A Pilgrim’s Digression

http://www.washingtonpost…5090601926.html

Yesterday, a relatively short line of people waiting to view Rhenquist’s casket snaked down the Supreme Court steps and along First street to Maryland Avenue. I say it was a short line, but I am comparing it to the line that formed to pay respects to Reagan after he died. I’m not sure why anyone would wait hours in line to see the casket of a Supreme Court Justice or a President, frankly. Somehow, to me such scenes always remind me of old newsreel clips in which hordes of hysterical people cry and scream and throw themselves on the funeral bier of Josef Stalin or Mao Tse Tung.

At least we don’t allow our leaders to lie in state in an open casket. Still, the whole thing seems sensationalist and morbid. I would find it difficult to mourn someone whom I did not know and who simply died of old age.

Now the death of Bob Denver is another story. The Washington Post has a good obit for the Little Buddy today. If Bob Denver was lying on the Lincoln catafalque in the Capitol or Supreme Court, I might just stand in line to pay my respects.

I cannot begin to enumerate the number of afternoons after school that I lay in the living room floor watching reruns of Gilligan’s Island on TBS “The SuperStation.” Thank God for Ted Turner, because it would have been something akin to solitary confinement to grow up in the eighties without reruns of “Gilligan” and The Brady Bunch and The Munsters and Bewitched, not to mention more recent shows in syndication such as Happy Days. My cell phone ring tone is the theme to Sanford and Son, if that gives you any indication how much these shows mean to me.

It’s difficult to watch these shows for the entire half hour today with anything like the same degree of enjoyment. I think these shows are so innocent, compared to what we are accustomed to watching today, that only small children really have the ability to suspend disbelief long enough to enjoy them.

Look at how we thirty and forty-somethings remake these shows, when we turn them into movies. Bewitched, Dukes of Hazzard�the writers who grew up on these shows turn them into comedies with sex-based jokes and plot lines. Luke Duke becomes a deflowerer of rural virgins and Uncle Jesse becomes a pot head.

Children have a much better idea of what is funny, I think. Nothing is as funny as getting hit in the head with a coconut, or having the Skipper whack Gilligan with his hat. Unfortunately, we’re all too sophisticated for that kind of comedy, now. The question is whether we’re better off, or worse, for having grown up.

Incidentally and just for the record, I was always a Mary Ann kind of guy.