“How can you watch that stupid show?” I asked my father, in great pre-teen exasperation.
It troubled me no end that my old man — a smart guy who read The Atlantic, Albert Camus and all 11 volumes of Will and Ariel Durant’s “The Story of Civilization” — could happily sit there and tee-hee at such simple-minded dreck as “Gomer Pyle, USMC.”
Of course the reason that show — and not, say, “The Beverly Hillbillies” — bothered me so much was that people who wanted to annoy me would often, sometimes within seconds of hearing by surname, start calling me “Gomer.