Pop Friday: Andy Griffith vs. The Patriot Act
July 6th, 2012
One of America’s most beloved entertainers, Andy Griffith, died earlier this week on Tuesday morning at the age of 86. Funny, moving, charming, a great singer, and with a persona as American as apple pie, his leading role as Sheriff Andy Taylor in the classic 1960s “Andy Griffith Show” made him an American pop icon.
As a television program about a small town heriff, The Andy Griffith Show afforded a ton of opportunities for commentary and lessons about civics. Check out this very appropriately named YouTube video, entitled by its uploader, “Andy Griffith vs. The Patriot Act,” in which Sheriff Andy’s son, Opie, secretly records a suspect saying incriminating things and excitedly brings the audio to his “Pa,” the sheriff. Over his son’s objections, Andy refuses to listen, erases the tape, and gives his son a lecture on due process and the right of privacy:
Now if only all cops were like this! Sheriff Andy Taylor would later go on to becoming a founding member of Oathkeepers, and his little neocon son, Opie, would become a DOJ lawyer in the first Bush Administration and head up a special project in the DHS for the second Bush Administration –no, not really. But it’s a funny thought.
Watching this gave me an idea. Opposition to an entrenched, abusive, expensive, and tyrannical national security apparatus was once a great American tradition. It was the certainly the zeitgeist of the American Revolutionaries, whose Declaration of Secession Independence we celebrated earlier this week. That should be clear enough from reading the litany of abuses in the Declaration of Independence, or the Constitution itself, which was written with safeguards to assuage the fears of the states and their citizens that the new federal government would have as much power as the one they just cast off, and would use it to abuse Americans in the same way. Those fears turned out to be true.
But now the kind of people who seem to viscerally “love” “America” the most, the kind of people who will wear a tri-cornered hat to a Tea Party protest and say that we need to get back to the Founding Fathers’ vision of America– those are the same people who will shout you down as un-American for criticizing the actually un-American and explosively growing federal police state.
So here’s my idea: What if someone were to put together a documentary to draw attention to and criticize the machinations of the Bush-Obama era, but made heavy use of clips like the one you just watched above? What if we “out-Americaned” the flag-waving sycophants of the state and its “Patriot” Act by sharing the voices of respected American icons like Andy Griffith? By the end of the video, they would feel like they were the unpatriotic ones for supporting warrantless wiretapping, trial by drone, and indefinite detention… and they’d be right.
And don’t forget to visit our official website to learn more about the Silver Circle Movie: http://SilverCircleMovie.com
