If you haven’t seen the AMC show Mad Men, you aren’t going to understand this post. The show follows a Madison Avenue advertising firm through the early 1960’s, exploring the culture and prejudices of the time. I find the show interesting because my father was working himself up to an executive position on Madison Avenue during this period, but I can’t really picture him as a member of the cast. In any case, we all know the period; civil rights protests, the Bay of Pigs, the Cuban Missile Crisis, advisors in Vietnam, the Pill, the assassination, Marilyn Monroe. It was the period just before the great cultural rupture that played out most dramatically in the 1968 Democratic convention, and in the inner city riots. For conservatives, it is the moment of maximum of sentimentality. They see it as the last period when they felt comfortable about the nature and direction of this country.
Mad Men disturbs them because it displays the crass materialism, instinctual sexism, and lazy racism of the period in unvarnished terms. They aren’t mean enough to dispute the shortcomings of the era, but they think portraying it as flawed is smug. Who are we to pass judgment on the people of another era? It’s like doing a show about the Founding Fathers and harping on their slave ownership. I agree that historical treatments should avoid sanctimony, but they shouldn’t shamelessly romanticize either. I think the show has a good balance.
Rod Dreher makes his point this way:
The problem with either demonizing or canonizing any era in history is you see what you want to see. Of course by far the dominant narrative in our news and entertainment media has been that the Sixties were a glorious time of revolution and the overturning of the hated, oppressive ’50s. On the right, we have tended to locate in the Sixties the locus of all our contemporary problems. The thing we conservatives struggle to come to terms with is this question: If everything was so great in the Fifties, how come it all went to hell so fast in the Sixties?
It’s a good question that Dreher makes no real effort to answer.
… I don’t think “Mad Men” tells the entire story of Life Before the Sixties. Does anybody believe that? If “Mad Men” stays around for a while, and traces the arc of its characters, I would expect it to show that the liberation many of its characters yearn for and struggle for won’t turn out to be what they expected. It is a downbeat, melancholy program, and that’s fine. Again, if it’s true to its pessimism, it won’t make the mistake of following these characters till, say, 1970, and finding them all fulfilled and high on life. Because that’s not what happened in real life, is it?
As I’ve mentioned here before in connection to “Mad Men,” the book to read is Alan Ehrenhalt’s “The Lost City,” which traces changes in Chicago and community life after the war. Ehrenhalt points out that the Fifties we all long for, of cohesive communities, clear standards, better behavior, was purchased at a price in personal autonomy that few of us today would be willing to pay. “Mad Men” explores in part that cost, e.g., women having to learn to put up with their husbands philandering. And yet, as Ehrenhalt cannily observes, the kind of people who escaped those sorts of places and went on to write films, plays and books about them were typically unhappy rebels. The kinds of people who remember those days as mostly good, happy times aren’t often heard from. Anyway, I’m sure liberals and conservatives who are both fans of “Mad Men” watch it differently. Liberals may watch it with the smug self-congratulation about which Schwarz complains. My suspicion is that conservatives who like the show are drawn to it in part for its tragic aspect: that is, we know what’s coming next for these people, historically speaking, is not the hoped-for liberation, but a new and different kind of misery. There is no exit from the human condition.
You learn a lot about people when they are talking among themselves. Here you have a conservative writing a column for conservative consumption. And he writes of, “the Fifties we all long for, of cohesive communities, clear standards, better behavior.” I grew up in the 1970’s, and I have very happy memories of that decade. Most people who were trying to work for a living in the 1970’s have a much more realistic recollection. Our president resigned in disgrace, the divorce rate soared, we had rampant inflation, two energy crises, lost the war in Vietnam, and suffered from ridiculously high interest rates. We finished up with a hostage crisis in Iran.
It doesn’t surprise me that there is a generation of people who were living a nice comfortable suburban structured childhood in the early 1960’s who see the era with rose-colored glasses. But that’s what they are: rose-colored. That’s what Mad Men puts the lie to. Their fathers and mothers were living in a dreamworld. They didn’t see the revolution coming because they weren’t paying attention to the trouble brewing in our inability to deal with segregation and poverty and women’s equality and the bad decisions being made by the Wise Men of Washington. It all came apart because that illusion would not hold. And what was Madison Avenue but the factory of conformity and illusion? What better place to examine the lazy assumptions of our nation’s last fin de siècle?
Conservatives inability to see the dispossessed and to empathize with those who aren’t getting a fair shake is merely a symptom of their more general proclivity for magical thinking. It’s why someone like Dick Cheney can say that deficits don’t matter, and the Republicans can supportively govern as if that were true until the exact moment that they lose control of the purse-strings.
But no conservative column on popular culture is complete without an effort to make a black man agree with their interpretation.
One more thing: You know what I would like to see? A period drama like “Mad Men” set in a black community around the same time period — a middle-class black neighborhood in Washington, DC, say, in the final years of segregation, as the civil rights movement gained steam. Once when I lived in DC I took a cab ride with an older black gentleman driver. We passed by a desolate stretch of Northeast, and he talked about how when he was a young man, all this was thriving. He said to me that believe it or not, life was pretty good in some respects under segregation. That old man was not wishing for the return of segregation. But he was acknowledging the bitter truth that all the gains in freedom his community made in the Sixties also occasioned some fairly catastrophic losses. That would make for a great serial drama, don’t you think?
So, a conservative version of Mad Men would focus on some middle class black family whose neighborhood went to shit because blacks didn’t settle for their newfound rights and got upset when their leaders were assassinated. They’d all sit around and reminisce about how much better things were before the Civil and Voting Rights Acts riled up their neighbors and got them thinking they should ask for even more.
