What can Perry Mason tell us about modern times? [View all]

[PatrickforO]

My wife and I are both crazy about Perry Mason, so we took the step of buying the entire 9 seasons on disk, and we've been watching them appreciatively.

So...you ask...quite justifiably, why I'm even telling you this.

I have been thinking about it this morning. Now, we are both white, in our late fifties, and were raised in suburbia during the 1960s and 70s by relatively decent WWII generation parents (both dads born 1916, both moms 1920).

Now, in those days if parents, especially WWII generation parents, were decent, they genuinely believed that there was a right and a wrong, and that they could teach it to their children. Part of this teaching was to instill the belief that if we always tell the truth, then things will always work out OK for us.

The old Perry Mason episodes are the epitome of that. Perry, Della, Paul Drake, Hamilton Burger and Lieutenant Tragg are all honest and interested in justice. They are incorruptible and the unfortunate people accused falsely of murder could count on Mason to find the truth and free them. The whole group is sort of like a 'feel good' family - at least those are the feelings they evoke in me. Yep, I think, good will prevail.

It doesn't now, though. Does it? Good doesn't always prevail, and the institutions we used to trust, like (if you were white) the cops, firefighters, banks, schools, businesses, the military, the government, don't always give people, especially the old, poor, sick or different, a fair shake. And, if you were a little yankee doodle dandy like I was, the first realization that sometimes evil wins is very painful.

Because evil has been winning for decades now, and we've all been getting fucked.

I suppose Perry Mason allows me to escape from the corruption for an hour at a time and imagine a better, more just world.