. . . Queens today is often remembered primarily as the home of All in the Family’s Archie Bunker, the loudmouthed, blue-collar bigot invented by ultra-liberal Norman Lear. Bunker debuted during the Lindsay years, when the liberals looked with horror at how ordinary New Yorkers, especially from Queens’s ethnic neighborhoods, furiously resisted many of the progressive nostrums that Lindsay and his circle tried to force on them. Though Bunker evolved into a sort of genial, cartoonish figure, the show was part of a contemptuous assault against the ideals and values of the country’s blue-collar, family-oriented, ethnic middle class by the liberal elites of the time, who viewed resistance to their agenda as raw bigotry. But the citizens of Queens, for the most part, were not bigots, as Lear depicted them; and they were much wiser than John Lindsay, as the decline and revival of Queens -- and of New York as a whole -- makes clear. Let’s hope that the Manhattan elites don’t try to ride roughshod over the values and interests of the borough again. It won’t be just Queens that suffers.
"Why Queens Matters", by Stephen Malanga.
City Journal Summer 2004.
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