Mad Men, “Guy Walks Into An Advertising Agency”

I haven’t blogged about Mad Men recently simply because I’ve had no time.  Last weekend we were in New York, the weekend before time just got away from me.  I’ve been a little disappointed with the season so far.  It’s good, but it didn’t seem to have the juice of seasons 1 and 2.  The story arc was missing and each episode seemed like a one shot, or preludes setting up situations to explore later in the season.  But five episodes into the season seemed a lot for a prelude.   I kept waiting for the season to get going.   

Well, season 3 just got better.  “Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency” was brilliant, not least because of the story line involving Joan Holloway (now Joan Harris after her marriage.)  Christina Hendricks get to show off her acting chops in this episode, to marvelous effect.  At the close of the scene with her husband, when he informs Joan that someone else has been made chief resident and that he may have to leave New York to practice somewhere else, like Alabama, she turns away from him to turn off the light.  The slight hesitancy in her movement and the look on her face as she clicks off the lamp tells us everything we need to know.  In a show where subtext is all, Joan’s disappointment in her husband, and her misgivings about her own choices, are clear.  Later, sitting in the hospital waiting room with Don, I couldn’t help thinking, “they belong together.”  Their parting scene, wordless for the most part, when she kisses him on the cheek and then wipes off her lipstick, tells us they think the same thing.  Under different circumstances, Don and Joan could have been a couple.  Knowing Joan’s disappointment in her own choice of a husband, the scene is that much more effective. 

Roger Sterling also gets a big part in this episode.  He realizes before and certainly after the reorganization meeting that, in the view of Sterling-Cooper’s new owners, he is obsolete.  When Bert Cooper says, “Mr. Sterling isn’t even on that chart,” and Guy replies “Well, that was an oversight,” everyone in the room knows what Sterling is - he’s an afterthought.  Later, after Guy’s foot has been severed by a runaway lawnmower, Roger can barely conceal his glee when he’s in the office with the associates.  “He may lose his foot,” Sterling is told, to which he replies, “Just when he got it in the door.”  Roger, of course, knows what it means.  The organizational changes that were to be put in place, with Guy on top and Roger an afterthought, were out the window.  The status quo, with Lane Pryce (who was about to be exiled to India) on top would remain in place. 

Poor Guy.  He had it all, and then an idiot secretary cuts off his foot.  In 1963 this meant the end of your career.  As Joan says to Don in the hospital, “That’s life: One minute, you’re on top of the world; next minute, some secretary’s running you over with a lawn mower.”  Again, because of Joan’s earlier scene with her husband, the words resonate even more clearly.  Joan hasn’t had her foot severed but her life has changed in a way she never expected, or wanted.  When the British owners arrive they confirm what we already suspect, that Guy’s career is over.  “The doctors say he’ll never play golf again,” Saint-John says, in perhaps the funniest line of the episode. 

Conrad Hilton reappears, this time to ask Don or some free advice.  In a perfect Don Draper reaction he tells Hilton, "I think you wouldn't be in the presidential suite right now if you worked for free." Don Draper is subservient to nobody.  Later, when Hilton tells Don that the next time someone like Hilton offers him an opportunity like this he needs to ask for more, Don replies, “One opportunity at a time.” 

The final scene, with Don holding his baby boy Gene, and with Sally is sitting in his lap, is wonderful.  Sally is scared to death of the baby, thinking he’s the ghost of her recently deceased grandfather.  “He’s only a baby," Don tells her. "We don't know who he is yet or who he's going to be. And that is a wonderful thing."  Of course, we can’t help but think of Don himself, the farm boy with the abusive father and resentful stepmother who has made himself into a sophisticated and successful ad man on Madison Avenue.  He’s changed his name and left his past behind.  No one is more aware than Don of the American opportunity to make (or remake) yourself into whoever you want to be.  In mid-1963, pre-assassination and pre-Vietnam, when America was young and optimism was in the air, Don sees those possibilities for his son and it was indeed a wonderful thing.  Again, as I often do when watching Mad Men, I thought of The Great Gatsby.  Don Draper is Jay Gatsby, the self-made man.  Dick Whitman was James Gatz, the man he left behind. 

September 11

I mentioned earlier this week that my wife and I are headed to New York City soon with my nieces and nephews and a couple of their spouses. I told them it was their trip to do what they wanted. One thing I told them was not worth doing was heading down to the World Trade Center site. There’s nothing there to see. Now, it appears they want to do some other things down at the tip so we in all likelihood will pass by the site. But, at least as short a time ago as last Christmas, there really was nothing there to see.

