The Johnny Bravo Candidacy
The Brady Bunch offered the wisdom of the gods of the copybook headings.
Aug. 23 - The next few paragraphs—the whole opening segment—may seem trivial and inconsequential. It’s not. Its seriousness and importance will become apparent later. Patience.
One of the difficulties of living abroad, even in a country as plugged into American culture as Denmark, is that one loses a lot of cultural touchpoints with one’s peers.
Most Danes of my age, for example, are familiar with a lot of the American music, movies, and fashion of 70s and 80s—but to American children of that era, those were secondary to television.
For example, very few Europeans of my generation will have any idea what the following lines mean:
Plop plop, fizz fizz.
Double your pleasure, double your fun.
Box 350, Boston, Mass, 02134.
Virtually all Americans of my generation, however, not only have those words seared into their childhood memories, but know the melodies that accompany them. The first two are advertising jingles; the third was the address for the children’s program Zoom, which sang out its viewer mail address incessantly during every episode.
Mine was the last generation raised on network television: cable television didn’t arrive to wreak its inexorable segmentation until we were already coming of age. How old am I? MTV was still playing music videos while I was graduating high school.
Growing up with just ABC, CBS, NBC, PBS, and whatever UHF channels one might have had in one’s region, and without the distractions of cable or the internet, we were all exposed to the same programming: the same Saturday cartoons, the same new prime time sitcomes and dramas, the same old reruns.
We don’t just have memories of the same programs: we have strong opinions about them, hardened on the anvil of many heated discussions with friends who didn’t share them. Those shows were our Iliad and our Odyssey, the stories from which we drew our metaphors and analogies.
Kamala Harris belongs to my generation. She’s mere months older than me.
She and her staff must therefore know all about the lesson of Johnny Bravo.
According to a Brady Bunch fan site wiki:
Adios, Johnny Bravo is the season premiere episode of Season 5 of The Brady Bunch, and the 96th overall episode of the series. Written by Joanna Lee and directed by Jerry London, it first aired 14 September 1973 on ABC.
When a talent agent signs Greg (Brady) to become a rock star named “Johnny Bravo,” he lets his new fame get to his head, until he discovers that he was only signed because he “fit the suit.”
It’s more complicated than that, obviously. The six Brady kids have a singing group and have landed an audition with a television talent show. They win a spot, but afterwards Greg, the eldest of the three boys, is approached by a seductive talent agent hipster who says she and her agency are interested, but not in the group: just in Greg.
There’s friction in the family, obviously—we were supposed to be a family group, you sellout!—but the flattery succeeds in turning Greg’s head. He decides to give up on college and just dive right into the great solo musical career the talent agents are promising him.
During his recording session, however, he notices his recorded vocals have been electronically modified to sound better. He objects—he’s all about the music!, the authenticity!, etc.—and is told he can bloody well take a hike, then: the only reason they chose him was because he fit the suit.
The Johnny Bravo suit.
This thing:
Well, the jig is up. Greg Brady has too much integrity to make a career out of just fitting a suit, so he goes back to his family. All is forgiven.
I guarantee you that Kamala Harris knows that episode because she was a Gen X kid and she couldn’t possibly have made it through her childhood without seeing it.
But plainly she did not understand it.
The old American sitcoms and dramas, it’s worth noting—worth emphasizing—were true to the gods of the copybook headings. They were morality plays. Small and cheap, sure, tinny and weak, but their morality was sound.
It can be hard to be honest, but lies will always catch you in the end.
What’s easily won is easily lost—and rarely has much value.
Integrity matters.
Water is wet and fire burns.
And so on.
We can mock the saccharine simplicity of those old shows, but we mock their morality at our peril. They were the copybook headings for an entire generation of Americans.
There are many lessons in the Johnny Bravo episode (be true to yourself, be loyal to your family, never trust a hippie), but the central one was: sing with your own voice.
Literally and metaphorically.
Kamala Harris, who has never won a single primary vote, has now been the Democratic nominee for more than a month. She has not granted a single interview. She has not held one press conference. She has not published a platform.
She’s been so reclusive that even mainstream journalism hacks like CNN’s Jim Acosta are getting annoyed.
The Johnny Bravo suit she was offered was the Democratic candidacy for president of the United States. By most accounts she wasn’t even the first choice, but the hands of the Democratic Party’s “talent agents” were forced by Biden’s post-resignation tweet endorsing her.
They’d just pried the old sot out of office but wanted to maintain plausible deniability: ignoring his endorsement of Harris would complicate that.
Harris knew she was unpopular. She knew her unfavorables were even higher than her unpopular boss’s. She even knew—had to know—that the people endorsing her were the same treachorous conspirators who’d forced Biden out of the race. (Although her own hand may have been on one of the daggers thrust into his back.)
But once Biden’s endorsement went out, she fit the suit.
