In my talks with families, I like to offer a simple family quality test. It's individual and private. No one will know each other's results, so there's no reason to judge anyone. We also won't use the test for cheesy group activities. The test has only one question, and you must answer it completely honestly. It's: "Do you consider yourself a better or worse parent than the Simpsons?"
Parents respond to the question with laughter, because who doesn't, quite obviously, consider their family to be far superior to the Simpsons'?
Now, the test is actually a trap. If we compare ourselves, we must accept that the Simpsons have dinner every night as a family without screens, even though Homer is a fervent TV devotee. I don't know why Marge is in love with Homer (although she has no shortage of suitors who celebrate her), but the truth is that she is, which suggests to us that loving each other is much more important to family than understanding each other. If there's someone in the world who, knowing each and every one of our incomprehensible flaws, still loves us, we've already hit the jackpot in life. Homer, who is well aware of this, can do a lot of crazy things, but there's a red line he'll never cross: the one that puts Marge's (or Lisa's) love at risk.
The Simpsons are capable of starting each episode from scratch, without permanently carrying the reproaches and grievances of previous episodes. They are the greatest masters of the difficult art of starting over.
For all their obvious flaws, the Simpsons don't practice the grave vice of overprotecting their children. It's a form of abuse that's completely alien to them. Bart is fortunate enough to be able to play freely and riskily, without feeling the constant shadow of an adult supervising what he does or doesn't do. Bart has the hallmark of a healthy childhood: knees marked by the stories of his adventures.
In conclusion: if we consider ourselves better parents than the Simpsons, we're in luck and on the way to becoming a truly imperfect family. In other words, a luxury. The members of the Simpson family aren't always known for their exemplary behavior, but we can bet that, no matter what happens, they'll stick together.
Lisa sometimes feels invisible and undervalued by her parents. It happens to her what happens to most of us, poor, trivial heroes, when we feel we're not loved as we'd like. There are times when everything seems to collapse. We think of the stress caused by the cost of Homer's triple bypass surgery or Marge's collapse when she finds her sanity tank depleted. But, one way or another, everything eventually mends itself.
If Bart's irreverence frightens us, it's because it starkly shows us that being a child means having far more energy than the sense to manage it. But despite his volcanic spontaneity, he adores his parents and even accompanies them to church.
In 1990, the first lady of the United States, Barbara Bush, dared to say in an interview in the magazine People that the Simpsons were the stupidest thing she'd ever seen. Faced with this outrage, Marge, dignified, came to her family's defense with this letter:
"Dear First Lady:
I read your criticism of my family, which caused me great pain. Heaven knows we're far from perfect, and truth be told, perhaps a little below the norm; but as Dr. Seuss says, "a person's a person."
I try to teach my children, Bart, Lisa, and even little Maggie, to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and not to speak ill of anyone, even if they're rich. It's hard to get them to listen to me when even the first lady considers us not just stupid, but the stupidest thing she's ever seen. Ma'am, if we were the stupidest thing she's ever seen, Washington would look quite different from what they teach me in current affairs at church.
We share a great challenge. Each of us lives her life in service to an exceptional man.
With great respect, Marge Simpson"
I don't rule out the possibility that someone might consider my vindication of the Simpsons to be frivolous. If so, I share my frivolity with that of Thomas Pynchon, who has made a couple of appearances on the series. Upon reading the script for one of these appearances, he discovered that his character spoke ill of Homer, so he corrected him and sent the following note back to the writers:Sorry, guys".
