Beef Loving Texans

Have you seen the advertisement for Beef Loving Texans?  This ad pops up and plays first when I click on a video I want to watch on CNN or wherever.  I have seen it on TV as well.  It is a wonderful, pastoral scene.  Set on a large ranch, a tall, thin Anglo male in western dress plays with his Anglo boy and girl in a great outdoor expanse with a background of round bales of hay strewn across the field, while the attractive Anglo mother works dutifully at home.  The narration talks about Texas and our values and our history and how much we value eating beef.  The final shot shows the family gathered around the table as the father slices a nice rare brisket.

I thought it was a joke the first time I saw it, and was laughing before it ended.  Only then did I realize this ad was serious.  It is the most gross stereotyping I have seen in a long time and completely oblivious to the current reality of Texas.

These folks are not typical Texans by any stretch of the imagination.  The typical Texan is a Latino who lives in an urban area and rents an apartment.  He or she does not own land, much less a ranch.  Where are the real Texans in this ad?  Where are the Blacks, the urban dwellers, the McDonalds eating Anglos?  No, this is visual painting of the nation’s stereotype of Texas and it is false.

Worse, if the target audience is Anglos and no one else, because of the income disparity in Texas most of those with enough education are vegetarians, not meat eaters.  Is the point here to convert healthy Texans to a food source that will hurt them?  Is the point here to let our majority/minorities know that beef is only for white folks?  That owning land is only for white folks?  That a typical family is a rugged cowboy like husband, attractive rancher mom and 2.0 kids, one a boy and one a girl and only they should eat beef after they have romped unfettered on their family’s huge spread?

I eat beef.  I know it is not good for me, but I eat beef.  Why must the beef industry promote such narrow thinking in an effort to sell their product?  Or, is the ad a subtle ploy by wise thinkers to encourage the dinosaurs among us to eat more beef so that their extinction is accelerated?

Is It Possible?

As I watch the news and read Facebook it appears to me I must live in a parallel universe.  Evidently, I believe contrary and contradictory things.  Deeply.

Is it possible that I truly respect, value, admire and support our law enforcement officers while hating every single time an unarmed person dies at the hands of police, especially Blacks?

Is it possible that I truly respect, value, admire and support our armed services and our veterans while hating the wars that they have been sent to fight, especially when I see those wars as politically motivated?

Is it possible that I support private gun ownership while hating how easy it is for anyone to get a gun and the sheer number of guns out there?

Is it possible that I have deep religious feelings while hating any believer of anything who wants to force their beliefs on someone else and believes that their beliefs are the only acceptable beliefs?

Is it possible that I deeply support the right of everyone to have their own opinions and attitudes while hating attacks on anyone else’s opinions as though people who think differently are fools and idiots?

Is it possible that I love America and deeply support the Constitution while hating the attacks on our own government from within and the unwillingness to support dissidence even if one disagrees with the dissidents?

Is it possible that I am a financially comfortable heterosexual Anglo male while hating poverty, bigotry and discrimination based on race, gender, and gender identity?

Is it possible that I promote reading, writing, and thinking on divergent topics and with divergent sources while hating those who would censor anything shared with kids at school that is in opposition to their own beliefs?

Is it possible to support a market economy while hating greed as a motivator and immoral production to enhance wealth without oversight?

I believe all of these beliefs are possible because I hold the all these beliefs.  However, my experience remains that if I do not think like the majority I am by definition an evil fool for whom harassment, name calling, and banishment must be justified.  Sadly, such behavior on the part of others continues to re-affirm my beliefs.

Yes, it is possible.  It is just not easy.  

