THE BEAVER IS BACK

In music, counter-point means blending contrasting melodies. The results can be elevating. But in society, it's often the contrast without the blending. These results can be exhausting.

Here's an example to worry over. The study in the un-blended contrasts between America then and now.

June Cleaver (Barbara Billingsley in real life) was America's perfect 1950's mom on the hit show "Leave it to Beaver." You needn't remind me how absurd it was to be the perfect mother with the perfect answers, always in perfect pearls and heels. Those of you who know only 21st C America have no idea just how gently reassuring that was to millions of kids and parents alike.

Barbara died a few weeks ago. Mrs Cleaver actually died many years before. She died in the jungles of Vietnam ...the bloody street in Dallas....the protests and riots and Watergate and drug gangs and Middle Eastern wars. By our times, her times have the look of an Egyptian excavation site. An era and an aura you can uncover, but you can't re-live.

"Hypocritical," today's cynics charge. And they're right. Because life and families were never quite how they were portrayed in the Cleaver household. However, being right is little cause for satisfaction. Or celebration. Most of us back then saw no reason to laugh at the gentle Cleaver fiction. After all. reaching for the stars means you'll never come up with a handful of mud. As today's muddier times bear witness.

Television today has turned its back on "hypocritical" by kidnapping this thing it calls "reality." Then gluing it onto its programming. But if June Cleaver was absurd, today's reality queens and studs are abysmal. Watching nightly television is like being water-boarded. Its families have substituted gentle with psychotic. Its young have replaced home with hangouts. Its stand-ups use crouches in place of comedy. Ripped-from-the-headline dramas mean featuring what's worst not best in what's left of our tattered species.

No June Cleavers and Beavers anywhere in sight. But at least we can tell ourselves we're not being "hypocritical." It would seem that reaching for the stars -- regardless of how far and far-fetched -- is deemed dispensable. In the place of naivete we have negativism. Substituting for pride there is protest. After awhile, there is this inexplicable sense that faces and forces far beyond our understanding are somehow somewhere running the world. An we're just walking through our designated parts.

If "Leave it to Beaver" is in re-runs, check it out. You'll miss what you missed...!