Norman Lear Is a Liar

by Mona Shaw

Whether witting or not, Norman Lear is a liar. He has done more damage toward the mobilization of oppressed people than anyone in entertainment.

Had Lear told the truth, Archibald Bunker would have been a Wall Street executive, and Maude would have worked as a hotel maid. After all, the authors of bigotry and the greatest executor of its evil are wealthy.

By making the face of bigotry a working-class man, Lear reinforced class bigotry and effected a lasting and pervasive act of blaming the victim. On the heels of the assassination of Martin Luther King, jr., the U.S. was at a pivotal juncture for acknowledging its racism. Lear exploited that by pointing a large arm at men in hard hats and screaming, “It’s their fault!”

You could write volumes on the damage done by this.  From the endless cartoons that showed some guy in hard hat saying something racist, sexist, or homophobic to portraying the women who loved these men as feckless and dimwitted.

“Right-on” Maude on the other hand was affluent and had her own sassy maid. Her husband and friends were other affluent people and they went to symphony concerts and the thee-ah-ter and made fun of Country music.

In the early 90s, I was a member of group who called ourselves “promo-homos.” We were LGBT people who would go to college classes, Rotary Club meetings and other venues so people could meet a real live queer. One invitation was from the UI College of Medicine. Two gay men in our group were construction workers. Every year an organizer from the College would show a slide of a construction worker making a homophobic joke.  Every year these men would object to that. Every year they were ignored, and the slide was shown again.  The message was obvious. If you’re homophobic, you’re part of the underclass, and no one wants that.

Thanks to Lear making fun of men in hard hats was considered an act of anti-racism, anti-sexism, and anti-homophobic.  It may be a little rude at worst, but hadn’t these men asked for it?  It certainly wasn’t understood to be the egregious class bigotry that it was. My own father wore a hard hat to work. He was a rock crusher in a quarry.

Every aspect of poor and working-class culture became fodder for derisive jokes. Their music, their dancing, their speech, their personalities, their clothes or the fibers of those clothes, their televisions in their living rooms, their food, or their beer. The laugher and ridicule were over the top if they lived in a mobile home. The mores of the poor and working class were suspect as well. It was assumed they were lazy, stupid, more apt to lie and steal, and have sex with their siblings and children.

If you didn’t want to be a bigot or any of these other things attributed to poor and working-class culture. Archie Bunker was not your role model in any kind of way. Maude was. Maude kept her television in the den.  Maude used pretty dishes and flatware that matched, preferably imported from Italy.  Maude wore flowing natural fibers. You certainly never saw her in a windbreaker with a union logo on it, and she spoke in grammatically correct English. She hired interior decorators and didn’t clean her own home.

Internalized oppression is a very real thing. Targets of oppression often come to believe the lies told about them. They believe they’re exception in their own culture. They convinced me for awhile. Like others, I believed that if I educated myself, if I learn how to dress like them, talk like them, went to their events and became fluent in all things upper class, I would be accepted by them. I believed it was my fault I’d been rejected. I simply needed to change my “white trash” ways. I read the dictionary like it was a novel and grew an impressive vocabulary. I memorized the Chicago Manual of Style. My diction and grammar were close to perfect.  I read all the self-help books including “Dress for Success.” I put my television in my bedroom and lined my place with shelves of books that I had actually read. I used to steal the syllabus on the first day of classes at the university that I couldn’t afford to attend, so I would be conversant in those subjects.

You can pass for a while. You have to lie a lot, but you can. At some point, though, you’ll be found out. And you’ll be regarded differently from that point on, or worse you’ll be praised for rejecting your roots. Or, you’ll hear one too many lies about your people to bear, and you’ll never see them the same way again.  Both happened for me.

I remember one such moment for me. I was at a gathering of opera aficionados. A woman said, she saw me the day before having lunch with a woman that looked familiar. I told her I had been having lunch with my mother.

“Well,” she said, “It couldn’t have been the woman I knew. She was a girl I knew in high school. Her name was Marlene. She was totally white trash and ended up having a bunch of kids and working in a factory.”

“You knew my mother,” I told her and waited.

“How did you rise above such a station?!” she exclaimed.

I had had it.

“I didn’t rise above it,” I told her, “I still aspire to it. My mother single-handedly organized a union in that factory and has organized hundreds of factories and workplaces since. I can only hope to be so noble.”

Coming out as working poor is a lot like coming out as a lesbian. It never stops. You are constantly correcting people who make the wrong assumption.  This almost always happens after someone has made a slur about your people.  The reaction is usually much the same as the woman at the opera meeting. After observing that you “don’t look or act like them,” they slink away and go discuss you in a corner.  You never run out of people who’ll make excuses for their slur and explain how we all have difficulty in life. The problem is my inability to see what “they” meant by the dig, not the fact that they made it.  They will become outraged at any suggestion they’ve been a bigot and manipulate the situation to where you owe them an apology for objecting.

Every time I see Norman Lear praised; I think about how much harder he has made life on people like mine. I wish he’d never been given a contract. Someone might want to inform Lear that underclass people have a better chance of winning the lottery than “moving on up to a high-rise apartment in the sky” thanks in no small part to his class bigotry.