By Stephen Smoot
In 2013, Alan Alda reflected on a brilliant career with the formerly venerable Saturday Evening Post. He spoke mostly about items not M.A.S.H. related, but at one point observed “everybody hated the laugh track so much.” The network and producers however, understood that scenes portraying medical operations would have no laugh track so writers would occasionally endeavor to “set up a whole show in the ER” or take the plot in other directions where a laugh track would feel inappropriate.
One thing that likely occurred to no one at the time was that the laugh track at times was the only way to identify the main character, Benjamin Franklin “Hawkeye” Pierce, as heroic and the initial butt of his jokes and attacks, Frank Burns, as not so much the villain as the “sap.”
In that context, “sap” refers to a person easily tricked or deceived.
The television show M.A.S.H., based off the movie of the same name, served as an anti Vietnam War statement set in the Korean War. Oddly enough, the author of the original novel wrote it as an homage to military life and opposed the antiwar rhetoric employed by both the motion picture and the television show.
In the first seasons, the protagonists are B. F. “Hawkeye” Pierce and “Trapper” John McEntyre. They share tent quarters with Major Frank Burns. Commanding the unit is the golf loving, but generally listless Lt. Col. Henry Blake.
The Burns character serves as a symbol that the characters hate and that the show invites the audience to hate as well. A fundamentally weak man, Burns finds comfort in the structure of military life. He brags of the financial success of his practice at home at times and insists on observance of military rules to an irritating degree. Burns represents in some ways the war itself that ripped the people of the camp away from their homes and families.
Burns’ tentmates relentlessly play jokes on Burns to cause emasculation, humiliation, or even physical pain. Almost pathologically, they will brainstorm ways to channel their personal misery toward the generally uncomplaining Burns, who only seems miserable himself when experiencing the tender mercies of his bullies.
He goes through the proper channels for relief, only to find that his commanding officer doesn’t care. Burns finds all in the camp, save his lover Margaret “Hot Lips” Houlihan, turned against him and helping along all efforts to bring him down at every turn.
Meanwhile Hawkeye and Trapper are portrayed as the “cool kids” and their bullying as hijinx. Writers for the show give Burns not even a sliver of pathos. He never gets to be correct on a plot moral dilemma. The character never gets an opportunity to evoke empathy for himself on one hand or to effectively stand up for himself on the other. Even his usual tormented ventings to Houlihan are stripped of the normal audience empathetic response by the laugh track, which in itself seems in on the cruel joke.
A running gag lay in Burns’ supposed incompetence as a surgeon, but the only source for that information is the bullies. In the show, Burns never loses a patient. He is never accused of ineptness or malfeasance by anyone other than Pierce and McIntyre, which is textbook gaslighting. Blake gently reprimands them for their barbs, but never agrees with their criticisms of Burns’ ability.
At one point, Burns is so hurt that he chooses to leave his comfort zone and the love of Houlihan just to escape the cruelty. His tormentors actually elaborately manipulate him into staying, not because they suddenly feel sorry for him or realize their own faults, but because that’s one of the few times they may actually face consequences for what they have done to Burns.
Burns, however, has one advantage over his tormentors, which he could use to deflect any attack but in a noble and gentlemanly style, chooses not to. In Houlihan, he has the love, affection, and respect of probably the most capable person in the entire facility. She is more beautiful, more intelligent, and has better leadership and medical skills than pretty much any other person there.
And she chooses Frank over anyone else, which is probably one of the quiet reasons why the main characters hate him so much. Why does she prefer the attention of the apparent weakest of men there? Because Burns is literally the only man of officer rank on the entire show, at least in its early seasons, who respects women in general and Houlihan in particular. She alone sees that respect for women as a strength instead of a weakness.
Burns, again unlike any other male of officer rank in the early seasons, regards women as more than objects for physical gratification. He feels genuine love as well as professional respect for Houlihan and she reciprocates. No other male on the show’s early seasons has the same notions of sentimental chivalry with which Burns treats her, but the show dismisses these as the stylings of a pathetically unvirile man.
