The other day I was talking to a young guy at work. Now, by young I\u2019m talking relatively.\u00a0 Looking at him and basing my opinion on appearance, work experience, the fact that he has a wife and a child, I\u2019d say he\u2019s somewhere between 27 and 32 years old.\u00a0 Well, we were discussing stuff and Fred Flintstone came up.\u00a0 We were talking about car tires and how Fred could chisel out a spare when he got a flat.\u00a0 There were some general comments on the unenlightened character of Fred and I said that Fred was a cartoon copy of the Jackie Gleason character Ralph Kramden and how Ralph was a comical but fair representation of the working class guy of the nineteen fifties.\u00a0 This elicited blank unrecognition of Jackie Gleason, Ralph Kramden and the Honeymooners in general.\u00a0 I guess this surprised me.\u00a0 After all older shows that I watched on TV as a kid were still well known to younger people.\u00a0 For instance, The Three Stooges were from the 1930s and 1940s and yet they are a fixture on television and are still relatively well-known.\u00a0 I guessed that the Honeymooners must have disappeared from television far enough back to completely disappear from the present adult population\u2019s collective TV consciousness.\u00a0 That bothered me.<\/p>\n
Why do I think that the Honeymooners shouldn\u2019t disappear? First of all I don\u2019t pretend that the Kramden household represents some golden age portrayal of American marital bliss.\u00a0 Ralph is portrayed as pretty dimwitted and Alice is given a certain amount of the female empowerment motive that has reached its disgusting fruition in our present feminized society.\u00a0 She often wins the argument by proving to Ralph just how superior she is and how unfair her role as homemaker is.\u00a0 Deference to her moral superiority is on display most of the time.\u00a0 But the basis of the show is the underlying rock-bottom premise that a man should be the king of his castle.\u00a0 Even in the derisive arguments that Alice gives Ralph at every turn is the bottom line of \u201cso if you\u2019re the boss, what do we do now?\u201d\u00a0 No matter what dumb thing Kramden does, he is the master of his soul.\u00a0 He will have to find a way to prevail.\u00a0 And like it or not, Alice will have to back his play.\u00a0 And good, bad or indifferent she would rather go along with him than go it alone.\u00a0 He may be the lowest rung on the totem pole but he is still the alpha male.\u00a0 And in a few episodes he does get to prove himself the king.\u00a0 The one that stands out is of course one of the least plausible.\u00a0 Ralph has obtained a bag full of counterfeit money.\u00a0 When the gangsters catch up with him they threaten Alice and the neighbors and when Ralph defies them they take him in the back room at gunpoint to work him over and make him comply on giving them the money.\u00a0 And in this crisis Ralph prevails.\u00a0 He beats up the thug and rescues his wife and neighbors.\u00a0 Of course, in the next minute he tries to cash in on his achievement and makes himself ridiculous, but his victory stands as proof that he is the man of the house.\u00a0 And for once even Alice can\u2019t diminish his victory.<\/p>\n
And the other aspect that endears the show to me is the working class ethos. For the most part, American TV exists to reflect the world-view and the sensibilities of the upper middle class.\u00a0 Even when they are portrayed as struggling twenty-somethings you can see that missing a meal or not having the status symbol item is not part of their existence.\u00a0 They are the cloud people.\u00a0 By contrast, the Kramdens and the Nortons (their upstairs friends and neighbors) don\u2019t have two nickels to rub together.\u00a0 Even buying a new bowling ball can be outside the realm of possibility.\u00a0 These are people who aspire to be lower middle class.\u00a0 Ralph dreams up countless get rich quick schemes to allow him to make Alice proud of him.\u00a0 And he always fails but he never gives up.\u00a0 That is the kind of message that the young people need to get.\u00a0 Not that everything will be handed to them on a silver platter.\u00a0 And not that they can\u2019t decide what is good enough for them.\u00a0 For that is the message that is out there now.\u00a0 The government will provide what you need and also decide what you don\u2019t need (or deserve).<\/p>\n
So I\u2019m going to do my best to spread the word to the kids about Ralph Kramden and the Honeymooners. I think the show is an antidote for the namby pamby male sterotypes currently infesting television and the movies.\u00a0 He may be a colossal failure but he certainly is king of his castle.\u00a0 And that\u2019s a good thing to be.<\/p>\n
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