Filling halls is quite different from filling shoes.
One’s past history and accomplishments should be a main consideration when choosing who to vote for and Republicans, fearing the loss of their majorities in Congress this fall, will be viciously on the attack. If Susan Collins’ Democratic opponent is someone with a dubious past and a thin resume, her campaign will consider it a gift.
All that glitters is not gold and all that a person’s age is in years is not old. The wisdom to solve problems can come with age and Janet Mills’ record and experience speaks for itself. She has been a great governor of our state and her chances of beating Susan Collins head to head are the best opportunity we have for Maine to be represented in the Senate by someone who won’t continue to fold when America’s future is on the line.
Now, I will support the candidate who will be chosen to run against Susan Collins. We all should.
Peter
How Did We Get Here?
(Part Three)
Can TV Sitcoms provide a hint?
I was just out of college working for CBS News in New York and had become the sole “production assistant” for the CBS Evening News with Walter Cronkite. I was responsible for on screen identifications called “supers” back then and for ordering the graphics needed for each night’s newscast that were created on glass slides projected on a screen behind the anchorman. Only once do I recall making a mistake which led the executive producer to ask me if I had actually graduated.
I still have a CBS News stopwatch. It’s one I dropped and no longer works if they want it back. I used it for a further responsibility. In the control room I timed the broadcast to keep track of how close we were at any point to being too long or too short in the half hour time slot. Too short and you ran credits. Too long and there was a problem. Something had to be shortened or jettisoned. Certain correspondents had large egos. Fortunately, what got cut wasn’t my decision.
One day well before that day’s newscast was to air, the set of Evening News where Cronkite sat and where the writers and I worked, was silent. Nothing earth shattering was going on in the world at that moment but what we watched on a closed circuit monitor was perhaps something that could be considered an equivalent in the history of television broadcasting.
A new sitcom was about to premiere on CBS that would change the programming landscape of TV in America. I recall the room went silent and remained that way. Nobody laughed. Maybe it was because they were all “hard bitten” news people who laughed infrequently to begin with or maybe they were as stunned as I was.
The pilot episode of All in the Family was a far cry from the sitcoms we had regularly tuned into on television. It tackled issues like racism, sexism, and politics— subjects that had been hidden under the rug that sitcom mom June Cleaver vacuumed in her living room.
The show’s creator Norman Lear may have intended for the pater familias Archie Bunker to look foolish and serve as a liberal punching bag but instead, he was to become America’s “loveable bigot” and the candidate of a mock campaign for president in 1972.
All in the Family was the number one show in the Nielsen ratings for five consecutive years in the 1970s. Many laughed and indulged Archie’s attitudes toward women and minorities because he seemed harmless and had never marched with the KKK or hit his wife although he called her names that would have ended both my marriages.
Lear might have hoped the Archie Bunkers of America were becoming an anachronism and he was doing his part to move things along in that direction. I too, was among those who hoped that our society was on a steady course to becoming less sexist and racist. But Archie’s appeal to a rising number of voters— particularly blue collar workers who were being left behind by accelerating economic and social change —was identified by politicians and exploited.
Of course what gets on commercial television in America is all about what gets watched on television and the population of the United States was becoming a more urban/suburban TV audience that advertisers increasingly coveted. In the early 1970s family sitcoms that were popular with rural viewers and those that appealed to escapist fantasy fans began to be replaced by different types of “families” in more socially conscious shows like All in the Family.
The Mary Tyler Moore Show featured a woman in the workplace who was more competent than some of the men she worked with. M*A*S*H was set at the time of the Korean War when the United States was in one in Vietnam. The show didn’t poke fun at war, it belittled it. Cheers was a family of loveable barflies, The Golden Girls, a group of woman dealing with life after menopause. Sitcoms were no longer just about the way we were supposed to be. They were showing us the way we were.
But foremost among these shows was another that starred a husband and father who was quite the opposite of Archie Bunker and became as big a ratings success. The Cosby Show dominated the ratings in the 1980s and equaled All in the Family’s earlier run as the number one program on television for five straight seasons.
It was comedian Bill Cosby’s idea to adapt his observations about family life in his stand-up act for TV. The Cosby Show featured a Black family where the father was a doctor and the mother a lawyer. This was despite the fact that Cosby’s original idea was for Cliff Huxtable to be a limo driver and his wife Clair a plumber. He was talked out of it.
Apparently, Cosby’s wife and the producers thought a Black family on television needed to skip being middle class and instead be a professional and affluent version of the Nelsons and the Cleavers. So the Huxtables were cast accordingly and moved on up from the Bunkers’ working class row house in Queens to a brownstone in Brooklyn Heights, a neighborhood that was also admirably and a little too noticeably colorblind.
Bill Cosby earned a doctorate in education and pointedly took the opportunity in his show to emphasize the importance of getting one. Here’s a clip where he hammers that home to his son…
As much as The Cosby Show broke the stereotype of how Black families had been represented earlier on television, critics contended that the program went too far in the other direction. The affluent Huxtables may have inadvertently signified to white audiences that inequality and racial prejudice were no longer serious problems for America.
