Anchor Struck

Last Sunday night CNN debuted a series called TV On the Edge, which will remind us of special moments on the tube, such as Kanye West observing that George Bush “doesn’t care about Black people.” The initial offering featured the 1992 episode of the sitcom Murphy Brown in which Murphy, an unwed career woman played by Candice Bergen, has a baby.

Murphy is one of my favourite series, chock full of colourful characters and choice zingers. When a co-worker makes unwanted advances toward Murphy, she just smiles and says “I’m gonna go stand somewhere else now.” In a poignant scene when she first holds her child, she tells him “I’m gonna make a lot of mistakes. I’ll try to keep it under 750.” Then she serenades him with “You Make Me Feel Like a Natural Woman”.

Dan Quayle, U.S. Vice President at the time, felt that the neonate was partially responsible for the Rodney King riots. In a speech mansplaining how popular culture contributes to a “poverty of values” and thus decay of family structure, he opined “It doesn’t help matters when prime-time TV has Murphy Brown — a character who supposedly epitomizes today’s intelligent, highly paid professional woman — mocking the importance of fathers, by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another ‘lifestyle choice’.”

Murphy had the final word, taking Quayle to task in a subsequent episode. Bergen was more forgiving, saying that Quayle’s comments were “a perfectly intelligent speech about fathers not being dispensable and nobody agreed with that more than I did.” Country singer Tanya Tucker was less forgiving, saying “Who the hell is Dan Quayle to come after single mothers?”

Quayle earned recognition elsewhere with quotes like “I have made good judgements in the past. I have made good judgements in the future.”, and “I believe we are on an irreversible trend toward more freedom and democracy, but that could change.” His all-time best, however, was when he was trying to explain the slogan of the United Negro College Fund (UNCF): a mind is a terrible thing to waste. According to Quayle, “You take the UNCF model that what a waste it is to lose one’s mind or not to have a mind is being very wasteful. How true that is.”

In these modern times, we are more fortunate to have the clarity of Donny John Trump: “The fake news will say ‘Oh, he goes from subject to subject.’ No, you have to be smart to do that. You got to be very smart. You know what that is? It’s called spot-checking. You’re thinking about something when you’re talking about something else, and then you get back to the original. And they go ‘Holy shit! Did you see what he did?’ It’s called intelligence.”