Archie Doesn't Fit In Trump's World

Yes, Donald Trump has changed the game on racism and now he runs the table at will.

His latest “If-you’re-not-happy-here-you-can-leave” rant has an audience. “A lot of people love it” says the president. He’s not fussed by any controversy “because a lot of people agree with me.”(For what’s it’s worth, those who agree with him include white supremacists.)

In the past four years, Donald Trump has gone beyond normalizing racism. And America has been a complicit, passive, enabler.

There was a day when we laughed at Archie Bunker because we understood irony - or at least we thought we did. Here we are nearly half a century since Archie’s groundbreaking prime time television success and we’ve turned fiction into flat earth fact.

But that would never happen today. Archie would never get past the pitch meeting at the networks in 2019. All the “woke” apologists and politically correct who’ve become politically paralyzed, who bitch about the president’s idiotic ranting and unhinged behaviour couldn’t possibly abide a fictional overt racist, misogynistic, middle aged, foul-mouthed white character having any celebrity on television.
 
So, here we are in a world of breathless reporting that qualifies as journalism, a world of Twitter tirades that fuel Trump’s base that get little more than a slack-jawed response from a US Congress that is constipated by its partisanship.
 
We’re here because we have lost - perhaps forfeited - our collective ability to truly think independently, to understand or comprehend the nuanced lessons of irony.

We didn’t laugh at Archie Bunker because we agreed him. We laughed at him because we knew him to be a loathsome, ignorant asshole. We laughed at Archie because he was a racist. He was the butt of the joke.

Nobody’s laughing now, primarily because America is simply not brave enough to stand up to Donald Trump. And America certainly isn’t brave enough to say we need more Archie Bunker on prime time TV.

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