Does anyone else out there find this outrageous? Appalling? Remember the cries that went up in the days and weeks after the buildings came down? “Build them higher!” was the call. We wanted to spit in the eye of the terrorists and their enablers and shown them that as Americans we could not be intimidated.

Now I was never part of the “build them higher” crowd. I knew from my time in New York what the main complaint about the World Trade Center area was, besides its ugliness: it took away the street grid and left the area at night a barren wilderness that no one would go near. There were quite a few nice plans though there was one in particular being pushed by the folks over at City Journal that was gorgeous, stately, grand. Instead they picked the Libeskind travesty. I started a blog back in 2003 that died a quick death, but here is what I wrote there in February of that year:

The selection for the World Trade Center design is a travesty - not that it's much or any better than the other finalists. The Libeskind design team must have included George Jetson (and his boy Elroy) - all post-modern angles coming from every which way, nothing having any relation to anything else, nothing pleasing to the eye. To my eye, it's jarring. What's more, it has nothing to do with the other architecture in NYC. The finest architecture in the city in either a neo-classical or art deco style - and now we'll have this thing soaring above the skyline, sticking out like a sore thumb, like aliens have invaded and set up their own world smack in the middle of Lower Manhattan. Furthermore, the design doesn't take into consideration the rest of Lower Manahattan life, which during the 1990s had evolved into a 24 hour a day area - excluding the World Trade Center, which after dark became a desolate wilderness due to its mass and lack of streets. By not bringing back the street grid that the orginal Trade Center replaced, they've guaranteed the same will happen again. It's a shame. They could have done something grand. They could have put up classical buildings that included the necessary office and retail space and still had a beautiful memorial and plenty of green space. Something that, once you turned the corner and saw it all would take your breath away. Instead, they picked a design that, with all it's high-tech post-modern space age newness, is banal, and barren. As Janet Flanner said about the the decision to build the Tour Montparnasse in Paris, which scarred the Parisian skyline in a similar fashion, "C'est bien triste."

But now, eight years later, nothing. My wife said she heard on the news this morning that the memorial should be open soon and apparently the base of the ‘Freedom Tower’ has been laid. The Port Authority executive director says they want it complete by 9/11/2011 (“all else pales in comparison,” he says) but I wouldn’t lay a dime on that bet. I’m also concerned that the memorial will be weepy and PC, rather than grand and tough. We’ll see.

Oh, and there’s this, from one of the articles I just looked up about the subject:

Also gracing the site is the "East-West Connector," a striking subterranean passageway 60 feet below the streets of lower Manhattan that will revolutionize the way tens of thousands of New Yorkers commute to their jobs.

Great. Send everyone underground. Keeping the grid would have made this unnecessary, and it would have allowed street-level businesses to flourish. New York deserved better.

Digital Barbarians

I haven’t read Mark Helprin’s Digital Barbarism: A Writer's Manifesto and I’m not sure if I will, but it sure looks interesting.  I may not read it because I’m already a convert to Mr. Helprin’s point of view.  His subject is something I’ve long been aware of and concerned about.  So what’s it about?  Let Joseph Epstein, whose marvelous review brought the book to my attention, explain:

Mark Helprin's Digital Barbarism is ostensibly a book about copyright: the need for preserving it and indeed extending its span, the distinctions between it and other forms and kinds of property, the political implications behind recent attempts to eliminate it. As a copyright holder myself, who has not thought lengthily on the subject, but only gratefully collects his peasantries (as I refer to my rather meager royalties) and moves on, Mr. Helprin's argument strikes me as sound, persuasive, even penetrating. But the book is about much more than copyright. Digital Barbarism is, in fact, a diatribe, harangue, lecture, attack, onslaught, denunciation, polemic, broadside, fulmination, condemnation, no-holds barred, kick-butt censure of the current, let us call it the digital, age.

And what are Mr. Helprin’s concerns about the digital age?  Epstein:

Without gainsaying the rich new possibilities that digital technology has made available, Helprin makes the case that this same technology inculcates a frenetic habit of mind, quick on the trigger yet slow to appreciate subtlety and dazzlingly blind to beauty. "The character of the machine is that of speed, power, compression, instantaneousness, immense capacity, indifference, and automaticity," he writes. The other side of this debased coin is that the machine does not understand tradition, appreciate stability, enjoy quality, but instead "[hungers] for denser floods of data" and fosters a mentality in which "images have gradually displaced words."