Teachers Know

First day of school.  Parents don’t know what is in store for their children this year.  Principals kind of know, superintendents don’t know, school boards don’t know, legislators don’t know and billionaires for sure don’t know.  Teachers know.  Only teachers know.  Teachers have the map, they know the journey of this year, and they look at their students as passengers and fellow-travelers on this journey.  Teachers will quickly learn where the journey starts for each student and how far each must go to successfully arrive.  And in that way a relationship is formed with each student.  There are some who will promote high priced computer assisted instructional programs for kids.  Alas and alack, those may help somewhat, but they are incapable of forming a relationship with the kids and are, in my humble opinion, mostly a waste of money.  Teachers do not survey their classroom and see the kids as a lump, as a group, as a large blur who somehow represent lots of little data sets.  Teachers see each and every student.  Only teachers know the necessary journey in each class with each student.

In addition to teaching kids the actual content, teachers learn that some kids may have a tough time growing up as they need to this year.  There are steps, there are milestones, kids need to accomplish.  Some kids will have a tougher time taking the next step than other kids.  Most likely those kids will have it harder because their parents really do not want them to grow up.  They want their children to remain dependent on them.  They want to protect their kids, spoil their kids, earn the love of their kids and hopefully their kids will return to the roost and take care of them in later years.  Parents like these want to be the first line of defense against a teacher who does not understand their child and somehow their child feels unappreciated and non-rewarded by some task-master teacher.  Sadly, the teacher will know that child better in many ways than the parent.  Whatever the crime perceived by a parent from picking on my kid, to failure to turn in an assignment, the teacher will view the crime as an instructional and emotionally developmental issue, not some kind of personal affront.  I remember my guffaw when a parent said, “But Johnny never lies to me!” and/or, “Sally would not be caught dead with a boy like that.”  And, if the parent appeals a ruling and explanation beyond a truly professional teacher, woe to a principal who backs the parent and not the teacher.  Why?  Because teachers know. 

When a parent or a community member or a board member approaches a principal or a superintendent regarding the performance of a kid, or an issue with the kid, or the performance of a whole group of kids, the principal and the superintendent do not know the setting, context and events leading up to the incident.  He or she has no clue what has transpired in the classroom, what the teacher expects and what the student has done.  Superintendents and principals tend to be risk avoidance type folks and do not want to make parents mad or board members mad or legislators mad, so the administrator is likely to say he or she will look into it.  If they are really wimps they worry about making the athletic director mad.  But that’s just silly.  The AD works under the supervision of the administration.  Supes and principals that support AD’s over teachers end up all tangled up in complicated mixed loyalties.  I have actually heard of athletic directors who would call an ARD to change a kid’s IEP just so they could play Friday night.  Such bastardization of the purpose of schools is both sinful and illegal.  Athletic Directors do not know.  Superintendents and principals should simply say, “Talk to the teacher first.”  Why?  Because the teacher knows.

Every day, likely for at least an hour, this highly trained and educated adult interacts with a group of kids.  Some of these groups are way too large, some are small.  Some are 4 years old, some are 18.  But in every single instance, the teacher knows what is to be done, what is to be learned, what is to be experienced, what is to be thought about, what is to be created.  And in every single instance the teacher monitors the progress of these 20 or 30 or (Lord help them) 40 or more kids move from step 1 to step 2.  The teacher sees those who leap.  The teacher sees those who do not want to go on and want to retreat.  The teacher sees those who move only if cajoled, bribed, or threatened.  The teacher sees.  And the teacher knows.

Somewhere, way outside the classroom, a school board member is saying not all kids need to go to college.  He is wrong in the sense that all kids need to be prepared to go to college.  The gap between middle class and upper middle class is drawn by those who have a college degree.  The days of earning high income via a skilled trade are virtually gone, and if we are not preparing every single student to attend and be successful in college we are doing a terrible disservice to those kids and their parents.  We need to totally debunk the argument that "some kids are just not made to go to college."  That is BS.  Successful college grads do not all love college, reading, writing, thinking, homework and long essay tests.  Saying kids should be exempt from college preparation because that is outside their make up is equivalent to telling Uncle Sam you did not file a tax return this year because math is just not your thing.

