Norman Lear has some serious energy. At 80 years old, he’s a trim, neat and compact man, neither taller nor shorter than anyone would expect, with what may be one of mankind’s most perfectly spherical heads. As he stands amid a loose mix of photographers, librarians and schoolchildren at the downtown library, he emits a sort of restful activity, a preparedness that those speaking with him clearly find comforting. You get the feeling that he doesn’t find much use in couches.
As members of the press cluster in pods around him, as the constant flow of children swirls in eddies on either side of him, Lear seems to be right at home. After all, he created this hoopla. He’s responsible for the Jones Paideia Magnet School Superstars, a grade-school chorus group, doing their pre-show warm-up (which consists of chasing each other around, shrieking) as Mayor Bill Purcell looks on. They’re here for the ceremonial arrival in Nashville—via a customized 18-wheeler led by a police escort and a full marching band—of the Declaration of Independence.
The two-week stay in Nashville, until Nov. 21, of the country’s most famous poster (to be precise, it’s one of 25 remaining original copies of the Declaration printed on July 4, 1776) is just one stop in what is called, with a calculated MTV-like flourish, the “Declaration of Independence Road Trip.” The document is part of a multimedia exhibit designed to educate, provoke, wheedle and guilt us into a better sense of civic duty—or, failing that, to at least get us off the couch to vote every once in a while.
Which is, when you think about it, kind of funny in a way, considering Lear’s résumé. After a successful comedy writing career with credits that include, among others, The Colgate Comedy Hour with Dean Martin and Jerry Lewis, Lear became a household name with the creation of All in the Family, a show that is widely considered to be the first socially conscious sitcom. He went on to create several other hit TV shows of the ’70s, notably The Jeffersons, Sanford and Son and Good Times, all of which, to varying degrees, broke new ground in the way American society was represented on television. Archie Bunker’s slur-strewn put-downs of his son-in-law were always far funnier than Meathead’s earnest, politically progressive whining, but there was never a doubt about who was right. Meathead’s message always resonated.
Now Lear is taking his message of social responsibility—and, more specifically, of civic participation—to a smaller audience, in both senses of the word.
“We want to reach these little guys,” Lear says of the amped-up Jones Paideia students. “We want them to come home from school and—the way they used to come home and tell us to recycle, the way they came home and said, 'Stop smoking’—they’ve got to come home and say, 'You’ve got to vote.’ ”
As conceptually awkward as the combination may be, Lear and the Declaration of Independence are not as strange a pair as they may at first seem. Lear describes his own inspiration for civic duty clearly, as though it came upon him the other day:
“I had a grandfather who I lived with for three years as a kid”—this would be, remember, in the late 1920s—“and he had this inordinate love of country. He wrote to the president all the time, and I was a captive audience. He’d read me these letters, and they’d always start off the same: 'My Dearest Darling Mr. President, don’t listen to them when they say such-and-such.’ And then a few weeks later I’d run down to the mailbox and get this little white envelope that said 'The White House’ on it.”
The experience—the ease of communication between the president of the United States and his grandfather—made a lasting impression on Lear. Some 70 years later, in June 2000, he bought his copy of the Declaration at a Sotheby’s auction for more than $8 million and set about trying to infect the rest of the country with his own inherited sense of civic purpose. (In ways not lost on Lear himself, the current road trip echoes the document’s original path. The primary draft of the Declaration of Independence was completed, famously, in Philadelphia on July 4, 1776, and from that, 200 copies were immediately printed for distribution by horseback throughout the 13 colonies. Known as the “Dunlap broadsides,” Lear’s is one of only 25 remaining copies of the original 200, and it is, so to speak, on the road again.)
Lear sees the power of the document as vital and immediate. Though England has long since ceased to oppress us (with a few notable exceptions, Hugh Grant and Martin Amis among them), the Declaration still represents the ideals of democracy as it’s shaped our country, and the world, to this day. Lear perceives in it an energy and an accessibility that is, in fact, sorely needed in an America that regularly passes on even the most basic form of democratic participation: voting.
“You know, people just don’t believe that voting’s worth their time,” Lear says in a tone that betrays his struggle to comprehend the idea. “They don’t believe they matter. And the establishment everywhere—not just in politics—doesn’t help them understand how much they matter.
“But the more people vote, the healthier our democracy will be,” he continues. “And that’s what all this is geared to promote, to inspire. More civic participation.”
Although he’s far too optimistic to say it, it’s evident that he believes that, with only about half of eligible voters turning up at the polls, we’re letting ourselves down.
It’s not that Norman Lear wants us to stop watching TV necessarily. It’s just that he believes it is of surpassing importance that, in between shows, we manage to get off the couch and vote every so often. Or maybe head downtown with the kids to take a look at the Declaration of Independence while it’s here. Then, sure, we can go back home and turn the boob tube (back) on. But if you’re looking for the kind of socially relevant sitcoms that Lear pioneered 30 years ago, good luck.
“I see drama addressing some issues, but not comedy,” he says, a barely perceptible note of disappointment marring his otherwise unflappably optimistic energy. “Except, maybe, for South Park. And The Simpsons. It’s interesting,” he says. “Two cartoons.”
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