Bush and Obama, Wars and Economy: Power and People in an Age of Limits and Loss 583Ron Burgundy variety, saw a sensational story to report on—“Could Homer
Simpson be a communist? His father [Abe] spoke out on his behalf.” As the
camera shifts to Abe Simpson, the old man, borderline senile, says, “My Homer
is not a communist. He may be a liar, a pig, an idiot, a communist, but he is
not a porn star!” Similarly, the Springfield Isotopes, the local minor league
team, holds Tomato Day at the stadium, along with a pregame speech by “the
recruiter for the Springfield Communist Party” who is promptly pelted by the
rotten tomatoes. Even more, in one of the most remarkable exchanges in
modern television memory, Homer intervenes in an argument between his
daughter Lisa and “Adil,” an exchange student from Albania, who are fighting
over the merits of democracy and communism. Tired of their back-and-forth,
Homer intones, in words one would not even believe would be spoken on a
popular show, “please, kids, stop fighting. Maybe Lisa’s right about American
being the land of opportunity, and maybe Adil’s got a point about the machin-
ery of capitalism being oiled with the blood of the workers.”
If the show revolved around Homer, the breakout star was his son Bart, the
bad boy who played by his own rules like James Dean and Marlon Brando in
an earlier era. Bart was constantly in trouble, like the juvenile delinquents of
those times, and much different than the kids whose parents had a “My Child
is an Honor Student” bumper sticker on their car. Bart, as t-shirts and posters
boasted, was an “underachiever, and proud of it.” Contrary to the idea of
parenthood seen on most sitcoms, like the Cosby Show, Homer went along
with Bart’s antics and his sister defended him. “But, in a way,” Lisa Simpson
argued, “isn’t he everyone’s son. For you see, that little hellraiser is the spawn
of every shrieking commercial, every brain-rotting soda-pop, every teacher
who cares less about young minds than about cashing their big, fat, paychecks.
No, Bart’s not to blame. You can’t create a monster and then whine when he
stomps on a few buildings.” In fact, every episode began with Bart writing
on the school chalkboard, obviously as a punishment for something he had
done in school. The lines he was scribbling, however, were not of the typical
“I will behave in school” variety, but instead had some political message and
often were digs at the public education system, which in Springfield, as in
much of urban America, was dismal. “I will not expose the ignorance of the
faculty” and “This punishment is not boring and pointless” were examples of
the critique of a school system in American increasingly based on standardized
tests and the national “Common Core” Standards.