Wow. I'm watching All in the Family, and Archie just went down to the TV station to rebut an editorial from the previous night about gun control. He talks to the producer, and the producer calls a coworker in because, "I've got something I want him to see before it's extinct." So Archie gets to go on TV to talk about gun rights.

And the arguments he's using? EXACTLY the same as stuff people have been saying lately. Except people seem to be taking those arguments even more seriously now than they did then. Archie says that skyjackings can be prevented by arming all the passengers, and this gets huge laughs, like it's a completely ridiculous idea. (The stuff building up to there, the "We have rights to guns because we're Americans," didn't get the same sort of laughs.) I'm pretty sure this has been proposed on Fox News and similar places by actual political people within the past few years.

Archie Bunker also thinks that the working man pays too much in taxes and the big guys pay too little, but he thinks that any proposal to tax rich people more will stifle everybody's ambition to get rich, and everybody will stop working and the country's productivity will go down the terlet.

Archie sounds like a prophet.

Between Maude and All in the Family, Norman Lear was a prophet.

Whee. I'm being a grown up.

So I'd kinda forgotten I'd noticed that escrow was going to be a little short (tax estimation was a bit off) and so had a few moments of freak out when I opened the statement with the new monthly payment jumping. Then I remembered that you know what? Let the bank owe the money for most of the rest of the year. It's basically an interest free loan.

This is grownup for me, because I'm so allergic to owing money (I carefully don't think about the actual mortgage) that my instinct is to always pay in full. But that makes no financial sense here. The bank will get the money over the next year. In the meantime, I'll earn interest on it, not them.

Archie Bunker scares me because a) he sounds like my grandpa and b) I had hoped my grandpa was a dying breed. But somehow the people nndow seem even worse-- like at his heart, AB ended up to be a big old softie who adopted a little girl, he just needed to meet new people and be educated. While some of the people spouting Archie Bunker like stuff have been educated, and seem to still think this way.

like at his heart, AB ended up to be a big old softie who adopted a little girl, he just needed to meet new people and be educated

That was Archie's saving grace, that there was a decent human being under there, he just needed prying out of his shell. Yes he was racist, but his black buddies were still his buddies. He just needed help making the connections.

Archie Bunker may have been a bigot but the show was written to appeal to liberal viewers. Complicates comparisons to his real life counterparts.

You know, I guess because of my grandpa, and watching it with him, I always saw Archie Bunker as a way of teaching a lesson to the "Archie Bunkers" of the world, since he liked the show, but then couldn't really argue with the message. Of course, I was a fairly small child, so I probably missed the nuances. The liberal view was of course why my mom and her brothers watched it.

but he thinks that any proposal to tax rich people more will stifle everybody's ambition to get rich, and everybody will stop working and the country's productivity will go down the terlet.

Imagine if anyone proposed a top tax rate like existed during the time of that show. Back then nobody ever wanted to get rich.