Word: cleaver
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Riley had its own working class hero, Dobie Gillis's father ran a small grocery (his mother worked in the store) and the best of them all--The Honeymooners--featured Ralph Kramden the busdriver and Ed Norton the sewer worker. Although alternatives to My Three Sons and Beaver Cleaver were rare, they existed, and Archie breaks no new ground in this direction...
...particular to All in the Family, but are a symptom of TV's general vacuity. All characters, whether bourgeois or proletarian, are stereotyped, and consequently become a kind of substitute reality in the minds of their audiences. Several years ago, when Jerry Mathers, the actor who played Beaver Cleaver, was rumored killed in Vietnam, people seemed almost more saddened than if their next-door neighbor had been a casualty. The cardboard character had become not more real, but more easily identifiable than the kid down the block. And in this attempt to foster respect for a substitute reality...
Such escapism creates many problems of its own: a phony realism is not one of them. All television shows--comedy and tragedy alike--are ridiculous and are perceived as such by their audiences. A show like Bewitched would be the paramount example, but even Beaver Cleaver is as obviously stereotyped as Jackie Gleason-Ralph Kramden. TV forces its audience to pay obeisance to the unreal, but not to believe...
Abbie Hoffman, who had ample opportunity for observation, has concluded that "everyone in prison is writing something." Indeed, there is a tradition of prisoner-authors from John Bunyan and O. Henry to Nehru and Genet. Most of the current ones, including Eldridge Cleaver, the Berrigan brothers and Hoffman himself, have used prison time to work out polemical theories. A few, though, are nonpolitical convicts who are trying to write about what they know best-crime. By far the most skillful is E. (for Emil) Richard Johnson, inmate No. 22251 at Minnesota's Stillwater State Prison, now 34 and doing...
...Eldridge Cleaver, the well-known author and Black Panther official, though then two years underage, ran for President on the platform of the Peace and Freedom Party, winning 36,500 votes. Not to be confused with that party was the Freedom and Peace Party, which ran black activist Dick Gregory for President in a few states...