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Contributors
John Mark Reynolds- Contributor
John
Mark Reynolds is the founder and director of the Torrey
Honors Institute, and Associate Professor of Philosophy,
at Biola University. His
personal website can be found at www.johnmarkreynolds.com and
his blog can be found at www.johnmarkreynolds.info.
 The
Helen Crump Rules
Well-meaning social decay…
[John Mark Reynolds] 11/29/04
The Andy
Griffith Show in black and white is nearly perfect television. With a
few other shows it unites all generations of televisions viewers.
Whether you are an aging member of the Greatest Generation, a
Boomer, or my seven year old daughter Jane, Don Knotts is funny
and Opie makes us all cry when he releases those birds.
And then
came color. For some reason, Andy becomes crabby. He snaps
at everyone.
My best theory is that he is forced to perpetually
date, but never marry the well named Helen Crump, the least appealing
female character to appear on the show. Don Knotts was long gone
after being mishandled by countless writers who reduced his considerable
abilities to clown status. The producers tried replacing him
with Deputy Warren Furguson, the least funny and most annoying
comic sidekick in television history.
Somehow the writers still produced a few good episodes. There
is no better moment in the series than when Howard, the perpetual
mother’s boy, becomes a swinger and sets up a bachelor
pad. His happening party consists of Helen, Andy, and Goober.
As Andy enters his near empty room, he declaims, like a liberal
Episcopalian looking at his youth group, "And still they
come. And still they come." Any show that can still write
an episode like that deserves some praise.
However, the show
began to become ever more desperate for plots. Following the
Iron Law of Declining Shows, they wrote an episode
where Andy goes to Hollywood. Any show not set in Hollywood that
visits Hollywood will end soon. The worst episodes were when
the most blessedly unhip show in television history tried to
speak to "today's issues." The old episodes are timeless,
the socially relevant ones painful viewing.
My favorite of these
bad shows, so bad it becomes entertaining, is one of the frequent "The Kids are All Right" episodes.
In this Mayberry Woodstock, Helen Crump decides to direct the
Mayberry school play. The students want a musical. They also
want to sing some "groovy music." They gyrate about
the stage in music that could never have been hip and never fails
to make me laugh out loud. Of course, instead of laughing at
the talent-less yokels who have sold their Carolina cultural
birthright for the pottage of bad sixties music, the principal
is horrified and cancels the show. He astutely observes the lack
of musicality and the lewd nature of the music. He argues that
he need not contribute to cultural degradation. Forty years later,
his words make a great deal of sense.
The Crump fights back by teaching the principal a lesson. She
discovers that the principal danced the Charleston with some
flappers in the Roaring Twenties. She shows the poor man that
kids are just the same now as they were. Eventually, the poor
man is convinced by the Crump that Stole Culture that the random
gyrations of her students are just like the difficult-to-perform
Charleston.
From this episode one can develop the Crump Rules. These rules
under gird a great deal of television. They are assumed to be
true, but are entirely false. Here are three of the most important:
I. Primary Crump Rule: The kids are o.k. There is a special
sanctity and sincerity to our kids. Each generation struggles
to find their way and adults should let them do so.
By and large, kids
don't understand the world. Adults, and I don’t mean
twenty-somethings, need to be role models and help them develop
cultivated taste. Much of high school culture
is vicious with cruelty never matched in later life. Left to
themselves, kids are not o.k. They need parents and adult figures
who do not try to relate to them. (In fairness, this is a mistake
I made early on.)
Alternative General Truth- Kids are kids. Adults should help
them raise their standards and grow up.
II. Worrying about depravity in one generation is silly since
every generation worries about such things. Parents worried about
Crosby, then Elvis, then Styx, and now . . . fill in the naughty
group of the moment.
This misses two points.
First, one can note that there may have been real social decay.
Elvis was naughty and this led, as our
grandparents predicted, to worse. Critics of lewd music in the
fifties were, after all, overly conservative in their predictions
of future depravity. The fact that Elvis seems modest to us now
may indicate that we are depraved compared to our great-grandparents
not that we have made progress. Of course, Elvis had real talent,
but this talent does not justify his hedonistic message. One
can recognize his good music while frowning on music packaged
on sex instead of talent. Now we have toothpaste sold the same
way. Aren’t you tired of it?
Second, our pop culture
experience is very limited. It stretches over one human lifetime
(the last one hundred years). There is
no reason to think things "always go this way." They
don’t always go in this direction.
Alternative General
Truth- Social decay is a problem. All of us in every generation
(especially me!) should say, "Lord
Jesus Christ have mercy on me a sinner." The best way to
avoid social decay is to worry about it.
III. The fast people of any generation form the norm.
Helen Crump convinces
the principal, who evidently had a misspent youth that "modern" music is fine because of what he
did as a young man. Does anyone believe that must principals
in the Carolina’s were hanging with Flappers in their youth?
The flappers of the Twenties were not most young people. I venture
more people attended Fundamentalist Revival Services in tent
meetings and walked the Saw Dust Trail than drank gin and danced
the Charleston, especially in North Carolina.
Why do the bad kids
(hippies in the sixties) now form our "normal" image
of an era? At my own university, if we had sixties day, people
would dress in ways that the actual students of the Biola of
the sixties would have despised.
It is time we began to admire the good kids of these eras who
served their country in the Armed Forces, who played by the rules,
and built the nation by conforming to social norms. Conformity
to social norms does not lead to intellectual stagnation as centuries
of life in Christian universities prove. Needed social change
best comes by good citizens, like Rosa Parks, who have the moral
standing to press for change. One black pastor was worth one
hundred hippies in civil rights.
Alternative General Truth- The hard workers in any generation,
who play by the rules, produce most of the greatness of the nation.
They also are best positioned to produce needed change.
The Helen Crump rules must go. They are at best assumptions
and whatever limited truth their may be in them, they have outlived
their usefulness. tRO
copyright
2004 John Mark Reynolds
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