It’s Kermit the Frog, losers. It’s always been Kermit.

Maybe you remember him as the innocent naïf singing “Rainbow Connection” on a swamp log, but Kermit was never naive, never innocent. He was good, yes, but he’s not naive.

Kermit is the straight man, in comedy terms. In the context of The Muppet Show, being the straight man means being the only reasonable, rational person in a chaotic cast of loonies.

When the other muppets were acting insane, Kermit looked at the camera with a half-frown, half-smirk that said “you see what I have to deal with here?”

We were little kids watching it, but the adults who were making the show were living through the latter half of the seventies, when America seemed to have just lost its damn mind. Everybody was doing “their thing,” the old rules were out the window, trusted offices of authority tainted by scandal, it was a very chaotic, neurotic moment in the American story. Everybody reeling from Vietnam, Wategate, Manson, Kent State, the Middle East, and of course the omnipresent Cold War that tinted everything with an extra shade of paranoia and terror.

The Muppet Show wasn’t just a show for children, it was also a show for adults to watch and feel like children again. I think The Muppet Show was such a phenomenon because even the adults in the late 70s needed to suck their thumbs for a half hour. So this weird show that was like a kid’s Saturday morning show, but was also much more adult than a kids show would be at that time, and had real guest stars that adults would recognize, fit perfectly into that moment in time.

And Kermit is the Everyman. All this madness goes on around him, and he’s just trying to maintain his sanity and get everyone to do what they’re supposed to do. He is the lone sane person left when the inmates are running the asylum, and I think that’s how a lot of people felt at that time.

And that’s what WE absorbed, as kids. We were the first generation that was exposed to the idea that the world around us might not be running smoothly, that adults might not know what they’re doing, at the earliest of ages.

That’s why Kermit is our mascot as a generation. He just wants everything to work out for everybody, but everybody around him is some kind of jackass, lunatic, or moron.