I’m writing this to offer my belated two cents on the murder of Rob Reiner and his wife at the hands of their feral son Nicholas. Everyone around my age remembers Reiner’s role as Michael Stivic, aka Meathead, in the wildly popular 1970s shitcom All in the Family. But thinking about that show, the little that I saw of it, brought me further back to my childhood and adolescence in the 1960s. So for the benefit of younger readers who wonder what American entertainment was like back then, I’d like to reminisce on some of the television programs of that era.
I’ll start by saying that I didn’t watch nearly as much TV as my friends and younger siblings did. Books appealed to me more, so I did a lot more reading than staring at the screen. And that’s still true today. How couldn’t it be true, since I took my television set out to the curb with the rest of the trash thirty years ago? Nevertheless, I did watch a fair amount of television when I was young, say from 1960 to 1967, though again, probably half of what most kids of my generation watched.
For me, 1967 was a pivotal year. It was when I first sensed that the social norms which most people associate with the serene 1950s were beginning to crumble, and degeneracy was seeping in. There were terrible nationwide race riots as well that year, along with increasingly violent protests against the Vietnam War. 1967 was also my freshman year at an academically tough private high school, and my heavy load of homework every night left me little spare time to watch TV. Through the 1970s as well, I watched very little in the way of entertainment. In fact, I never saw a single episode of M*A*S*H or Star Trek, and only a few of Happy Days, three of the most widely viewed shows of that decade and beyond. By 1980 I had become politically and racially aware, and saw television for the Jewish brainwashing tool that it’s been since day one. By this time, my TV watching had dwindled to little more than an occasional escape from my daily routine, like an engaging nature show or a major league baseball game. I spent a lot more time reading books. It was around this time, I believe, that the Jews behind the scenes began going full throttle with their cultural sewage, poisoning the minds of children especially. The toxic stream has never let up, though to be honest I don’t keep up with this junk and I have no idea what kids are watching these days. More of them seem to be glued to their smartphones, which might be even worse.
Returning to the sixties, there were so many programs that came and went, and so many that stayed put for years — cartoons, comedies, dramas, variety entertainment, quiz and game shows, what have you — that I couldn’t name half of them off the top of my head, but if you were to make a list, I’d instantly recognize 95% of them. In fact, I watched a lot of these programs on and off, but I had a few favorites that I regularly stuck with, at least for a year or two. I’m thinking of The Little Rascals, Leave it to Beaver, Dennis the Menace, Superman, Lassie, The Three Stooges, The Addams Family, and a few others. Like newspapers, radio, and motion pictures that came earlier, television was heavily Jewish from its inception, but looking back, with one exception, there was never any kind of subversive messaging in the TV fare of that time, at least none that I could detect. I found out much later that the Three Stooges were all Jewish, but it was slapstick comedy at its best, and when I watched reruns much later as an adult, I laughed all over again, even harder. Like every child, I always rooted for Superman because he was a champion of good over evil — “truth, justice, and the American way” as the announcer proclaimed at the start of every show. Lassie, the beloved collie of a rural American family, was always rescuing her companion, a handsome young lad named Timmy, from some misadventure. Every episode of that show was heartwarming. In fact, it’s hard to believe how wholesome television was back then, when one compares it to what it is today. Despite that, I still remember one of my teachers in elementary school referring to it as “the idiot box,” and he wasn’t the only one. And that’s what it was — a box. Flat screens came much later. And believe it or not, we grew up with black and white. Color television made its first big splash in 1965, and it was years before my parents bought a color set. There were no remotes. If you wanted to switch channels you walked over to the box and turned a dial. There was no cable TV. You had your choice of seven stations, and in most of the country, probably less. In the New York metro area there were channels 2, 4, 5, 7, 9, 11, and 13. If I remember correctly, channel 2 was CBS, 4 was NBC, and 7 was ABC. 5, 9, and 11 reached only a local audience, but 11, WPIX, hosted a lot of shows for youngsters. 13 was a highbrow channel for eggheads. Nightly news programs appeared on CBS, NBC, and ABC, all run by Jews, of course, and characterized by the slanting, obfuscation and censorship with which we’re familiar, though I knew nothing about that at the time, and didn’t start following the news closely until I was in my late teens.
