Father’s day is a nice invented holiday, no matter where you live.
We get to say thanks to Pops for his part in bringing us into this world and bringing us up, for better or worse!. 🙂
It was sweet to be out and about “brunching” today and see all the young families in their Sunday best taking dad out for some special quality time.
I was trying to figure out what to write about today whilst slipping into my egg-and-hollandaise-induced food coma and thought about the cultural context of Dads in middle class America.
It occurred to me that If I were an alien from another planet and had to rely on things like popular media to tell me about families and where father’s fit in the mix, that they might seem to exist for comic relief or beasts of burden.
Take a look at the history of Dads on television…and specifically on Sitcoms. With the exception of the occasional Cliff Huxtable, you would think that American dads are professional morons.
If Archie Bunker, Al Bundy and Homer Simpson are any indication, we might as well send our Dad’s out to pasture and become a full time Mommy-state.
Here’s a fun article on the 5 most inappropriate TV Dads:
http://voices.yahoo.com/televisions-5-most-inappropriate-dads-6738090.html
And yet another suitable list of dynamic cartoon sitcom Dads:
http://unrealitymag.com/index.php/2009/02/04/my-six-favorite-cartoon-tv-sitcom-dads/
Finally, to balance it out with a little bit of good and a little bit of bad (going back to the sixties)
http://artofmanliness.com/2008/06/10/the-all-time-best-and-worst-tv-dads/
For better or worse, lets go ahead and tip our glasses to the very first men in our lives. And lets thank the entertainers and creatives for their homages to the father figure archetypes that gave color to our wacky modern America.
The Narcissistic (American) Anthropologist 