I was … taken instantly with [the] clever show [All in the Family], and count myself today as one of its many yet unjaded enthusiasts. Part of my delight in Lear's scripts is traceable, I suspect, to my longstanding admiration of Sinclair Lewis' work: surely Archie Bunker is the McLuhanesque counterpart of the Gutenbergian George Babbitt of half a century ago. The American appetite for social satire is, it seems, nearly as voracious as the English: indeed, every American social class with the exception of course of the noble subproletariat has by now been depicted as a set of clowns. After watching Archie thrash about recently in the tatters of his precarious and blusterous self-complacency, I summarily canceled The Jeffersons and reached for my copy of the Lewis novel. (pp. 401-02)
The working class in America has come of age, and since 1970 it has had its own George Babbitt as the badge of its maturity.
Lear's brilliantly witty scripts … suggest that the liberal middle class, as the mastermind of the sluggishly evolving Great Society, has formulated its own ideas of class responsibility…. Its members are too polite to refer, even among themselves, to "wops" or "kikes" or "culluds" or "broads"; they have signed too many full-page primal screams in the New York Times and fed too much Piper-Heidsieck to too many Panthers to flay themselves into the rehabilitation of their liberal psyches. In their hearts they know they're right: now they have only to activate their high principles, roll up their sleeves, get off their rumps. They are not gauche, for heaven's sake, and they are full of Concern. But there are others who yell "Polack" and "Dingbat," sleep in their underwear, and don't give a damn…. The blue collar boys aren't terribly bright and they're not very talented, so they can't write sociological guidelines for affirmative action or whip the law round Southerners' ankles. But at least they can be expected to learn the right attitude.
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