Early in Digital Barbarism, Helprin posits two characters, one a high-flying executive in 2028 of a company that "supplies algorithms for the detection of damage in and the restoration of molecular memories in organic computation," the other a British diplomat in 1908 on holiday at Lake Como. The first is living virtually the virtual life, so to speak, which means that he is hostage to the machinery of communication and information, flooded by e-mail, cell-phone calls, screen imagery, in a life lived very much from without. The second, reachable only by slow international post, lives his life with ample room for reflection, cultivation of the intellect, acquiring musical and literary culture directly and at leisure. Helprin naturally prefers the life of the latter, and if you don't grasp the reasons why, you are a digital barbarian in the making, if not already made.

Reading Mr. Epstein in full will certainly be more profitable than staying here with me.  But, in case you choose wrongly and stay here, let me make my own meager points. 

I’ve been long concerned that the digital age is producing a state of mind that can no longer recognize, never mind appreciate, beauty, depth, or greatness.  We are breeding a generation that is hooked up to all the latest technology but which appreciates only what can be gotten instantaneously and in small packages, via text messages, Twitter, Facebook, and goodness knows what else.  One of the marvels of the Internet revolution is that information can be shared in real time.  But it’s also has its drawbacks.  You can’t do any analysis on these tiny communication devices, all you can do is transfer raw data.  As a result young people today think in 140 characters, and often much less.  Subtlety, depth, analysis, thought, are impossible in these arenas.  An entire generation is swept up in this world, and it will have its consequences. 

I mentioned many months ago that I created a Twitter and Facebook account for myself.  I twittered three times, I believe, before I realized its uselessness.  What does anyone care, even those closest to me, what I’m watching on TV now, or if I’m off to work, or if I’m bored.  Isn’t that the bulk of what gets written on Twitter?  Now, I’m not totally anti-Twitter.  If you’re someone like James Lileks, who can make anything sound funny (“Picked up dog's arthritis meds. At this price I want him to get up on hind legs and riverdance.”) I’ll gladly browse through his Twitter feeds.  But few have that ability.  For most, the twitter above would end after the first sentence, and again I say, who cares?

The same thing with Facebook.  It is a complete waste of time, at least the way the vast majority of people use it.  I joined up hoping to get into conversations with people, debate issues, talk about movies or music, and the site has the potential for that.  But most users are simply not interested in debate, and don’t have the patience or knowledge to engage for any period of time longer than a few minutes.  From what I see, someone makes a statement, you get a lot of concurrences, and some smiley faces and exclamation points.  Who needs it?

As for text messaging, why not pick up the phone if you need to communicate?  I have long said that I will leave this earthly realm without ever having sent a text message or owned a personal cell phone.  I’ll never understand the need to constantly be in touch.  I’m perfectly comfortable alone by myself. When I’m out on my own that’s what I want to be, on my own.

Now, I’m not anti-technology.  I’m simply dismayed at how its used.  Hell, I’m blogging on the Internet as we speak.  But I do it not for you but for myself.  At the very start of this blog I wrote:

I'm thinking writing about my interests may deepen my understanding of them. Pauline Kael once wrote, in her introduction to Deeper Into Movies, that "I write because I love trying to figure out what I feel and what I think about what I feel, and why." I guess I'm thinking something similar for the blog, though I'd be more comfortable saying "I write because I want to figure out what I think, and why.

And that has proved true.  Writing forces me to think, it allows me to organize my thoughts, it gives me an outlet for self-expression.  I enjoy all those things about it.  I read a six or seven other blogs daily because I’ve found people on the internet who make me think, make me laugh, who expand my own horizons.  I love the Internet, when put to the uses of furthering understanding, knowledge, and open debate.  But the instant, cotton-candy uses the digital barbarians employ it for is corrupting.  It doesn’t expand horizons, it limits them.  Stuck in a world of Twitter, Facebook, and text messaging, the youth of today have no time or inclination to explore the worthy things of life. 

My buddy Mike and I have been in agreement for more twenty years that the cultural and social environment of the day have degraded to the point that we no longer have the capacity to produce another Beethoven, or Michelangelo.  The digital generation has furthered this decline.  Not only can’t the digital age produce a Beethoven or a Michelangelo, it can’t recognize their greatness, preferring instead Michael Jackson or Brittney Spears or the latest American Idol winner.  With the great cultural treasures of the western world at their fingertips, they can’t rise above childish modern pop, violent special-effects movies, and mind-numbing video games.  And tiny little hand-held devices. 