She has ideas of her own, of course, almost all of them wildly out of synch with those of the American electorate, but the Johnny Bravo suit comes with its own voice. Johnny Bravo candidates aren’t allowed positions. They’re not permitted to set policy. They emanate vibes, generate memes, and, apparently, giggle like embarrassed schoolgirls while the marketing minions around them do the real messaging.
“Adios, Johnny Bravo” first aired just five weeks after Richard Nixon’s resignation: the president had owned up to his failings and voluntarily stepped down in disgrace. (It’s more complicated than that—much—but that was the winning narrative. And it was the winning narrative because it suited the gods of the copybook headings: cheating is bad and paranoia will get you in the end.)
The Americans of September 1973 were not naive, just wary of offending the gods of the copybook headings. As one should be. Of course Greg Brady was a cad for letting the siren song of fame draw him away from his family. Of course it would be dishonest to allow himself to be marketed with a voice that was not his own. Of course he had to do the right thing.
Remember that? The right thing?
Quaint.
Kamala Harris is terrified of interacting directly with the press because she knows she has no chance of winning without the Johnny Bravo suit she’s been stuffed into. She knows that singing with her own voice would horrify her supporters—and donors. She knows the right thing would be to come clean with the American people: to speak her own beliefs with her own voice.
(She probably also knows where that would get her.)
But because it’s been working so far, she’s apparently convinced herself she can get away with it.
The gods of the copybook headings say she can’t.
So does The Brady Bunch.
But Johnny Bravo has now accepted the nomination. There’s no turning back. It’s Bravo or bust for Kamala Harris—who is surely telling herself that once she’s elected she can toss the suit and let her own freak flag fly.
“Well, ya know, that suit never really did fit right through the shoulders. . .”
The Democratic National Convention featured a lot of millionaires and billionaires expressing their concerns about income inequality. I don’t share their concern, but their pain seemed genuine so I’d like to help them address what ails them.
According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the median annual wage of American individuals is $48,060. According to the Federal Reserve, the median net worth in America is $192,900.
If you really care about income inequality, then take all your income above $48,060 and distribute it among people who make less than that.
If your net worth is higher than $192,900, sell off everything until that’s all you’ve got left, then parcel out the proceeds to the unfortunates around you whose net worth is less than that.
So easy! And better still, there are absolutely no obstacles to doing this. It’s safe, it’s legal, and by your own logic it’s the right and necessary thing to do.
So get crackin’.
On August 22, 1485, at the Battle of Bosworth, England's King Richard III was terminated for having made a fiscally irresponsible bid on a horse.
On August 22, 1642, the Civil War in England began between the Cavaliers who supported King Charles I and the Roundheads who had had just about enough of his crap, thank you very much. The war dragged on for years, until the Roundheads won by removing the king’s head. Oliver Cromwell took over and led a republican government until his death seven years later. He was buried with pomp and circumstance and remained dead until the monarchy was restored in 1660, at which point they dug up his remains and executed him by hanging and decapitation (presumably in that order).
On August 23, 79 AD, Mount Vesuvius erupted, burying Pompeii and Herculaneum in a bath of volcanic ash. Thanks to the unexpectedness and immediacy of the eruption, these cities were preserved forever in the moment of their doom. Even the graffiti was preserved, so we know that Secundus likes to screw boys and someone loved the girl whose name was Athenais. Also that Atimetus got someone pregnant, and that Apollinaris, the doctor of the emperor Titus, defecated well here.
William Wallace, the Scottish warrior-hero of Braveheart fame, met his end on August 23, 1305. It wasn’t pretty. He was hanged, drawn, quartered, and probably dry-cleaned, all courtesy of King Edward I, who wasn’t exactly known for his diplomacy. The English, who preferred their Scots either submissive or elsewhere, made sure his pieces were distributed far and wide, inventing a macabre early version of national parcel service.
On August 24, 410 AD, Alaric and his merry band of Visigoths sacked Rome, ending an eight-century undefeated streak for the imperial city. Historians have still not determined where Alaric got a sack that big.
Speaking of sacks, am I the only one who wonders what Nancy Pelosi did with Joe Biden’s testicles after she cut them off? I have a theory.
On August 25, 1609, Galileo Galilei turned his rudimentary telescope toward the night sky and discovered four moons orbiting Jupiter. This naturally enough led to questions that the Catholic Church asked Galileo to kindly refrain from asking because the science was settled.
Gene Kelly (1912) and Rick Springfield (1949) were born on August 23.
August 24 is the birthday of Jorge Luis Borges (1899) and Jean Michel Jarre (1948).
August 25 is the birthday of Sean Connery (1930) and Leonard Bernstein (1918).
Enjoy the weekend!
© 2024, The Moron’s Almanac.
Ever since Harris was “selected” my thoughts went to Greg Brady as Johnny Bravo. I’m glad to know I wasn’t the only person who saw this parallel!
So much spot on, all the way down to "...the Catholic Church asked Galileo to kindly refrain from asking [questions] because the science was settled."