Mad for nostalgia? Don’t be.
By Rod Dreher
The most emblematic scene in “Mad Men,” the justly acclaimed serial drama now in its second season on the American Movie Channel, concluded an episode in September. Father Gill, an idealistic young Jesuit priest serving in 1962 Brooklyn, methodically removed all his priestly garments as he prepared for bed. It was as if he were divesting himself of armor, deconstructing a façade. Wearing his undershirt and his trousers, the priest sat on the edge of his bed, picked up his guitar, and thrashed out an impassioned version of a Peter, Paul and Mary song.
My first thought: Oh God, here come the felt banners and “On Eagle’s Wings.” My second, more considered thought, was something an orthodox Catholic graybeard told me after listening sympathetically to one of my rants about how the Sixties generation ruined the Church: “You know, the Sixties came from somewhere.”
In his 1995 book The Lost City, about Chicago in the 1950s, Alan Ehrenhalt warned against the way nostalgia and poetic memory tempts contemporaries to falsely idealize the past. Though Ehrenhalt chastised liberals who demonize the world of the Fifties as nothing but a nightmarish corseted burlesque of Joe McCarthy, Jim Crow, and Cardinal Spellman, he rapped conservatives for idealizing it as the last good decade.“We don’t want the 1950s back,” Ehrenhalt wrote.
“What we want is to edit them. We want to keep the safe streets, the friendly grocers, and the milk and cookies, while blotting out the political bosses, the tyrannical headmasters, the inflexible rules, and the lectures on 100 percent Americanism. But there is no easy way to have an orderly world without somebody making the rules by which order is preserved. Every dream we have about re-creating community in the absence of authority will turn out to be a pipe dream in the end. This is a lesson that people who call themselves conservatives seem determined not to learn.”
His point is that the very real psychological and social comforts available to people who lived in traditional neighborhoods in those days – neighborhoods whose disappearance gave Ehrenhalt his title – didn’t just happen. They were purchased at the cost of individual choice and mobility. However much latter-day conservatives might complain – with justice – about the loss of community standards in our atomized, vulgar, deracinated society, few of them would be willing to accept the kind of cultural authority necessary to regain the lost city, and that lost time.
Do you doubt it? Would today’s conservatives be willing to yield without protest to the cultural authority of the traditional mainstream media and higher academia? Of course not: bitter experience has taught well-informed conservatives to be suspicious of those institutions’ biases. Liberals who run the media and the universities do not like it when the mantra “Question authority” is turned against them. Once what literary critics call a “hermeneutic of suspicion” becomes generalized in the culture, it is impossible to corral.
It’s easy for Generation X conservatives who came of age in the ruins of the Sixties, and who saw Ronald Reagan as the Great Rescuer and Rebuilder to resent the self-indulgent and ubiquitous Hollywood narrative that trashed the Fifties as nothing but duck-and-cover repression and martini-soaked misery. I know, I know: boundless Baby Boomer self-regard all but demands a reactionary response from Gen Xers. How could it not?
But my older Catholic friend’s line hangs in the air: “The Sixties came from somewhere.” And that’s why “Mad Men” is so fascinating: it chronicles the turning point in our culture, when the Fifties gave way to the Sixties (as Philip Larkin told us, “Sexual intercourse began/In nineteen sixty-three…”). It focuses on a time when people became aware that the old social customs and forms had been hollowed out, and were on the verge of collapsing from their own dead weight. Had American culture been as solid at its core as it seemed on the outside, the Sixties’ rebellion wouldn’t have and couldn’t have happened. “Mad Men” is a chronicle of a revolution foretold.
The show is a melancholic meditation on identity. Its protagonist, Madison Avenue advertising executive Don Draper (Jon Hamm), is in every respect a self-made man. He is creative director at the Sterling Cooper agency; his greatest creation is himself. Born into a poor, miserable family, Dick Whitman took advantage of an accident of war to assume the identity of a dead soldier, becoming Don Draper.
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