I become daily more concerned that we are leaving the treasure of western civilization behind, not simply the cultural aspects of art, music, and literature, but also the organizing political ideas upon which we’ve all previously agreed.  These youth do not understand nor respect republicanism, democracy, or capitalism.  Many openly disdain them.  It’s no secret that the public schools long ago stopped teaching western civilization (except to criticize it).  That loss of knowledge about, and confidence in, those ideas that have shaped our society may now be coming home to roost.  Enter the digital barbarians and their childish sense of entitlement to every whim or fancy, their lack of civility towards anyone who disagrees with them, and you have the potential for true cultural and political chaos. 

Plato asked (and I’m paraphrasing), “what if one generation of children could be perfectly taught?”, implying that it would lead to a perfect social order.  Well, consider the opposite.  What if one generation of children could be perfectly emptied of all the wisdom of their ancestors?  Now, both those scenarios are equally implausible in that they are asking for perfection, which doesn’t exist.  The concern is that we are producing too many citizens devoid of the cultural and political wisdom that once was a inheritance, a given.  Produce enough of them and you end up with a society that becomes unlivable - think modern day England, which many Brits now living in the U.S. consider to have entered into a state of semi-barbarism. 

I nearly didn’t post this.  If I have any readers at all it well might drive them away, or at least solidify their opinion of me as a hopeless old-fogy.  Be that as it may.  But before you laugh off my musings, please read Helprin’s account of the “holy war” he entered into when the Wall Street Journal published his article in defense of copyright, the article that became the basis for his book.  His account of the barbarians ignorant yet ferocious reaction to his column is not pretty.  

I’m self-taught for the most part, but well enough to know that their are things that make life worth living.  The pursuit of virtue, the pursuit of happiness, the pursuit of wisdom, and the pursuit of beauty, all make up a large part of what I consider the good life, and all of these concepts depend upon one another.  My concern for years was that we were raising (or have raised) a generation which no longer recognizes this, that cannot see the sublime in Bach or Shakespeare, that can’t find beauty in Mozart or Raphael, that can’t perceive majesty in Beethoven or Michelangelo.  The digital barbarians heighten that concern, expand it into the political and social arena.  Their’s is, according to Epstein, “a mind propelled by a strong sense of entitlement, inane utopian visions, and less than no regard for those distinctions and discriminations that make a complex culture hum,” and according to Helprin, “"is against property, competition, and the free market," which "favor a world that is planned, controlled, decided, entirely cooperative, and conducive of predetermined outcomes." At minimum, a mindset like this will degrade public life.  At worst, one is reminded of Burke’s dismay as he watched the unfolding of the French Revolution (the italics are mine):

The unbought grace of life … is gone.… All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of her naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

Last one....

...I think. You must read this great post from Yuval Levin over at The Corner. It summarizes what was wrong with Obama's entire speech. Great stuff. An excerpt, but read it all:

"I am not the first president to take up this cause, but I am determined to
be the last." The last?

Permanent perfection, in this kind of technocratic vision, would surely
require getting every fine detail just right. Yet Obama did not seem to be
advancing a very detailed plan, but rather championing some vague generalities.
And when you line these generalities up, they form a very peculiar and
implausible picture. It will cost $900 billion, involve no tax increases for the
middle class and no Medicare benefit cuts for the elderly, but not add a dime to
the deficit. The basic prerequisites for risk-based insurance will be rendered
illegal, but the public is assured that insurance arrangements need not
change-or rather that they will only improve.

To try to sneak these glaring contradictions past his listeners, the
president engaged in some familiar misdirection. He said the government would
not force people to lose their existing insurance. But the question of
displacement is not about force: employers currently provide insurance not
because they are forced to do so (they are not) but because a combination of
policy and labor market pressures lead them to choose to do so. Change those
pressures and coverage arrangements will change for millions.

And More....

From James Capretta over at National Review's Critical Condition blog:

It’s as if the president and his team haven’t read anything that the
Congressional Budget Office (CBO) has said about the health-care bills under
consideration. The truth is that these bills would add an additional
runaway health-care entitlement to the ones already on the federal books.
CBO has said that the House bill would set in motion new spending that would
grow at about 8 percent rate per year, while the revenue to pay for it would
increase only about 5 percent per year. You don’t have to be a financial
genius to see a problem here.

No one would accuse Obama or his administration of being financial geniuses. At this point I'd settle for minimally competent but, alas, even that standard seems beyond their grasp.