The Little Rascals — originally called Our Gang — was a little different. It was a series of shorts, running 15 to 20 minutes, which was filmed mostly in the 1930s, and later syndicated to television, which had not yet been invented for mass ownership. You can find these old clips on the internet, and just before I sat down to write this, nostalgia hit and I watched a few which had me chuckling the whole time. What a different country it was then. What pure, clean comedy that has become extinct in modern America. The cast of regulars numbered about a dozen, their average age about seven, with childhood themes like puppy love, confronting the town bully, and classroom pranks. There was no twisted humor because the producer, Hal Roach, was not Jewish. The actors were adorable White kids, except for two Black boys, Stymie and Buckwheat, but there was no hint of political correctness. In fact, both were the kind of stereotypical pickaninnies of a hundred years ago that would never appear on television today.
I had a quick look on the ’net at another memento of yesteryear, Hullabaloo. This is the exception I mentioned above, a campy entertainment show with various musical acts that began airing in January 1965 and lasted just fifteen months. I only watched it once or twice, and it made no impression on me as an eleven-year-old, but I remember our next-door neighbor, a dear old lady, chatting with my mother over the fence and calling it “disgusting.” Don’t ask me why, but that show just popped into my head, and it too is preserved on the internet. I checked it out and quickly understood why my neighbor was repelled by it. There were go-go dancers thrashing around like wild animals and negroes milling around with pretty White women on the dance floor. Some of it was sexually suggestive, but I was too young to pick up on that.
The following season ABC introduced a short-lived science fiction series, The Time Tunnel, which was far and away my favorite TV show of all time. It aired on Friday nights and I would’ve walked ten miles every week to see it. Looking back, I still don’t understand why it intrigued me the way it did — me and no one else I knew — but it did. The plot centered around two men, Doug and Tony, who were catapulted through a spiral, illuminated tunnel in a control room occupied by technicians and a huge computer bank. The theme was usually the same — they would drift through the time tunnel before landing at the scene of an epic and tragic moment of history, just before it happened, and knowing what was about to unfold, they would try to save as many people as they could but in the end they just barely saved themselves. Custer’s Last Stand, Pearl Harbor, the terror of the French Revolution… but what I remember best was when Tony hit the deck of the Titanic hours before tragedy struck. He pleaded with the captain to change course or else the ship would strike an iceberg and sink with great loss of life, but the captain thought he was crazy, and, worried that he would frighten the passengers, ordered him locked up in a special cabin. Doug was then launched through the time tunnel on a mission to free Tony and escape the ship before it went down. After a tranquil evening was shattered by the Titanic ramming the iceberg, followed by pandemonium, the captain realized that somehow these two men had been right all along, and they gravely informed him that he, along with most of the ship’s 2200 passengers, would soon drown in the frigid sea. The show ended with scenes of mass panic, and a mad scramble for the pitifully few lifeboats.
This particular episode gripped me in a way I can’t describe. It was as if I were one of those frantic passengers, not knowing if I would live or die. Naturally, with the miracle of the internet, I had to watch it again, just yesterday. Emotions surged through me as I fidgeted in my chair. Maybe I was trying to turn my biological clock back sixty years to my lost youth. Maybe I have an unquenchable fascination with history, and I was witnessing history as it really happened. Or maybe I’m just weird.
I loved that show and watched it religiously. I was in the Boy Scouts then, and I remember that we were all expected to attend a special event on a Friday night, but I told our scoutmaster that I wouldn’t be going because I had to stay home and watch The Time Tunnel. He gave me a little lecture on how we have to sacrifice our pleasures sometimes, and told me that he himself occasionally missed his own favorite TV show — a fictional World War Two serial called The Rat Patrol that I knew about but never watched –– when something more important came up. Funny how I can recall these little moments in all their details sixty years later, yet I don’t remember if I stayed home and missed that scouting event, nor do I even remember what the event was.
