Those who wish they lived in Mayberry might not have noticed who’s really doing what and to whom in that supposedly idyllic hamlet.
The British social commentator Theodore Dalrymple remarked a few years ago that rock music in Western countries is accorded much the same immunity from criticism that Muhammad enjoys in Muslim societies. I can think of only one other pop-culture phenomenon against which no voice may be raised without hazard to the speaker:
Once upon a time, there was a long-running situation comedy that was almost universally regarded as the ultimate in wholesome, moral family television, a reminder of simpler and more decent times. Eventually it even became the basis for a Sunday school curriculum. The star of the show, who recorded albums of sacred music, portrayed a churchgoing small-town sheriff, also his town’s chief magistrate, who regularly lectured his young son on the importance of integrity, who was considered a sage and a model of modest rectitude–and who lied all the time.
The Andy Griffith Show revolves around Andy’s lies and deceptions. Andy Taylor is almost certainly the most prolific liar and deceiver in prime-time television history. If Andy had entered the oil business in Texas, J.R. Ewing would have been his houseboy.
Tellingly, when the series spun off Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., the pilot episode depicted the excruciatingly honest Gomer succeeding as a recruit only because of a lie told by Andy that falsified the young man’s very identity. Apparently goodness and innocence can prevail only with the aid of a lie.
The public laughed approvingly–and our leaders took notice.
Were The Andy Griffith Show satire, our laughter would mean that we know sleaze when we see it. It isn’t, and we don’t. The conduct of our major political parties and corporations tells me that the men and women behind the curtain have divined the actual import of The Andy Griffith Show and are using it as a manual for handling the rest of us.
We might want to think harder about Deputy Barney Fife, who longs for some uplift and greatness in his life, who really wants to do things the right way. Genius? No. Good-hearted individual with high aspirations? You bet. And The Andy Griffith Show presents Barney as a boob who must always yield to Andy’s rural good ol’ boy Machiavellianism.
In what might be the defining moment of the entire series, Andy asks Opie to use his wood-burning set to literally engrave a lie to fool Barney–an adult, a friend of the family, and an officer of the law. One of the results is that a museum bases an historical exhibit on Andy’s prevarication, meaning that a lie told for Andy’s convenience victimizes the general public and falsifies history. That’s not trivial, and it’s not funny.
I am having some trouble seeing Mayberry as a blessed alternative to or refuge from Washington, D.C. or corporate America.
The Andy Griffith Show premiered in 1960 and is usually described as a relic of the time just before the upheavals of that decade altered our culture forever. It strikes me rather as an early and powerful manifestation of the mentality that led to those convulsions. To be blunt, we didn’t start stinking when the loonies and rioters and assassins showed up. They showed up because we stank. After a decade of having been cosseted by the greatest expansion of wealth and leisure in all of history, Americans said “We’ve got this” and settled back to wink at falsehood and enthrone the trickster as the ideal person. There was still an adult in the room, but the adult was morally bankrupt.
Considering all the adoration of what goes on in Mayberry, small wonder that teenagers and young adults during the ‘60s became disillusioned and cynical toward their elders and particularly toward authority figures, more particularly still toward law enforcement officers and the courts, repudiating traditional religion and what are often called small-town values. One element of realism in The Andy Griffith Show is that the master manipulator is from a small town in a part of the country that prides itself on righteousness.
The people who most ardently cherish the show are the ones who were most vexed in recent years when the churchgoing president of the United States was a serial liar and plagiarist whose son was out sick the day they handed out ethics, and who got away with a large assortment of misdeeds because the media nodded and smiled and said he wasn’t hurting anything. The son fancied himself an artist. Maybe Hunter started out with a wood-burning kit like Opie.
I hear people say they wish they lived in Mayberry. I believe Mayberry is exactly the moral community we have inhabited for the last sixty-five years. People in high places know this. And they have given the rest of the country what it wants.
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