Additionally Houlihan’s effective feminism under fire, both rhetorically and actually, gets ridiculed and played for laughs until the departure of the Burns character, but she is the “shrew” no man can tame.
Admit it. You feel pretty sorry for Burns now that you see him from a different perspective.
One cannot blame the show’s writers for not seeing something horrifying in the behavior patterns that they are presenting as comedy; the culture of the time even among uber liberals like Alda, was much more Darwinian.
The patterns laid down by the Pierce and McIntyre characters are exactly the same as those of classic school bullies. Only after Columbine and other tragedies do people understand how that story all too often ends. One cannot go back and measure how the example set by these beloved television characters may have shaped the behavior and perspectives of people who enjoyed the show at the time, but the complete imbibing of the ridiculous racism of Archie Bunker by some in the same time period shows how that works.
This television show was a big part of that medium’s cultural foundation, along with a handful of other shows, in the 1970s. The program made the bullies the moral center of the show and their hounding of Burns as righteous because of what Burns represented, not things he actually did.
That said, none of these people ever really existed in real life. But “Phillies Karen” does.
“Phillies Karen” represented the villain of the week for the beginning of September. She was the late middle aged woman who watched a father gather a home run ball, run with joy to his son to hand it over, then marched over there and obnoxiously berated him until he gave her the ball just to make her go away.
Yes, that’s unacceptable behavior for sure. Cameras caught her. Then the customary unseemliness really started as the Internet Detective Agency worked to track her down with the intent of holding her to public humiliation, and sharing her name with potentially crazy people who might wish to do her harm, with the ultimate trophy representing “justice” being finding out that her employer fired her.
Much misinformation has surrounded who she might be and I am personally loathe to look too far into if anyone actually successfully identified her. I hope and pray no one ever really does.
The woman has emerged as a symbol far beyond anything she may or may not be as a human being. She now represents the trivial affectations of overbearing authority now culturally identified in the modern world with shrill middle aged white women lumped into the epithet “Karen.”
But who stopped to think in terms of grace – that 99 percent of the time her life might be exemplary, that life pressures may have caused her to snap at the worst of times for the worst of reasons? There but for the grace of God go most of us, because not a single human being is immune in extremis.
Once the tocsin rings, the righteous mob of the internet blunders into action with the mission of virtually hanging from a sour apple tree a woman whose real “crime” lay in acting rude over a baseball grabbed for a child. They base their “righteousness” on the likely untrue notion that one bad event defines a person entirely and also that it is their job to serve as the hand of justice, putting the sinner in the stocks for the public to pummel and laugh at..
“Justice” gets served by stripping the sinner of their livelihood, upending the lives of them and their family, and exposing their identity to the world, then passing off any ugliness that results as “karma.” Some might argue that “she should have thought of that,” but how many of us have gone off half-cocked for dumb reasons and regretted it later, then were just lucky to not have the whole thing broadcast to the world?
It’s not justice they serve or redemption for the sinner they seek, but a perverse desire to puff themselves up at the expense of another, to, in their own estimation, signal their own shining virtues in front of an approving world by contrasting them against the “other.”
This is also the action of a non believer, someone uncertain that a divine Providence rewards the good and bad accordingly, someone who lacks faith that the scales of life get balanced somewhere, somehow, according to God’s plan.
Kids today have crafted a new phrase, saying “it isn’t that deep.” Most slang is kind of moronic, but this one fits. It means “it’s not a big deal and don’t make too much of it.” “Phillies Karen” and her 15 minutes of notoriety, not fame, is also “not that deep.”
Those who spent a lot of time trying to track her down to shame her before the world, those are the unrighteous. Those are the bullies. Those are the ones whose acts might lead to horrifying unintended consequences.
And they are not the moral center of anything.
