Word: harriet
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...Americans need their stories now, the recovered histories of what they have been and fantasies of what they might be. The American family, as well, desperately needs a new folklore, a new driving myth. The old version, which in caricature is a 1950s suburban setting out of Ozzie and Harriet, does not entirely work anymore, except in nostalgia, in Kennebunkport, Maine, or in Ronald Reagan's afternoon naps...
...misses the point to say that Murphy Brown is not a real character. Fiction is real enough in its powers. When Abraham Lincoln met Harriet Beecher Stowe, the author of Uncle Tom's Cabin, he said, "So this is the little lady who made this big war." That, at least, is the legend. Little Eva perhaps belongs to a higher order of symbolism than Murphy Brown's baby, but the simple principle, the power of stories, remains the same...
...telling peculiarity of the family-values issue that it is so often framed in visual memories of television shows. Many Americans conjuring images of an earlier family ideal think of Ozzie and Harriet or Leave It to Beaver or The Donna Reed Show. They may even think that family values are something enacted in black and white -- the home returned to after school, the milk and cookies, a rustling of Mother in full stiff skirts. Americans almost never cite books as aide-memoire or illustrations of family values, perhaps because the TV sitcoms of American childhoods tended toward the sunny...
Here Kaus invokes the stereotypical picture of a nation united by "Ozzie and Harriet" and World War II. By 1984 some amalgam of investment bankers and $1000 watches dominated the American culture scene. In spite of the money inequality of the 1950s, Kaus says (maybe a bit implausibly), Americans were happier then...
...Richard Nixon once said, "but he can certainly hurt you." Gore will appeal in the South and to environmentalists, say the talking points Clinton's aides distributed to the faithful last Friday. Gore's support for the Persian Gulf war will reassure Reagan Democrats. Gore's Ozzie-and- Harriet marriage and his wife's crusade against rock lyrics will add some much needed "family values" points to the ticket. Above all -- it is the No. 1 talking point after the obligatory assertion that Gore could succeed Clinton without missing a beat -- Gore represents John Kennedy's earlier claim that...