Somewhere way outside the classroom a school board wants to see standardized test results assuming that somehow that is good measure of what the teacher did.  They are wrong.  Teachers do not take those tests.  And the results for students are spurious at best.  The linkage between the teacher and the student's performance is mostly poppycock and balderdash.  The strongest link we know relative to student performance on a high stakes standardized test is not the teacher-student link.  It is the parental income link, the zip code link, the racial identity link.  To argue that a great teacher failed to get all students to pass the test is as silly as arguing that the oncologist did not prevent lung cancer in all his patients that smoke. 

Somewhere way outside the classroom a legislator is thinking public schools would be better if they competed with charter schools.  He or she is wrong.  Teachers frankly do not worry about nor care what is going on in the next wing, much less what may be going on in some other facility designed to make entrepreneurs rich at the expense of public schools.  There is no sense of competition because we all know who works in those schools, and we know they could not hack it in our school.  We know at conferences we do not come to sit at their feet to learn.  It is the other way around. Somewhere, way outside the classroom, multi-billionaires sip brandy and decide to fund their own little experiments in schools, all of which, again I say, all of which have failed.  Making money does not make one smart or a skilled educator.  Getting elected does not make one smart or a skilled educator.  Being a teacher makes one smart.  Being a teacher for a while makes one a skilled educator. or a teacher drop out.

Teachers know. They know the kids, the curriculum, the challenges, and the measures.  No one knows this better than that teacher with those kids in that subject this period.  Period. 

So before you propose some cock-a-mammy cure or program for public education just shut up and ask a teacher.  And if you are making plans to "improve" a school you better ask the teachers.  And if you are even building a new facility you better ask the teachers.  Why?

Because teachers know.

Have a great year.

Hill Yes

I will vote for Hillary Clinton.  That should come as no surprise to those who have been reading this blog and Tardy Belle before this one.  But I live in Texas and that means most of my friends and neighbors, people I know and like, will either enthusiastically vote for Donald Trump or will vote for him as the lesser of two perceived evils.  This post is for my conservative friends, the folks who plan to vote for Trump, and serves less as an apology and more as an explanation of my Hillary support.  I believe I am not crazy and it is important to me that you know that I am not crazy.

I start with the following assumptions, any one of which you may challenge, but to practice full disclosure I must declare these up front.  Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are both human beings.  Ambitious human beings.  Neither are perfect.  Both have proven their humanity through a series of mistakes and half-truths and misdirections.  If we wait for a candidate who is perfect we will never vote.  Therefore, as I make a decision about voting, I discount the claims from the other side about the evil in each candidate.  I set their human traits aside.  I set aside the Republican talk about emails and Benghazi and the Democratic talk about walls, discrimination and tax returns.  I set their looks aside.  I set their ethnicity aside.  I set their gender aside.  They are human.  That should not be a variable in my decision making unless it is an extreme example of flawed human behavior like child molestation, murder, etc. 

So, unlike many of my fellow Americans, I do not believe in voting for the “best person”.  (I think it is real progress that we used to say we will vote for the best man.  Not this year.)  All candidates are human.  And it is impossible to really know a candidate.  We may know what their campaign headquarters wants us to know about both the candidate and the competition, but I really do not know Trump or Clinton as people.  To say I will vote for this person over that person because they are a better person is ludicrous.  To say I will vote for this person because of their gender or race or religious belief is an admission of prejudice, pre-judging, a practice I will not support.  And so, if I will not attempt to select a candidate based on what I think of them as people, how shall I choose?

The key variable in the selection process for me is philosophy.  I see myself as a protestant Christian.  When I move to a new town I do not check out the Catholic churches, the synagogues, or the mosques.  I check out protestant churches even if the most dynamic, impressive pastor around is Jewish I will not attend that church as it is not of my faith.  It is the same with politics.  I will not vote for the person based on affability or my personal connectivity to them, it will be the person who believes as I believe.

