Vic Socotra

05 October 2009

The Kramdens

(Jackie Gleason as Bus Driver Ralph Kramden)

This is a magical time of the year, as you probably have noticed. My favorite sports are in full flower. It is sweater weather, and there is football, college and pro, and baseball has worked it’s seductive best.

The weekend did not go so well for all my teams, but so be it. There will be one last hurrah for the Tigers and Twins on Tuesday night, after Bret Favre takes the field against the Packers tonight. My big screen television works just fine, and who cares if the winners of the American League Central Division are going to walk into Yankee Stadium exhausted with the hated Yankees are fresh and smelling roses.

Life is OK. The cable bill is paid, and if I am walking a bit of a tightrope to keep all the ends pulled together, that is just the way life is these days. A lot of us are doing that. I don’t think I would have predicted this odd situation when the bubble was still building just a few magical Octobers ago.

Who’d have thought that we would have a flirtation with the Great Depression at this point in a Baby Boomer’s life? Or maybe it would be better to just say that this was a great run, and the piper must be paid at some point.

There was a cultural oddity that has survived past a generation due to the miracle of kinescope and film. I may have watched it on television when it was new. I wouldn’t remember, since I was only four years old at the time. I think we had a television. Naturally, I cannot remember a time when we did not.

If someone told me The Honeymooners was funny, I might have believed him.

The show was one of the original cult phenomenon’s of the small screen. It was a real dedicated show for only 39 episodes- one season, in those days- and existed as a component of several of Jackie Gleason’s other variety shows before and after.

In today’s television universe, the 39 full episodes would have made three season’s worth, so it was not a bad run, and there were dozens of “lost” episodes from earlier airings on the Cavalcade of Stars, among others.

Two of the original Alice Kramden’s were blacklisted as commies. Remember the List? Fewer and fewer do. The abrupt serial vacancies were filled by the vivacious Audrey Meadows.

Knowing politics shaped the case when the Honeymooners came back in the 1970s would have helped put things in context. By then, the situations and schemes of Gleason as Ralph and Art Carney as Ed Norton had become something from another America.

I remember one episode that revolved around getting a telephone for the apartment. Another involved a scheme about getting access to a television. It was beyond strange to baby boomers, who had just about anything we wanted whenever we wanted it.

Part of the historical discontinuity with our version of America was straight from Gleason himself, and you remember the set of the show. The Kramdens' financial struggles mirrored those of the portly comedian’s early life in Brooklyn, which naturally goes back to the Great Depression, and he took great pains to duplicate the interior of the apartment where he grew up, including the address (328 Chauncey Street).

My folks started out their married life in Brooklyn after the War, so there was something that was both alien and familiar about the comic narrative, and a certain resonance in the family saga.

I do recall thinking about how strange it was for a married couple to be living in a one-bedroom house with no phone or television.

The final episode of The Honeymooners aired on September 22, 1956, just after the conclusion of the Suez Crisis that marked the official, if belated, end of the Empires of France and Britain and the ascendancy of the Anglo-American cousins.

I mention this not only because of the full October moon that still hangs outside my window this morning, but because the implications of the deficits and the long hangover of the excesses of the past decade are now becoming apparent.

One of the commentators on NPR this morning was looking at the same moon I was, and noted the fundamental difference between now and the WW II generation is in the sort of national debt we are incurring these days. In the old days, even if the debt numbers were vast, the money was basically owed to other Americans. Everyone else in the world was too busy trying to stay alive.

Now, the money is going overseas, and that gives someone else a vote on how much they will charge to loan it to us. I don’t think that China will decide to kill the Golden Goose, at least not yet. But it is clear that the cost of money must go up.

That isn’t a surprise; I have based my portfolio on the idea that we are going to have to inflate our way out of this mess, sooner or later, and real things are more durable than paper money, which is, after all, just an idea.

But I never thought in my wildest dreams that the Kramdens were about the past, but lot more relevant to the future than they are to the America in which I grew up.

One of the creepier things about Ralph were his persistent threats of physical violence to Alice. “Pow! Right in the kisser!” he would glower. “One of these days Alice, straight to the Moon!”

Sitting here by the tall glass window at Big Pink, the moon’s nighttime brilliance is fading to pale silver. We have been to the moon, and back. The Chinese are talking about going there, too.

So I suppose the question is who is Alice now, and who is going to hit whom, right in the kisser.

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