It’s a pretty phrase, a small poem that sticks in my head. The places you see it aren’t pretty. It’s a multicultural way of repeating No Loitering so that everyone can know the rules of behavior outside of convenience markets.

In the mid-sixties, we learned the rules like this:

Uncle Joe: “Betty Jo, do you know where that old picture of Jefferson Davis and his cabinet is?”
Betty Joe: “Oh, it’s hanging at the top of the back stairs. Why?”

Yes. Why?

Why is there a picture of the leadership of the Confederacy hanging in the Shady Rest?

As I’ve been loitering in the later seasons of the show, it becomes more reactionary and I like it less and less.

I noticed suddenly that I haven’t seen a single non-white person anywhere along the way. Was Hooterville, Missouri, despite all its folksy charm and commitment to a stilted morality, a white supremacist enclave?

Because I don’t see any black people on Andy Griffith or Green Acres, either … hmm.

Compare that to this gem from Wikipedia:

Gomer Pyle, U.S.M.C., was set on a U.S. Marine base between 1964 and 1969, but neither Gomer nor any of his fellow Marines ever mentioned the war in Vietnam.

So the disturbingly important thing isn’t mainly in what we see, but in what we’re not allowed to think about. The existence of the race war. The existence of the draft funneling thousands of young men from Pixley and Crabtree Corners into the meat grinder of imperialism and sending them back to the peaceful valley in body bags.

The matriarch of Petticoat Junction, the actress Bea Benadaret as Kate Bradley, died halfway through the run of the series, and with her passing (which also goes essentially unremarked on the show), the tone becomes more shrill and shaky. Betty Friedan’s book makes a brief appearance, but is mis-titled with a dismissive chuckle as ‘The Feminine Mistake’. The new husband figure, dashing pilot Steve Eliot, turns out to be a sexist jerk. The characters sing more and more songs at length, but it has the feel of whistling in the dark.

Right at the turn of the turbulent decade, all these shows were cancelled suddenly in an event known as the ‘rural purge’, even though some of them were still very popular. It seems to me that Hollywood couldn’t take keeping the blinders on, and the hypocrisy of their own meta-message any longer.

The next TV season kicked off a new era with a show called ‘All in the Family’.

You may recall that one had a few black people on it. And even a hippie.