There are two major prevailing beliefs or philosophies in our nation, conservative and liberal.  Once I know if I am a conservative or a liberal, candidate selection and support becomes simple.  I see these philosophies through the following lens.  Both philosophies look to a system to resolve conflict, make decisions and promote health and well-being.  The conservative philosophy looks to the individual first to solve his or her own problems, and then to the market place to resolve all other issues and provide all other services.  The system conservatives fear the most and oppose the most is the “government.”  They oppose the growth of government and the intervention of government and the services provided by the government.  They would much prefer that individuals take care of themselves and that free enterprise take care of everything else.

Liberals on the other hand look to the government to solve problems, resolve conflicts and provide services.  Liberals do not fear government intervention, in fact, they support it in areas of injustice and poverty.  Liberals do not oppose the market in the ways that conservatives oppose the government, but liberals are skeptical of the market because those who make market decisions are not elected by the voters and those who control the market are more interested in making money than providing for the common good.  Hence, liberals see the market as immoral, an entity to be monitored.  If one can make money by cutting corners on production, paying labor less money, moving production overseas, ignoring consumer and worker safety, etc., etc. then the market will do so in the name of monetary gain regardless of the human cost .  Liberals will support market oversight and regulation, they will support providing aid to the hungry and shelter for the homeless and mental health support for the disturbed.  Liberals will support governmental provided services such as public education, law enforcement, water certification, food inspection, highway construction, and universal health care while conservatives tend to see all those programs as boondoggles at the expense of the tax payer.  If the government provided fewer services it would be smaller and cheaper leaving more money in the hands of those who have more money to begin with and need those services the least.

(As an aside, several things have fascinated me over the years.  First, conservatives perceive themselves to be the American super patriots while attacking their own government, shrinking their own government, and even shutting down their own government.  Second, despite all the research on government provided services, conservatives still believe that public sector services should be provided by the private sector.  They support charter schools and private sector prisons, etc.  And most amazing to me of all is that citizens who are employed by the government consider themselves conservatives despite the fact that their checks come from the government and from tax payers.  Teachers and law enforcement folks who consistently vote conservatively clearly must support the reactionary interpretation of the second amendment or they could not do such a good job of shooting themselves in the foot.)

As you know, or may have guessed, I am a liberal.  I have seen first-hand what happens when market forces are not monitored, when schools are not funded, when food inspection is not thorough, when work place safety is not enforced and when industry lays off American workers to move overseas to make more profit.  Our economical crash in 1929 happened after 8 years of conservative policies that were summarized by the expression, “What is good for business is good for the USA.”  Our economical crash in 2008 happened after 8 years of conservative policies that dramatically reduced government oversight of Wall Street and the banking industry.  Clearly every time we do that we head for a crash because the market is not ethical, it is not moral, and it will do whatever makes the most money for some very few people.

I love our country.  I love our government.  I love knowing I can turn on the faucet and drink the water.  I can safely buy meat and vegetables.  I can drive a car with required safety and anti-pollution features.  I can apply for work, attend school, open a bank account, and/or buy property without concern regarding my race, gender or religious preference.  I love driving down the interstate highways and seeing power grids.  I do not feel as though my freedom has been limited by the fact that I stop on red and go on green.  Yep, I’m a liberal. 

I understand if you make more than $350,000 per year voting conservative may be tempting in a self-serving sort of way.  If you make less than that and vote conservatively you are hurting yourself, but that is your prerogative.  I understand that if you think the main role of government should be to provide for the common defense and the government should get out of every other facet that you are a conservative.  If so, it is my hope that you have the funds to provide all your own health care and safe water and safe food and private education and your own law enforcement.  I do not understand if you are a conservative and oppose human beings coming to the this country who are responding either to the market, i.e., they come for more economical opportunity, or people who come here pursued and persecuted by terrorists and madmen who rule other governments.  It would seem to me that conservative philosophy would most support an influx of cheap labor and those who are persecuted by their governments.  But it is the liberals who have a hard time labeling human beings born on planet earth as aliens.

