Here's to Yesterday

Here’s to Yesterday.
Editors Note: So for the past 20-something years, I’ve always written on lengthwise folded copy paper or Fisher Price size legal pads. This marks the first essay I’ve written in a composition notebook in an effort to keep better track and save them for posterity... or to make it easier to sanitize when shit gets sideways.  So if this sucks, that’s gotta be the reason.  

As I was wasting time scrolling through one of the Satan Social Networks the other day, I came across a video clip from All in the Family. It was Season 4, Episode 20, "Lionel Gets Engaged". For those of you who don’t know about All in the Family or what it was,  let me paint a better-than-Pollock-worse-than-Rembrandt picture for you. All in the Family was a 70’s sitcom starring Carrol O’Conner as Archie Bunker, a lower-middle class cab driver from Queens New York.  There was Edith: his flighty, shrill-voiced wife; Gloria: his hippie, try-anything-once daughter; and finally MEATHEAD: Gloria’s fiancé and eventual husband (and, turns out, big time Hollyweird director). Like with most shows of the era, there were lots of transient characters and some special guest stars here and there - the standard fare.  Here’s the hook though: Archie was kind of an asshole and a not-so-subtle racist.  Not a "March in the streets, Scum Scum Scum Go Back To Where You’re From" kinda racist, but an "under the breath, smartassed wise cracks, screw up common sayings to make them offensive (Well if that ain’t the black callin' the kettle pot)" kinda racist. In today's Americccpa and in this society, you couldn't even dream of broadcasting this on network television. 
      Thing is the show was written precisely that way to show what an ass Archie could be, making him the butt of the joke whether he realized it or not. The show never glorified or reinforced his views. It showed the audience, the other characters, and even Archie himself, how dumb being hateful for hate's sake really was.  This was no standard sitcom. From its first episode it addressed racism, antisemitism, infidelity, homosexuality, women’s lib, rape, religion, miscarriage, abortion, breast cancer, menopause, impotence, and even the Vietnam War.  And this was a FUCKING SITCOM!! It was fathoms deeper than a fat guy arguing with his wife.  
     The Bunker family was what I would call working class and affected as any family on the line was back then by any ripple in the economy, labor market supply chain.  Look up the gas crisis in the seventies - Weak leaders lead to bad times.  It’s a saying for a reason, but I digress.  Archie would come home and head straight to his chair and holler for Edith to bring him a beer and he would start in on taxes or politics or whatever social movement of the day was and how it effected him directly, even when it didn’t. It only made him sound ignorant. Like the people you hear spouting half the story and then when you call them on it, they brush it off or completely change sides so they don’t look like dumbfucks. Yeah, like that.  There’s this one thing that made the show work though: When smacked in the face, over and over and over and over again with fact upon fact, example upon example……Archie would not only admit defeat, HE WOULD ADMIT HE WAS WRONG!! CAN YOU FUCKING IMAGINE???
Sometimes it was a slight nod with a certain smirk. Sometimes it was a self deprecating comment.  Sometimes it was an outright “I’m sorry”, or “I was wrong”.  
That was it.  That was the magic formula that made it all work. Archie was human and foul-able.  He was also worthy of redemption.  I have no doubt lots of people watched the show because Archie was a racist.  Imagine their surprise when they realized it wasn’t a hymn to the old days, but really a damnation of them.  No eye was safe from the thumb of All in the Family.
         Then, in the eighth episode, a black guy moves in next door. George Jefferson, his wife, Louise, and son, Lionel, move in next door and the irony and tension go up considerably.  You see, George, a successful upper-middle class businessman, is just as big a racist as Archie, and just as outspoken. Louise is the rock upon which all of George’s waves of bullshit crash and break.  Louise gives George a pretty wide area of operation but when she’s done with it she has no problem dressing George down, and how.  Lionel is the late teens/early twenties son who surfs George and Archie’s bullshit with the grace and ease of Laird Hamilton.  Lionel has more interaction with Archie and is unshaken by his bullshit and ignores it or goes all “wells, I guesses I musta dun forgots, Massa Archie”, which automatically makes Archie cringe and squirm audibly and visually.  The show was way deeper than it let on; a masterpiece of terrible things funny and helping people laugh at themselves so they could skip the crying stage.  
          What I really loved were the Archie and George Episodes.  Two dudes who were trying to impress their point on the other at all cost. Archie, the lower-middle class cabby, and George, the upper middle class businessman. Both had no problem getting filthy dirty mudslinging and name calling one another, neither one saw the other in themselves (not till later episodes anyways). Two sides of the same asshole. 
     Back to Season 4, Episode 20: "Lionel gets "Engaged.  Lionel gets engaged to a beautiful girl and she wins the Jefferson family over quickly.  George dotes on her to his friends and she clearly has his approval.  It’s not till the engagement party that we find out that Lionel has kept something from his Father, George.  The secret is that his fiancé has mixed parents and her father is white as the driven snow. 
Of course Archie is there and he ear hustles his way into learning that George has no idea that the other white guy at the engagement party is actually going to be related to him shortly.  Archie watches the big blow up between George and Lionel and in what becomes a trend in the show between them, Archie consoles George at the bar, because it’s the 70’s and that’s what men did.  
“What the hell happened Bunker?” George asks. 
“Jefferson…I got no idea but here’s to yesterday…”, and they toast.   
Two bigots finding solace and a sympathetic ear in each others company. They both see the times changing and even though they are each others hate incarnate they find comfort and "normal" with each other.  "Why?", you might ask? Because in that room of people, they felt like the other was the only only dude that KNEW HOW SHIT WAS SUPPOSED TO BE!! Not acknowledging to the audience the irony of their twosome, the modern world, and its changing social norms. 
The enemy of my enemy is my friend; my enemy if he’s the only other dude who will believe my bullshit is at least an ally till I get the numbers on my side built back up, that kinda thing.  
      What I see now (and subconsciously understood as a kid) was these two loudmouths coming to grips with being lied to and misguided and wrong for most of their lives... and that they both were redeemable men.  The long game of the show was to illustrate that people can change for the better. Whether that was the point or just happened, who knows, but it happened just that way.  Isn’t it fucking sad that that these fifty-some years later this same society would have lost that knowledge: that men can be redeemed? That men can change and admit their faults and follies and be given another chance? Societal Evolution at its finest.  
       Not only were the hot tub parties, cocaine, and tax brackets better in the 70’s, so were people. Their attitudes and faith in others not just to see different points of view but to realize mistakes and accept apologies. Making fun of things from all sides to show that we all really aren’t that different when it all shakes out.  
    Today jokes are hate speech or even better: MISINFORMATION!  There are protected classes and special policies and procedures to safe guard those classes.  Playing nanny and coddling instead of the tough father and saying, “handle it kid”.   
So as Archie says “Here’s to yesterday...”, so do I. Here’s to Yesterday. When a person could change their mind, admit their wrongs, and be forgiven not cancelled, shunned, or ruined.  When we could talk about our differences without shouting or bullhorning over the opposing side to shut them up or stop the dialog.  When, like Archie and George, we could see our common ground and work from there. Failing that, we could have an oldfashioned donnybrook in the parking lot, with no one getting shot,  work shit out, and be better men for it. No court or coroner needed - just fixing things amongst those individuals and changing minds and hearts one or two at a time.  
What I wouldn’t give for a yesterday like that..