Comfort TV – In Times of Crisis

 

If you were watching television in November of 1956, you might have laughed at the complications that ensue when Ozzie Nelson gets stuck blowing up hundreds of balloons on The Adventures of Ozzie & Harriet.

 

Over on Gunsmoke, Marshal Dillon wonders if he arrested the wrong man in “The Mistake.” Disneyland featured Walt Disney introducing the animated “At Home With Donald Duck,” while Groucho Marx interviewed a woman who rode a horse from Maine to California on You Bet Your Life. 

 

 

And if you watched the nightly news, you also saw Soviet First Secretary Nikita Khrushchev issue a dire warning at an event featuring ambassadors from several western nations. “Whether you like it or not, history is on our side,” he declared. “We will bury you!”

 

In October of 1962, The Clampetts were still adjusting to their new lifestyle on the first season of The Beverly Hillbillies, while Rob Petrie discovered that his wife has a secret bank account on The Dick Van Dyke Show. Perry Mason exonerates a rookie cop from a murder charge in “The Case of the Hateful Hero,” and Lucy Carmichael buys a sheep named Clementine to keep her backyard grass trim on The Lucy Show. 

 

 

In the news that month: a Soviet plan to put Russian nuclear missiles in Cuba, just 100 miles from the coast of Florida. President John F. Kennedy announced that the U.S. would not permit those missiles to arrive, and demanded that the missile sites already under construction be dismantled. Over the next two weeks threats were exchanged and ultimatums issued, with U.S. forces told to prepare for war.

 

These moments of Russian aggression are easily recalled by those who lived through them, and should be familiar to students who paid attention in history class, or at least those who went to a school where actual history is still taught. But if you just watched the TV shows from that time, as many of us still do, you’d never know the anxiousness that many viewers felt back then, or (hopefully) the moments of respite these shows provided from ominous headlines.

 

I tend to idealize the classic TV era, and there are valid reasons for doing so. But there has never been a time in history free from uncertainty, conflict, or fear. We watch these shows now and wonder where we went off track – what happened to civility and good manners and deeper faith and the common sense values that have gone missing from what television shows us now? But there is no hint of the concerns that troubled those who created and performed in them.

 

We saw the Anderson kids attend school on Father Knows Best but we never saw them participate in mandated “duck and cover” drills, in which students dived under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack. 

 

It was hopelessly naïve and it’s hard to believe anyone didn’t realize that then or now. Only Indiana Jones could survive a nuclear detonation in his proximity – and audiences didn’t buy that either.

“We will bury you.” Not much different than a response “never seen in history,” the threat issued by the current Russian president to anyone who interferes with his invasion of Ukraine. The feelings now circulating through much of our country - helplessness – dread – anger – will be new ones for many under a certain age. Yes, we went through 9/11; but that was carnage unleashed from a small band of fanatics. They could wound us, deeply, but they could never completely destroy us. And if we had competent leadership, as we do occasionally though certainly not at the moment, their threat can be largely neutralized.

 

This is different. It might de-escalate in a few days, or continue to simmer for weeks before some resolution is achieved, or it may keep getting worse until something devastating happens that would have seemed unimaginable not long ago.

 

What are we to do until then?

 

The answer – the only answer, really - is exactly what people did in 1956 and 1962: they went on with their lives. They went to school, they went to work, they went to the grocery store, they went to church (and perhaps paid closer attention to the sermon), they cheered when their hometown sports teams won, and complained about overpaid players and incompetent coaching when they lost.

 

Of course times are different now. News bombards us from TV screens, computer screens and cell phone screens 24 hours a day. That’s not always healthy. But the near-instantaneous spread of information makes it harder to conceal atrocities now, as the New York Times did with its disgraceful lack of coverage on the Holocaust during World War II. Doing so was easier back then when tragedy was half a world away. Today, video of a Russian tank running over a car aired hundreds of times within minutes, and can be punched up on YouTube day or night.

 

We go on with our lives, until circumstances change. And then we make the best of them. And perhaps we can take comfort in the shows that aired in the shadow of previous crises when the world was on the brink. We were not buried, the missiles of October are long gone, and the shows that gave Americans something to smile about can still make us smile again.