161. More on “fun"

 More on “fun”

 

What I was trying to say on Tuesday was that Archie Bunker and Meathead, in the early 1970s, made it possible for my Republican and conservative-by-nature father, and me, thinking myself more worldly and aware of injustices, to laugh together. We could laugh with each other and at each other.

 

In the backroom of the Bookloft in those same years, and well into the Reagan years, Republican Chuck Gavin, the secret cigarette smoking, World War II-wounded vet who’d “done his backpacking” during that War, would regale us with stories of his fight with “John Barleycorn” in the hospital after being wounded; the old rodeo buddies who showed up at his door after he’d married a city girl—he’d hand them a few bucks for entry money and shoo them away before Shirley caught sight of them; and the way he’d put a wet finger to the wind when advising sheepmen when to sell their stock. Jack Finch would tell us that he and Ronald Reagan shared a birth year, and “that SOB doesn’t even remember the Depression.” And Max Bauer would take us on raucous tours of Wallowa County in the years following the big War. “A lot of war-widows around,” he’d say, and his mother shooed him off to college before he got caught in one scandal or another. He and Gavin shared getting their college educations on the GI Bill.

 

We’d all drink our coffee and laugh together—the two of my regular morning customers vying to out-story the one who had just finished his story. 

 

Which-ever side of this Covid thing you are on, it is near impossible to laugh with your sister or neighbor who lives on the other side, especially when it comes to the Covid itself. New York Times columnist Frank Bruni says today that religions’ falling believers are being replaced with worship based on political division, He quotes a new Times survey:

“Millions of Republican voters have decided that downplaying Covid is core to their identity as conservatives… Millions of Democrats have decided that organizing their lives around Covid is core to their identity as progressives.”

 

And not only can’t we laugh with the other side. We can barely laugh among ourselves, though comedy shows rooted to above-described political tribes apparently try. I guess—I don’t watch them.

 

I’m waiting for the next Archies and Meatheads, who were, despite their differences, “All in the Family.”

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