Goodbye to Norman Lear.

"Norman Lear, Whose Comedies Changed the Face of TV, Is Dead at 101/As the producer of 'All in the Family' and many other shows, Mr. Lear showed that it was possible to be topical, funny and immensely popular" (NYT).

 
“You looked around television in those years,” Mr. Lear said in a 2012 New York Times interview, referring to the middle and late 1960s, “and the biggest problem any family faced was ‘Mother dented the car, and how do you keep Dad from finding out’; ‘the boss is coming to dinner, and the roast’s ruined.’ The message that was sending out was that we didn’t have any problems.”

ADDED: I've written about Norman Lear on this blog a few times:

July 27, 2022: I blogged Norman Lear's NYT piece — "On My 100th Birthday, Reflections on Archie Bunker and Donald Trump" — and said: "Lear says Archie, if he were around today, would probably watch Fox News and vote for Trump. Probably?! He also imagines that Archie would have disapproved of the January 6th incursion on the Capitol. But why? Seems to me he'd approve, but Lear doesn't want him to, so okay. "

Having created a new tag and added it to 7 posts in this blog's archive, I list the 7 posts in an order other than chronological.

The new tag is "Edmund Morris."

The list:

1. September 4, 2004 — Studying the recent spike in the phrase "barking mad," I quote Edmund Morris's reaction to Maureen Dowd's calling him "barking mad" — "Like all barking mad people, I feel perfectly normal."

2. November 28, 2010 — That time Edmund Morris reamed Bob Shieffer on "Face the Nation," and I compared him to Peter Finch in "Network" and Marisa Tomei in "My Cousin Vinny."

3. December 4, 2023 — President Theodore Roosevelt waded naked in Rock Creek in full view of onlookers, described by Edmund Morris.

4. November 16, 2023 — TR's smelling of arsenic, as described by Edmund Morris

5. June 24, 2004 — Edmund Morris has a theory about how Ronald Reagan came to think the way he did: "Not until he put on his mother’s spectacles, around the age of thirteen, did he perceive the world in all its sharp-edged intricacy."

6. December 1, 2023 — TR's "cyclonic" personality, as described by Edmund Morris.

7. April 25, 2004 — "Edmund Morris gives a pretty bad review to the brilliantly titled book about punctuation, 'Eats, Shoots & Leaves.'"

Are you a feminist? "Yes. What else is there to be? Everything else is being an asshole. These are your choices."

"I have three sisters, and no brothers. In my family it is all women, and they are very strong, opinionated, professional women, and the idea that they would be in some way disadvantaged by comparison to men was just ludicrous, and if you had tried to suggest it to them you’d have got hit. So I learned it early."

Said Salman Rushdie, one of 15 famous men asked the question. Don't know if I like the hitting. But equality is achieved in negative and positive ways, and domestic violence is another field of human activity.

I like this answer: "Yes. Absolutely, of course. It’s a stupid question. Sorry." That's by Darren Aronofsky, whoever he is.

I checked. He's a movie director. Directed the movie Meade and I saw the day we met. That damned movie nearly kept us apart! Here's the blog post I wrote about it: "10 thoughts about 'The Wrestler.'" You'd never know I'd just met the man I'd marry 7 months later. The post begins, "To be fair to Marisa Tomei, it should have been titled 'Meat.'" Meat... almost a homophone for Meade, but there's zero mention of Meade in that post.

How would Meade answer the question asked of the 15 famous men? I say the question in exactly the words used by the magazine at the link: "Are you a feminist?" Pause. He says:  "Do I believe that women are people? Yes." Good answer. The problem with the question, what irks Aronofsky, I suppose, is that the question contains an abstract term that you might not want to adopt. Your head floods with thoughts about the people who define the term and why they might want to pin you down. What do they want from you? But you can muse too long about the meaning of the term. You need to jump to yes as fast as you can.* If you don't say "yes" right away, as Salman Rushdie revealed, you'll be considered an asshole. Meade had a better answer than the 15 famous men, I think, because he got his definition in quickly and elegantly and got to that "yes" easily. And his definition evoked the great old saying: "Feminism is the radical notion that women are people."
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* Or Salman Rushdie's mother might hit you.