Searching the ’net, I found a seventeen-minute narration about the difficulties surrounding the production of The Time Tunnel, which explained why it ran for only one season, from September 1966 to April 1967. The main reason was poor budgeting — the production team could never keep up with the expenses of salaries, installing and maintaining a vast array of props, special visual effects, filming large-scale historical recreations and such. To cut costs, footage from old movies, and even previous Time Tunnel shows, was stitched in — not that most viewers, including me, noticed. There were arguments between script writers over historical accuracy, character portrayals, and similar matters. The two actors who played the leading roles, James Darren and Robert Colbert, whose lives depended on each other in every story, couldn’t stand each other off the set, which created a constant tense atmosphere. Fearing public backlash in western states over certain historical interpretations, some ABC affiliates refused to air The Time Tunnel, another financial blow. Even though I’ve never had any interest in films and theater, I found all this quite interesting. It showed me that there’s often a very different reality, a hidden human reality, behind the fake reality that occupies the screen.
It made me think back to some unpleasant facts I’d picked up over the years about the other programs I mentioned. Fortunately for the children who appeared in The Little Rascals, it seems that Hal Roach — who incidentally also brought the beloved comic duo of Laurel and Hardy to fame — was a decent man. At least they never told any stories of emotional abuse of the kind that other child actors recounted after they left the fetid swamp of Hollywood. Watching those performances starring all those lovable, innocent kids, one could be forgiven for remembering them only as children who never grew up. But of course they did grow up, away from the cameras and into the real world. Many ran into trouble or misfortune, and died well short of life expectancy. Alfalfa, perhaps the most famous member of the cast, is a prime example. It may come as a surprise to some that Alfalfa wasn’t his real name. A native of rural Illinois, his real name was Carl Switzer, and after Our Gang disbanded, he bounced around as a bit actor, stretching out a mediocre career, and off screen bred and trained hunting dogs. At the age of 31, he was shot dead following an argument over a $50 reward debt owed for a lost dog that had been found. That same year, 1959, saw the passing of George Reeves, who had played Superman. On television, Superman was impervious to bullets, but not so in real life; Reeves was found dead in his bedroom of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. All those times in the early sixties when I watched that show, I was unaware of this. There are, of course, any number of sad or gruesome stories about the private lives of entertainers, and with a nod to Affirmative Action, I’ll mention in passing wife killer O.J. Simpson and serial rapist Bill Cosby, billed as “America’s Dad.” But let me now shift the spotlight to the title of this essay.
Trash TV rapidly picked up momentum in the 1970s, so it was fitting that All in the Family debuted on January 12, 1971 and soared in the ratings for seven years, mainly because our media masters kept insisting that it was hilarious, so idiot Americans kept watching it. If, by chance, you’re much younger than me and know little or nothing about this show, let me fill you in. The setting was a cozy living room in a working-class neighborhood of Queens, New York, where a middle-aged couple, Archie and Edith Bunker (played by Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton), lived with their daughter Gloria (Sally Struthers) and son-in-law Michael (Rob Reiner). Archie was an uneducated redneck type, and Edith a total ditz, but they were basically likable people in a happy marriage. Archie, stuck in the good old days of the past, frequently had long discussions and arguments with his more intelligent and liberal son-in-law, whom he often called Meathead. Gloria didn’t say much. Each show was taped in front of a live studio audience, which laughed on cue every time Archie made another remark that showed his ignorance.
The first I heard of All in the Family was in late 1971, when I was about to drop out of college after my first semester. My roommate told me about it and invited me to watch it with a bunch of other students in the TV room on our dorm floor. I have no recollection of the story line in that particular show, only that I found it slightly annoying and not at all funny. Even then, I was acquainted with some oafish couples in their forties and fifties, but none as stupid as Archie and Edith, who especially irritated me with her high-pitched, unnatural voice. Over the years, I watched that program only three or four times, and it always struck me as a poor parody. Except in a very loose sense, people like Archie and Edith simply didn’t exist. I know now that it was a subtle dig at the values of ordinary White Americans concocted by the program’s Jewish creator and producer Norman Lear.
