June Cleaver, Baseball, The Fall

Last updated on: May 15, 2014 at 8:19 am by Anne Kennedy

June Cleaver, Baseball, The Fall 2014-05-15T08:19:53-04:00 Anne Kennedy

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The kids have been watching Leave it to Beaver over the last few months when we cut them off from Minecraft every now and then. Go ahead and judge. They are allowed to binge on Netflix and minecraft on the weekends. We own a tv. We're sinners. Tralala.

So it's been Leave it to Beaver, which is really funny. I've been enjoying the timing and acting and pretty good writing. So then we dug around on amazon and found something called Father Knows Best. I expected a program thus titled to fall into the genre of Women Know Your Limits (a favorite treasure of mine. Again everyone, lighten up!)

It turns out it's not like that at all. Turns out that Father Knows Best is just a gentle precursor to Everybody Loves Raymond and every other funny tv onslaught upon the intelligence and abilities of men everywhere. Father, in Father Knows Best (gosh, I don't know his name) only knows best through hapless circumstances that arrange themselves to save his “wisdom” and togetherness at the eleventh hour. His children are disrespectful and his wife tells him what to do. As for me, sitting as I am the on the precipice of total societal destruction, I find myself genuinely shocked. Was this funny, all those years ago, because everyone thought it ridiculous? Children remaining lying on the floor when their father speaks to them? A man shrinking before the outrage of his wife? Or was it a reflection of what was already really going on? Raymond is funny because that's what everyone thinks. It's actually a pretty conservative picture of American Life–heterosexual life long marriage with children. How last century. I don't know, I wasn't there for the making of Father Knows Best or any of the upheavals that were incubating themselves to bring us to where we are now. It does seem like Leave it to Beaver is a dialing of it all back. June doesn't tell Ward what to do very often. She seems to be pleading and worrying and battling off Eddy Haskel. What a chore.

But the seeds are there. Disobedience. Disrespect. I must sound like I'm two hundred years old. Anyway, I find it striking because we are living in a sea of everlasting baseball (or so it seems, we are half way through) and there is nothing, for me, more old time Americana than sitting in the sun eating a concession stand hotdog and yelling at my kids to stop trying to fall off the bleachers. The boys in their bright uniforms with smears of dirt across them are practically Norman Rockwell. Alouicious can even make the face like he's coming at me out of a picture. I stand on the top rung with Matt biting my fingernails and hollering. When I have to leave early I text every few seconds for the score.

But all around is rotting decay. On the way home from the baseball park I am surrounded by coexist bumper stickers. I come home and get online and cannot read anything that doesn't have to do with the next firing of someone who believes in “traditional marriage”. We have tipped over and are careening down the precipice, picking up speed as we go. As long as homosexuality was merely battling for “equality” in the episcopal church, true belief was allowed. As soon as it got there the whole thing tumped over and belief turned into a crime with terrible consequences. “This” I said several times to Matt in the middle of all our loss, “is just practice for what is really coming.” I am so sorry to find that I am right. Participation in American life was allowable for everyone while the battle for “equality” was being waged. As soon as it got there, the whole thing tumped over and we are free falling into totalitarian insanity.

I sort of laugh at Father Knows Best, when we have it on, but it's just not funny any more.

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