Bottom line is to whom do you turn to solve our problems, resolve conflicts, set foreign policy, and implement strategies to improve life in America?  If it is mostly private sector and you fear the government you are likely a conservative.  If it is the government and you believe we should monitor the private sector you are most likely a liberal.

So, Donald Trump is for the most part a conservative.  Hillary Clinton for the most part is a liberal.  Trump is not as conservative as Barry Goldwater, nor is Hillary as liberal as Bernie Sanders.  But Trump leans right and Clinton leans left.  My decision to support Hillary is based on my philosophy and the fact that she is most likely to implement my philosophy.  If that sounds logical to you, then you know I am not crazy.

If not, if you believe you should vote based on your guts and your bias, then I probably still seem crazy to you.  Just know, however, I may not be the crazy one.

Worder Boreding and Other Professional Development Tortures

Soon, if not already, teachers will be reporting back to work to initiate school year 2016-2017.  This annual migration is always full of anticipation, anxiety and dread.  There will be new staff to meet, a room to get ready, and plans to be made.  There will also likely be donuts and luncheons and that will be a good thing because it won’t be provided again for months and months.  And while teachers are totally mentally pre-occupied with preparing their rooms and organizing for kids yet to come, administrators may be planning a host of activities, presentations, speakers, etc., that will do more than rob teachers of the precious time they need.  Such activities may be pointless, or worse, harmful to the professional staff. 

The worst atrocities committed against professional educators may occur in the time set aside for their professional preparation.  Professional Development may earn the descriptor, “oxymoron” if non-professionals have planned it, or school administrators without training in staff development have planned it.  In many cases it is designed to meet the wants, wishes and needs of the administrators and the requirements of the state, and has virtually no benefit at all to the teachers. 

For a professional educator to return to work after a summer break, full of energy and ideas for his or her classroom and learn that the next few days will be spent in professional development hell is one of the great discouragers of teachers.  Some of these sessions will be excruciating.  They will be professional development torture.  I have identified and named a few:

Media Misery

Somebody, somewhere thought it would be a good idea to show a tape, a DVD, a movie to either inform or inspire staff.  So a bunch of people with college degrees gather in some spot where all can see or hear and sit zombie-like while some media plays.  Sadly, the research is very clear.  Such a shotgun approach is rarely heard by teachers.  Why would I want to know what motivates football teams when I teach 6^th grade math?  Why would I want to know how to clean blood borne pathogens when I will never be called on to do so?  This does not apply to me and I turn it off in my head.  And sadly if I am called on to address the issue because a kid has a nosebleed I do not remember what to do because the professional development was more like media misery than learning.  Some, however, will be seriously listening and taking notes.  They will be surprised to know that by the time kids show up they have forgotten all about the media, and come next June when they find the notes they will simply throw them away. 

This all makes perfect sense.  Asking returning staff to watch a disconnected movie while they are already feeling stress about the preparation for the coming year is like forcing a bride to watch an investment strategy tape at the rehearsal dinner.  She just doesn’t care.  Not now.  Other things are much more important.  Media misery is planned by folks who do not know professional development and thereby they torture their staff before the year really begins.

Computer Cruciation

Oh boy!  We bought new software this summer to take care of the problems we were having with the old software.  Of course, by the end of the year we all found work-arounds and everything was humming right along.  But we decided to install an entirely new system so that everyone can look like an idiot other than the IT guys and the superintendent who was told by other superintendents who do not have a clue that this is the software to have.  Teachers must learn this to report attendance, grades, etc. but they resent having this task forced on them when they have so much else to do.  Can’t we ever wait and let teachers select the software and plan the implementation process?  No.  Involving teachers in decision-making is too threatening to someone with a clipboard somewhere.  So even if the software is the latest and greatest and should help kids, handing it to me, telling me I have to learn it, and taking up my time before school really upsets teachers and rightly so.  So we torture teachers on a desktop, or a lap top, or on a tablet of some sort. Regardless, it is torture. 

