By Abby Zimet/Common Dreams
We assume you’re all psyched for this week’s Mayberry Days, the annual festival celebrating the wildly popular, tepidly reviewed, deeply disingenuous Eisenhower-era TV show about small-town life during America’s “simpler times,” when “neighbors were neighbors” as long as they were white and nobody locked their doors.
For those of you less ancient than the rest of us, Mayberry was the mythical home of The Andy Griffith Show, which ran from 1960 to1968 but evidently still lingers in the wistful minds of those who best enjoy “being around their own people,” who tend not to include black, poor, gay, trans, Jewish, Muslim or any other garden-variety “others.”
The genial Griffith played the genial sheriff Andy Taylor, a widower who lived with his genial Aunt Bee and was raising his genial son Opie in a genial small town in North Carolina modeled on Griffith’s real hometown of Mt. Airy.
With no crime in those halcyon days, the sheriff refused to wear a gun, so he and the other townspeople – goofy deputy Barney Fife, goofier mechanic Gomer Pyle, etc. – spent most of their time dealing with issues like bullies, speeders, pickles and inept barbers while basking in “the general good, old-fashioned welcoming spirit,” even as the Vietnam War, civil rights violence and nuclear tensions swirled around them in the real but pointedly distant world.
Posted on September 21, 2021