Archie Lives

Whew! Glad to be done with this novel which is a 250 page descent into the hellish thought process of the Old South. Walking in the narrator’s shoes is tough going as he relentlessly and increasingly reveals himself as an insufferable, racist misogynist unable to reconcile himself to modernity.

The novel is a good lesson in remembering not to conflate the author, Walker Percy, with the voice of the narrator. Just as Orson Welles was not Citizen Kane nor was Norman Lear, Archie Bunker.

Of course, Donald Trump seems always to be lurking in one’s mind these days. Is there anyone, real or imagined, analogous to our head of state (I cannot bring myself to write, President T…..) in terms of poverty of intellect, arrogance, vulgarity, soullessness, deceit and malice?

In the aforementioned Walker Percy book, Lancelot, the protagonist speaks while confined to either a prison or psychiatric hospital. The only question in my mind is whether our Donald will be removed in handcuffs or a straitjacket. This is a Reductio ad Absurdum presidency. What seems so obviously wrong-headed on its face apparently is not to a big chunk of America.

Can it be we are living inside some comedic sit-com? Archie is president without a laugh-track. No Edith or Meathead to set him right. What we thought was dead forty-five years ago must have been buried alive.

As old beliefs die they become an art form. We can joke about them…or so we thought. Old World superstitions. The British Raj. Sailing off the edge of the flat world. Victorian manners. Child labor…. no strike that, it’s on the GOP agenda.

It turns out that, All in the Family’s, Archie Bunker, was seen by half of America as an identifiable model. They didn’t get the joke and now the joke is on us. Norman’s Lear’s miscreant clown roams the heartland.