Andy doesn't live here anymore

Andy Griffith, the actor, died last week at the age of 86.  Griffith was wonderful at his profession, and quite possibly a wonderful human being.  He was, of course, known for playing folksy country characters like Matlock and Andy Taylor. People forget, though that he played some of the most chilling and ironic villains of all time, such as the folksy huckster who was the subject of probably the best critique of celebrity ever put on film, Elia Kazan's A Face in the Crowd. In that film, Andy placed a crazed version of the country bumpkin routine that later made him famous.

The point of this is simple,  Andy Griffith was an actor, and a fine one. He was not a country philosopher or a loveable sheriff, but an actor, and as such was really unknown to us. An actor is one who conceals his face behind a false one.  The better an actor is, the less we can know of him in the character he plays.

This is important to remember, especially in regard to the crowning acheivement of Griffith's career, the Andy Griffith Show. In it, Andy created a small town,  called Mayberry,  based on his own home town of Mount Airy.  It was a place where life was slow, people were loveable, and no one ever locked their doors. Strangers were treated with love and respect.  It was the place where everyone wanted for their own home town.

The problem with Mayberry, though is this, like Griffith himself, it was an act.  It never existed. Though some of small town life did resemble Mayberry, most of it was, and is very different from Griffith's fictional creation. 

Charles Murray, in his book Breaking apart, writes about the demographic group which mainly made up Mayberry--white, working class people.  It is the group which today is seeing the most change of any ethnic group. Church attendance is down among white working class.  Cohabitation is up.  Drug use is up.  Uncertainty is up, misery is up. Today, Andy would have to carry a gun, and Barney would be a fool to carry just one bullet. 

Come to think of it,  the country was never like people wanted it to be.  Moonshine liquor, the Klan, domestic violence and plethora of other sins were hidden in unpopulated places.  It is only our selective memories that turn the past into paradise.  Life was never what we wanted it to be, but our memories deceive us into thinking it was. 

But for the sake of argument, suppose it was.  What if the past were just the way Andy Griffith imagined it to be?  We have to live in the future.  We cannot go back to that world, even if it did exist.  We have to learn to be Christians today

The thing that makes any world good or bad are the people in it. It is how we act, how we inculcate the values of Christ in our own life tha t really matters, not how the rest of the world reacts.

There is no use wishing for Aunt Bee, Opie, and Barney.  We have to become them, or at least the things in them that we admire--the gentleness,  kindness and tolerance we seem to see in the made up world of sixties television.  Those values are still part of the world if they are part of us.