I was never interested in theatre or films, and knew nothing about the actors involved. Like Carl Switzer and Alfalfa, it’s almost impossible for me to picture Jean Stapleton as anyone but Edith and Carroll O’Connor as anyone but Archie. From all accounts, O’Connor was nothing at all like Archie Bunker but instead a quiet, cultured man, whose life in later years was shattered by the suicide of his son, a hopeless drug addict. I can feel for him because of that, but there’s a side of me that can’t forgive him for playing such an obnoxious and unrealistic character as Archie Bunker, whatever his reasons were, and the same goes for Stapleton, who seems to have been a very sweet lady in everyday life.
As for Sally Struthers, 78, the only surviving member of the show and an incorrigible airhead, she had some interesting things to say in the wake of Rob Reiner’s murder, and in earlier years as well. She was close to Reiner, her co-star, right to the end, but loathed Norman Lear. A petite, attractive blonde, she was always unhappy about the minor role she played in All in the Family, and unsuccessfully sued Lear to get out of her contract. She revealed that Lear once told her that the only reason he hired her to play Gloria was the same reason he had hired O’Connor, because she had blue eyes and a fat face. Nice guy, that Lear. She further recalled, with bitterness, that she was the only one in the cast whom Lear never invited to his home for dinner parties.
And finally, there’s the late Rob Reiner, brutally murdered on December 14, not with fake blood on the movie set but in the flesh by his wretched son, whose life was an endless cycle of drug addiction, rehab, and homelessness. I knew of Reiner, of course, and knew he was Jewish, but I don’t follow these Hollywood types and was not aware that he had long been active as a film director and supported every liberal cause imaginable, though that didn’t surprise me. Nor was I surprised to learn, as all the insipid tributes poured in, that he had won more awards than you can throw a menorah at. But he appears to have been fairly human, certainly not a nasty Jew scumbag like Norman Lear, so I can cut the guy some slack. I don’t really differentiate him from all the Gentile liberal morons who swarm the entertainment world. I’ll even say that I despise who he was a lot less than I despise the freak in the White House, who instead of keeping his bizarre thoughts to himself for a change, tastelessly wrote on social media, among other things, that Reiner’s death was “reportedly due to the anger he caused others through… a mind-crippling disease known as TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME.”
There are plenty of horrible Jews in this country, along with some horrible Gentiles, whose untimely deaths would make me happy, but I didn’t feel that way about Rob Reiner. I didn’t feel anything at all. His violent exit was just another reminder that so much of what we see on a screen, and so much of what’s published in rags like People magazine, is just glitter that conceals reality. In the end, that’s what all entertainment is — a brief escape from reality. It’s just that in such a highly technological and suffocatingly Jewish age, the divide between illusion and reality is so vast. It doesn’t have to be that way. I’m sure it was much different when the common folk went to see a Shakespeare play in Elizabethan England, or listen to a symphony in Hitler’s Germany. With the right leadership and our ultramodern technology, entertainment can be a great tonic. Many of our best people live far away from the nearest theatre or concert hall. Who would’ve denied them the wonders of the vinyl record, or in these days the compact disc? Nor does television have to be the Jewish pestilence that it’s been from the beginning with regard to news reporting (the slide into culture rot was more of a gradual process). I see nothing wrong with children watching the kind of programs mentioned earlier that I enjoyed as a child. I see nothing wrong with television utilized as a medium for comedy, drama, adventure, athletic competition, and education, as long as it’s in the right hands. Ideally though, such broadcasts would be restricted to certain time slots, leaving the screen blank most of the day and night, so as not to stifle the mind.
I’m just dreaming, of course. There will be bloody struggles before my vision becomes a reality, if it ever does. But I’m entitled to fantasize once in a while, to look as far as I can into a time tunnel — but in this case it’s a time tunnel not to the past, but to the future.