(If teachers are required to watch something on a computer to learn it, perhaps to take a test at the end, then all the comments about media misery apply plus testing people like giant Accelerated Reader kids.  How insulting!)

PowerPoint Persecution

I was the director of staff development in a large mid-urban school district in 1987.  I remember the arrival of a Macintosh computer on my desk in central office.  It had the first iteration of PowerPoint installed, as the software was written first for the Mac.  It was so easy and intuitive.  I could develop a presentation, add media, move slides around, etc., and print my presentation as a handout.  In other words, everything I knew to be wrong with presentations was now made easier by PowerPoint and I used it because it was so pretty and easy.  I used it for years and years until it dawned on me that by projecting stuff I might be undermining what I knew to be good professional development techniques. 

It is hard to go to a convention, a workshop or a faculty meeting without seeing a PowerPoint. In some cases these projections promote real learning and real professional development.  In other cases they are just fancy ways to tell participants to sit down and shut up because I know stuff you don’t know and I’m going to tell you using these fancy slides on my computer.  In such a case, teachers and others suffer from PowerPoint Persecution, another form of professional development torture.

Worder Boreding

I have saved the most typical and most tortuous strategy for last.  Talking.  Speaking.  Lecturing.  Using words to bore teachers to near death.  Worder boreding.  Invite a guest speaker or a so-called motivational speaker, have a captive audience sit at his or her feet, and for 30 minutes to hours on end have him or her tell them their story, their specialness, and what the audience ought to do because the speaker is so special. 

If this strategy worked it would work at church.  It doesn’t.  People do not leave church, sell all they have and hop on the next boat to remote regions to witness.  If it does not happen in church, it is not going to happen.  A motivational speaker is not hired to motivate staff because he or she cannot and their mere presence makes it less likely that staff will be motivated.  A motivational speaker is a person who is motivated to entertain an audience at some exorbitant fee and never be held accountable for outcomes.  It is a great life to be a motivational speaker.  And yet it eventually dawns on the audience that if I am in an organization where I am not valued, where promotion is based on who you know rather than what you do, where prestige is determined by how well one brown-noses, then no amount of motivational speakers are going to encourage me this coming year.  If the boss hires a motivational speaker it is an admission that the boss cannot motivate.  In fact, because the boss brought them in is an admission that something is wrong.  Frequently, what is wrong is a total misunderstanding of a professional organization devoted to learning.  If there is a morale problem or a motivation problem let’s take the easy way out and hire a speaker rather than really address the issues.  I have observed that the weaker the system the more they talk about motivation.  Stronger systems that exist to promote involvement, purposeful work, and shared decision-making do not evidence poor motivation and do not seek to import such a quack.  Easy for me to say as I made quite a bit of money as a motivational speaker, but that is another story.

Anyone who believes what they say to a group is likely to make a difference is deceiving themselves and torturing the group.  That is not how a sermon works.  That is not how a lecture in a classroom works.  That is not how a good faculty meeting works.  It takes leaders trained in collaborative decision making and not leaders trained in water boarding or worder boreding.

So, what are some good professional development techniques?  Glad you asked. 

Content specific staff development is almost always powerful.  Let the English teachers meet with each other and perhaps an outside facilitator to talk about the issues in teaching English and where they might find new resources to help.  That strategy works great

Study groups work great.  A group of professionals adopt a source of inspiration and read it and talk about it and seek to apply it to their professional lives.

Shared observation works, sometimes with mentors, sometimes with coaches.  When a teacher knows he or she has a professional friend who is more experienced and more successful then helpful ideas are welcomed.  Not so much if it is a guru from the state education agency or a Hollywood star neither of whom have ever taught what I teach.

