How Meredith Baxter’s obvious secret nixed the public option before it was ever debated, spawned homelessness in America and led to 9/11

BY IAN MURPHY

“What would we do, baby, without us?”
-Family Ties Propaganda Song

It’s 1983: pro-business, family values conservatism is sweeping the nation, new creatures called homeless are squeegeeing the windshields of our wicked DeLoreans, Reagan’s CIA is funding the Mujahideen to repel the evil Soviets from Afghanistan and an NBC gem in its second season called “Family Ties” warms the nation’s cathode rays and hearts.

The beloved sitcom was both situational and comedic: ex-hippie parents ostensibly copulate and produce a young, craven, free market sycophant and Ayn Rand devotee named Alex P. Keaton—and Tina Yothers and the other one. Played at perfect prick by Michael J. Fox, Alex is likely what The Wall Street Journal’s Steven Moore wishes he were like in high school—a nervous, yet smooth, little yuppie-in-the-making, who’s in search of just the right cardigan and dogma to justify his core inhumanity, and score with babes. The tension created between the Keaton parents’ “stick it to the man” shtick and their teenage son’s rebellious worship of Wall Street was a main element in driving the plots. But this family, as the title mentions, had ties. At the end of each episode, love brought them together to coexist in a bipartisan wonderland of hugs, not drugs, and prosperity for all in Reagan’s America. And Tina Yothers.

We all know better now. Crack happened. Deregulation happened. Yakov Smirnoff happened. The S&L scandal happened, the S&L Bailout happened. Bin Laden became blowback. Flat Screens happened. And the “free market” cycle of boom and bust happened again under Bush I, Clinton and then Bush II at a more sinister scale. Alex P. Keaton, like Alan Greenspan, has come to represent a failed pig-eat-pig economic philosophy—a lie.

Michael J. Fox made a generation think it was cool to suckle obtusely at Reagan’s delusional free market teat and live the American dream even if you have to steal and lie to get it. And Meredith Baxter, who played Alex’s mother Elyse, helped us all believe the TV dream. But a dark secret belied this glorious vision of a shining family on a hill.

You know, I don’t care who Elyse Keaton is banging, or scissoring or whatever, all I know is that it  will break Steven’s heart. He’s a good father and a decent man! Skip may also be affected, you know, if Mallory gives a shit, but that’s neither here nor there. Nick will make her a garbage sculpture and everything will be fine and there will be sweaters and bipartisan happiness. And Tina Yothers.

The Keaton parents go as far left as you’re allowed to think exists by “the man,” man. But, what if “Family Ties” were about, poetically, what it should have been: some freaky-deaky, bisexual, polygamist family, who were into bondage? It seems closer to real life already. That’s really what liberals are into, or at the very least, regard as perfectly permissible. (Don’t worry: they wouldn’t have sex with Tina Yothers.) Anyway, the point here is that if the Keatons were a bona fide liberal couple, and not some corporately-imagined approximation, they’d have gone on a hunger strike. Or organized a protest at Alex’s school. Or canvased the neighborhood. Or pipe-bombed Alex’s room. Whatever. They’d have taken radical action of some description and Alex would have caved. Like today’s Republican minority, he wasn’t in a position of power, and yet, just as his parents often acquiesced and compromised with the little twerp, the current Democratic super majority doesn’t have the stomach to mercilessly beat the likes of John Boehner with their belts.

Meredith Baxter, besides living her own sha-la-la-lie, contributed to the perpetration of a few of America’s most deleterious myths. “Family Ties” was all about heterosexual values and norms. It’s easy to scold Baxter for knowingly contributing to this widely-held misconception about what it is to be “normal,” even though she loves pussy, but that’s a little tacky. It’d be a bit like criticizing the midget who played Alf for not being a real alien. She’s an actress; she plays make-believe for a living. In the ’80s, we weren’t ready to treat homosexuals like human beings. Embarrassingly, we still aren’t, but the battle is on and Baxter’s totally obvious revelation comes at an appropriate time in the nation’s, and Tina Yother’s, history.

Hiding her sexual proclivities from America is not what makes Baxter one of the worst people to ever live. Her real sin is that she played a character that embodied the weak, compromising left. Elyse Keaton was a feminist. Her husband Steven, played by Michael Gross, was basically her bottom-bitch. Tough, liberal men don’t exist in the American imagination. Elyse was the acceptable version of the feminized left. She wore the pants. She was progressive, thoughtful and conciliatory—to a fault.

Alex ran roughshod over his liberal parents, because they were operating under the same flawed notion of bipartisanship, which, twenty-five years later, is destroying what could have been real health care reform. Instead, what we’ll get is some half measure—a compromise with evil, yet another give-away to industry.

The main point here is that although many leftist opinions are widely held within the mainstream, you’d never know it, because what’s portrayed on TV as liberal is liberalism as viewed through the pernicious conservative film, which has coated our national consciousness since Reagan.

And for the purpose of this article, I blame Meredith Baxter. And Tina Yothers.