If All in the Family had finally brought America’s reality to sitcoms after the “feel-good” everything is Ok ones of the 1950s’ and 60’s, The Cosby Show kept the line moving in that direction. But sadly, although it offered a warm depiction of family life, Bill Cosby the person was revealed to be someone quite the opposite of Cliff Huxtable the congenial obstetrician and patriarch of a successful Black family.
And The Cosby Show was still on the air when another sitcom on a fledgling new network was about to flip the warm-hearted notion of the TV nuclear family upside down.
to be continued…
How Did We Get Here? (Part Four)
Can TV Sitcoms provide a hint?
For over three decades the television networks ABC, CBS and NBC had American TV viewership pretty much to themselves. That changed in 1986 with the emergence of a fourth national commercial television network when Fox launched its in test markets. For the family sitcom another seismic turning point occurred a short time later.
On April 5, 1987 Fox premiered a primetime lineup nationwide and that evening Married… with Children would flip over the sitcom living room sofa and knock the legs out from under its kitchen table. The new network had encouraged the creators of the show to be outrageous and come up with something the Big Three networks would never allow on their air. And so they did. Fox executives even suggested a name— Not the Cosbys —both a swipe at and a bow to the number one show on television at the time.
If Father Knows Best’s Jim Anderson was the moralist dad who was portrayed to be infinitely all knowing every week, Al Bundy was one who was unfailingly moronic in his every waking moment. The repulsive opposite of Anderson and the other sitcom dads who had preceded him was even disrespected and disparaged by his own family and the Bundys were the antithesis of any ever seen on American television before.
Married… with Children skewered the happy perfect sitcom family as if it had been a colossal put on. To call them dysfunctional hardly scratches the surface to describe how vulgar they were. Al wasn’t a doctor. He was a shoe salesman who hated his job and felt cheated by life. His wife Peg refused to either cook or clean and the two children were equally loathsome.
Almost immediately, the program raised eyebrows and caused consternation among those viewers who found it deplorable, debauched and a joke too far. But for others a darker view of life in America may have seemed a hyperventilating reflection of their own. While they laughed, they too may have been a family struggling to make ends meet. The Bundys were awful but perhaps more honest and real about it than the lives of the idealized sitcom families who always solved their trivial problems and then hugged each other at the end of the show.
And a bit of luck may well have contributed to Married… with Children becoming the Fox network’s first big hit. In its third season, a Michigan homemaker, who was offended by what she considered the program’s “anti-family values”, spearheaded a nationwide boycott of it. Several sponsors pulled their advertising but the negative publicity actually boosted the ratings and Married… with Children would run for 11 years and become one of the top dozen successful sitcoms in American television history.
The Bundy’s didn’t have a picket fence in need of paint and a lawn so overgrown it needed to be scythed. They probably wouldn’t have minded it though. They were losers and seemingly proud of it.
Looking back today, I believe Married… with Children can be seen as an early flashpoint in America’s culture wars. If the Huxtables would have voted for Obama, the Bundys, if they voted at all, would likely have been Trump supporters. But they weren’t the model for Americans who felt left behind. Al and his family weren’t showcasing their grievances. They were merely a punchline.
The Conners on Roseanne which debuted a year after Married… with Children were also a struggling working class family but a more genuine one who loved each other. The show even went beyond All in the Family in dealing with topics like addiction, domestic abuse and teen pregnancy. Its star Roseanne Barr continued a historic trend of stand-up comedians with successful sitcom series.
And beyond their success with audiences, both Roseanne and Married… with Children spawned offspring that completed the interment of the illusory sitcom nuclear family. In their wake other less than perfect families proliferated on television. Even ones more animated than Roseanne’s exasperated shriek.
Actually, the animated sitcom goes back nearly to American television’s Stone Age. The Flintstones which premiered in 1960 was an obvious takeoff of The Honeymooners with Fred and Wilma Flintstone clearly stand-ins for Ralph and Alice Kramden. The Jetsons followed two years later but animated sitcoms did not reappear as a permanent staple of network programming until the most popular one in history debuted 25 years later.
When The Simpsons first appeared on television I had just turned 40. In a couple of years the show will turn 40— it’s renewed to the end of the decade —and it has already set longevity records that I’m pretty sure I won’t. When I think about it, the show has an unfair advantage. Unlike us, animated characters don’t have to age and Homer and his brood haven’t. He and his wife Marg are still in their 30s. The kids—Bart and Lisa — are still 10 and 8 years old. They can be forever young even if the actors who are their voices won’t be.
A further advantage for a cartoon is that the characters can all be like Bugs Bunny and Road Runner and indestructible. In bungling Homer Simpson’s case apparently so is Springfield’s nuclear power plant despite his being responsible for its safety.
But The Simpsons wasn’t just a joke and Homer just a buffoon. Despite being a cartoon, there were genuine subjects and values conveyed through the satire and the slapstick. The show was famously praised by the likes of the Archbishop of Canterbury and criticized by President George W. Bush. At its best in its earlier seasons it garnered far more accolades than denunciations.
Did The Simpsons bear any resemblance to a middle class America that was shrinking? Maybe not but the nuclear family itself was further distancing itself from the center of the sitcom universe.
…to be continued
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