Andy Griffith was a genial and gifted character actor, but
when he died on Independence Day eve, you’d have thought we’d lost a Founding
Father, not a television star whose last long-running series, the vanilla legal
drama Matlock, expired in 1995, New York Magazine’s Frank Rich writes. The public tributes to Griffith were
over-the-top in a way his acting never was, spreading treacle from the evening
newscasts to the front page of the New York Times.
It was as if the nation were mourning its own demise. To
commentators in the liberal media, Griffith’s signature television role,
Sheriff Andy Taylor of Mayberry, North Carolina, was “one of the last links to
another, simpler time” (the Miami Herald) and a repository of “values which
actually transcended the deep divides which tore the nation apart during the
years the show aired from 1960 to 1968” (the Washington Post). On the right,
the sermonizers quickly moved past an inconvenient fact (Griffith made a spot
endorsing Obamacare in 2010) to deify Sheriff Taylor for embodying “a time when
television was cleaner and simpler” and for giving “millions of Americans the
feeling the country stood for all the right things” (National Review). Among
those “right” things was the fictional Mayberry’s form of governance, which, in
the ideological take of the Daily Caller, demonstrated that “common sense and
local control work better than bureaucracy or top-down management.”
In reality, The Andy Griffith Show didn’t transcend the deep
divides of its time. It merely ignored them… The wave of nostalgia for Andy
Griffith’s Mayberry and for the vanished halcyon America it supposedly
enshrined says more about the frazzled state of America in 2012 and our
congenital historical amnesia than it does about the reality of America in 1960…..
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