More On The Speech...

...from the marvelous Jennifer Rubin over at Contentions:

Okay, all Americans who think this is a moderate president who isn’t fixated on partisan politics, hold up your hands. Mr. Biden and Ms. Pelosi agree. Anyone else? I didn’t think so. What was the point of this if not to inflame the Right and gin up the Left? Is the president so inured to and so isolated from people with whom he disagrees that he thinks that with a bone like tort reform (which Pelosi and Harry Reid will embrace right after they enact right-to-work legislation for all 50 states and sentence the Democratic party to poverty by offending their key donor class) he can get a deal? The critics of health-care reform, Obama’s brand, can no longer be accused of exaggeration. This is a nationalization vision in which health-care markets, as imperfect as they are, are replaced by government edicts and an avalanche of new taxes (hmm, not too much about those tonight), so that all is provided and all is given (or taken away). Who needs the public option when government micromanages everything?

And, also from Contentions, John Podhoretz:

OK, wait a minute. He’s trying to sell this to the American people by invoking Ted Kennedy and what Ted Kennedy wanted? Notwithstanding the past few weeks, the invocation of Ted Kennedy’s name brings up complicated associations, and not just for conservatives. This conclusion does suggest he is living in a bubble and doesn’t quite get how to speak to those who don’t agree with him.

The italics are mine. Glad too see others whose opinions I respect came away with a similar take on the speech. I agree whole-heartedly with Podhoretz. Ted Kennedy is not someone you should be bringing up when looking for consensus. There are few politicians in history who are more polarizing. That Obama and those who wrote and vetted this speech don't realize this speaks volumes. The really do live in a bubble.

What Was That?

Barack Obama’s speech last night accomplished nothing, except perhaps outrage opponents of his health care package even more.  What exactly is different about what he proposed last night?  Did he really think that soaring rhetoric (along with multiples nasty shots at his opponents) would reframe the debate?  It’s too late for that.  The health care proposals that he has been selling (or not selling) for months now cannot now be sold simply by rephrasing the issue to sound different.  You cannot a) insure millions more Americans who are currently without insurance, b) improve medical coverage for those who already have insurance, and c) do it all for less money.  The American people know that.  As someone on the blogs said last night, Obama apparently still thinks he’s talking to a bunch of third-graders.

So Obama is going to pay for this 900 billion dollar monstrosity by getting rid of waste and abuse in Medicare.  Who believes that?  Medicare is government-run health care.  Obama himself keeps talking about all the inefficiencies Medicare, but he believes that a new government-run option will not be subject to the same waste and abuse?  Good luck with that.   

Also, Obama’s disdain for profits came out once more last night.  He claimed part of the problem with our current system is the health insurers ‘relentless pursuit of profits.’ Well, I don’t know about you but if I’m a shareholder of a company, relentlessly pursuing profits is exactly what I want the company to be doing.  Profits are good.  There’s no substitute for them.  Without profits you have no progress, no expansion.  Go for long enough without profits and you have no jobs. 

He then went on to talk about how his private option could provide a good option for consumers by avoiding the ‘overhead that gets eaten up at private companies by profits.’  The phrase ‘eaten up’ is telling.  Profits, like some vulture, gobble up all the good parts, according to Obama.  Lets set up a company without a profit-motive!  Like, like….let me think…..like Medicare!  Or the post office!  Or the DMV!   

One more thing.  Preventive care is not less expensive.  It’s more expensive.  For the person who eventually ends up not getting a disease, or catches a disease early-on so that it’s more treatable, preventive care is wonderful.  But you’ve got to test everyone, including the vast majority of those who are never going to get the disease.  Those test cost money and it trumps whatever savings you get from the few who do end up benefitting.  I’m not saying preventive care is not a good thing.  It is.  But it doesn’t save money, as Obama and the left continue saying.

The entire speech was a study in disingenuousness.  It will be picked apart today and in the coming days.  And this was his last shot.  He can’t make another nation-wide televised speech on the issue again.  It may be that everyone finally realizes that nothing on the scale of what Obama and the left have proposed will ever get through Congress.  They’ll come together for some minor health insurance reform, i.e. you can’t be denied coverage for pre-existing conditions, you don’t lose you coverage if you lose your job, you can buy coverage across state-lines, etc..  A bunch of the congressional clowns will gather around Obama at the signing ceremony and call it a victory.  But no one will be fooled.  Sweeping health care reform is dead.