Action research works.  Teachers are puzzled by either the success or lack of success of something they are doing in the classroom.  As a group they seek to discover research relevant to their puzzle and collect their own data to form their own research conclusions.  This can be so powerful that it is scary.

Sharing days where teachers of similar subjects and similar kids can share what they do, how they do it, and what resources they have.  Technology can be embedded in such a day.  The most powerful staff development is when teachers talk with fellow teachers.

Perhaps you noticed that in none of those powerful, successful professional development strategies is an administrator required to say or do anything other than unlock the doors, turn on the lights and make sure the resources are available.  That is very, very hard for some administrators who suffer from the notion that they were promoted to administration because they knew something teachers did not know and teachers were eager to sit at their feet and learn.  Poppycock.  Want to be a successful administrator?  Serve teachers, serve kids.  Bossing teachers and bossing kids does not work.

It is my fervent wish that every teacher returning for duty this fall walks into a building and/or a system that understands the above and is not likely to torture them in professional development.  If the administration has been trained, has knowledge, and has wisdom there is an odds on chance that teachers will in fact grow in such a rich environment.  The opposite, sadly, is also true.

If we plan pre-school days to support and serve teachers rather than to give them some administrative message we are light years ahead in the process of establishing a successful school system.  Any other strategy may work at General Motors or Alcoa, but those are not professional organizations and to take advice from folks in the private sector on such critical issues is tantamount to allowing the mother of the groom to run the wedding. 

Big mistake.

Donald Trump and Archie Bunker

The Norman Lear TV show, “All in the Family” was on the air throughout my twenties.  From 1971 to 1979 Archie Bunker played brilliantly by Carroll O’Connor, embodied the persona of an angry, working class, uneducated bigot.  He assumed the absolute worst about anyone who was not like him and his bombasts were classic.  His son-in-law, Meathead played by Rob Reiner, was the voice of reason, education and open-mindedness.  Meathead cornered Archie all the time and though Archie was a bigot it was pretty clear that thanks to his son-in-law he was coming around if only a little bit.

Some of the time I watched the show I laughed, but I was more prone to get angry at Archie and his angry, negative, prejudicial outlook on the world.  The anger did me no good and surely did not change Archie.  At other times I was just sad knowing there were American citizens who felt this way about women, and minorities, and poor people and the government.  But as I reflect on Archie Bunker I came to a realization.

Donald Trump is Archie Bunker.  His angry, negative, bombastic view of the world totally aligns with Archie’s view of the world 45 years ago, and his speech at the RNC could have played as a political rally in Archie’s neighborhood in Queens.  The biggest difference is Carroll O’Connor knew better and was just playing a part on a TV show.  When Archie and Edith sang the theme song, “Those Were the Days,” they were reflecting on a time gone by when things were good.  And that was In 1971!  Makes sense that Trump continues the theme in the same ignorant vein as Archie.

Theme Song Lyrics:

Boy the way Glen Miller played 

Songs that made the hit parade. 

Guys like us we had it made, 

Those were the days. 

And you knew who you were then, 

Girls were girls and men were men, 

Mister we could use a man 

Like Herbert Hoover again. 

Didn't need no welfare state, 

Everybody pulled his weight. 

Gee our old LaSalle ran great. 

Those were the days.

I have been in shock at the Trump candidacy.  In my wildest dreams I never thought he had a chance.  Surely there was nowhere near enough American citizens who are that angry, that ill-informed, that prejudiced.  And yet, here he is, an Archie Trumper, running for President. 

Sadly, there is no Meathead that Donald hears.  There are no Jeffersons next door as Donald is ensconced in wealth.  He lacks an Edith who will subtly point out his logical flaws.  When he sings “All in the Family” there are more people excluded than included.  Nothing and no one will move Donald Trump toward awakening and enlightenment and any effort to do so will result in a firing or a divorce.  In that way he remains a character sadder and more despicable than Archie Bunker.