Wherein the Sotomayor nomination enables me to blog about my fave TV show.
Posted by: Donna
What guys like Newt and Rush think they see in the mirror
To listen to the whining from conservatives, you’d conclude that Obama’s pick for the SCOTUS is a radical, activist, Marxist, reverse racist who parlayed the considerable privilege of being a Latina raised in a housing project in the South Bronx to take away spots in Ivy League universities and judgeships from deserving white men. Right.
Which brings me to Mad Men, AMC’s totally friggin’ awesome series set in a Madison Avenue advertising firm in the early 1960s. The producers go to great lengths to be historically accurate*, and the results are often jarring. Everyone smokes and drinks on Mad Men, including a pregnant character. The main protagonist (pictured) is Don Draper, philandering husband and executive of the fictitious Sterling Cooper firm. Despite his carefully crafted unflappable and self-possessed demeanor, Draper radiates inner torment. Toward the end of the first season we find out that he’s not who he says he is. Turns out he appropriated the identity of his commanding officer, the real Don Draper, who was killed in Korea. We learn that his real name is Dick Whitman and he grew up in an impoverished and abusive family. In the second season silver spoon weasel Pete Campbell exposes Draper’s past to Roger Sterling, Don’s boss and mentor. Roger decides to ignore it because Draper is a brilliant ad man and rainmaker.
What I love about Mad Men (besides the clothes and Jon Hamm) is that it portrays how life under the old boys network really was. The women at Sterling Cooper are mostly relegated to secretarial roles and fodder for sexual harassment or extramarital affairs. Draper’s angst-ridden wife, Betty, goes to a psychoanalyst and he reports what she says in their sessions to Don. The only black people in the Sterling-Cooper building are cleaning, serving sandwiches, or operating the elevators.
Opponents of affirmative action scream about quotas and how that will lead to OMG Less Qualified Candidates! They conveniently forget about the near-100% white male quota for good positions that existed throughout history, and still does in many important arenas (88% of the U.S. Senate is white males, for example). That system has allowed a whole lot of mediocre white dudes to succeed, and kept a whole lot of talented people who aren’t white and male down. Yet conservatives will still insist that it’s a glorious meritocracy where affluent white males just so happen to come out on top, due to their innate superiority. Like they’re all Don Drapers, who got there through grit and natural ability (though he still had to lie about his credentials), instead of Pete Campbells who got there because of Daddy’s country club connections.
*Normally I’m loathe to make a political point using fictitious characters but the Ayn Rand Libertarian Fan Club has run with it for over 50 years and, hey, at least the producers of Mad Men are trying to be historically correct.
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