The Assassination of Ozzie & Harriet

Leftism & the Ongoing Assassination of Ozzie and Harriet

You can make a great deal of money as a professional baseball player who gets on base only 1 out of every 3 times at bat. In that sport batting setbacks are weighed against overall success, and hitting 33% of the time is celebrated and richly rewarded. Things are different in leftist Utopia-ville, where – regarding traditional American family values -- anything less than perfection means condemning the entire belief system.

Ever since traditional marriage and the nuclear family fell out of favor with progressives, they rarely pass up an opportunity to malign those institutions, although this character assassination is usually done with just enough subtlety so as to be unnoticeable to the unobservant. As Kenneth Minogue writes in his remarkable The Servile Mind, revolutions can be relatively abrupt events or:

“an accumulation of changes in our form of life such that life has been entirely transformed, almost without people realizing what has happened.”

So -- In the recent NY Times obituary of David Nelson (son of Ozzie and Harriet) such a mini-assassination is present – as I knew it would be, this being the Times. It would be required because the Left has struggled mightily for decades to dismiss 50’s Ozzie/Harriet-style families as myths. Instead, 50’s families are portrayed as hotbeds of masculine oppression and abuse – with women and children in need of rescue – and males in need of sexual harassment laws and “sensitivity training”.

So -- David’s obit goes along nicely until the last two paragraphs, when his 1971 Esquire Magazine account of occasional intense arguments within the family is duly noted: “We would keep up the front of this totally problemless happy-go-lucky group . . . It’s an awfully big load to carry to be everyone’s fantasy family. How long can you keep protecting that image and never let any of the outside world in?”

The obit ends right there -- and there you go! Once again – Ozzie & Harriet de-mythologized, disproved, and disposed of. As far as the Times was concerned, the Nelsons -- i.e. 50's happy families -- were bogus.

Well, I respectfully disagree. Having grown up in El Paso during that period, I am here to testify that such families were not at all uncommon, and TV’s O&H were role-models that real families liked, identified with, and aspired to. Yes, those real families had their strikeouts, pop flies and errors, but all in all most were relatively safe, happy, and successful entities. Divorce was rare, very few children were born out-of-wedlock; neighborhoods and downtowns were safe, there was no need for security guards in schools; fathers supported their families while moms stayed home and mothered -- and we kids had "hobbies" and we went out and played -- unstructured, unsupervised, creative play. We never had "nothing to do".