L.I.P. service

Since I'm evil, I keep thinking of evil things to do. Lately, I've taken to Googling things people say. Not just any things but things they say when debating politics and culture. It all started because I've found you can't respond to these arguments anymore. Someone will make a strong claim and then get upset with me if I disagree. Or, they will simply terminate the conversation but get some quick jab in as if I am the one causing the difficulty and they think it's a shame that I can't be more civil.

Anyway, given that dissent isn't appreciated, I just nod politely now and let people ramble on. While they do so, I make a mental note of any particularly striking phrases. Not necessarily striking to me, sometimes the only thing that makes the phrases stand out is that the person using it places particularly heavy emphasis on it. Later, I pull out my phone and Google the phrases. That may sound boring, but it's simply astounding how often I find out that the most passionate arguments that people make are actually just low-information parroting of something they read elsewhere. Google will find the phrase they put such emphasis on and it will be in the middle of a piece making exactly the argument later repeated as a heartfelt belief.

Friday thoughts: the uses of moral argument

1. "Morally reprehensible."

That's what she said. She was speaking of an affair a woman she knew was having. I never met the woman she was speaking of until much later. I've often wondered whether this other woman really had the affair she was criticized for. What I did learn for certain some time later was that my friend, the one who spoke of another woman's affair as "morally reprehensible", was herself having an affair even as she spoke those words in a censorious tone.

I never confronted her about it. You don't in those circumstances. I don't anyway.

Ever since I've always wondered what the person I hear someone condemn someone else's sexual conduct is up to themselves.

What good is your morality doesn't actually help you do right and stop doing wrong?

Why even have a morality?

2. Spring

This is the season with the highest suicide rate.

People with bipolar syndrome are most likely to commit suicide when they are coming out of a depression.

The same mechanism is at work in both cases. Yes, the snow is melting and the sun is shining but that is a curse if all that is happening is the beginning of another cycle.

3. Parody

One of my first jobs I was production manager for the student newspaper. The production manager was the one responsible that there actually was a newspaper published every week. Every one else on staff was having a good time.

The most tedious time of the year was the preparation for the first edition for April because that was the parody edition. Every year they'd have a meeting to decide what to parody. The National Enquirer was a popular suggestion. It took them a while but the kids would eventually figure out that it couldn't be done. The problem is that you can only parody something you admire. Otherwise, you will produce something like this.

4. The religious left 

Someone named Francis J Butler at the National Catholic Reporter thinks more lay people, and fewer clerics, should be canonized. It's not a bad point. NCR, however, cuts the ground out from underneath it by running a picture of Sargent Shriver speaking to Peace Corps volunteers that makes it painfully clear that, in their view, canonization is a political project.

5. The religious left again

You may have heard that the Brookings Institute has a paper out suggesting that the religious left is poised for a come back. I hadn't noticed it had gone away myself.

I mean that quite seriously. I spend a lot of time in religious circles and the inescapable truth about such circles is how liberal-left they are. Bishops are overwhelmingly left wing, so are most priests, so are most religious educators and so are most of the support staff who work in church offices. These people never went away. What happened is that the media stopped paying attention to them.

The report inadvertently underlines this point. It tells us that the real left is, at best, ambiguous, about the participation of the religious left. And then it gives them marching orders:

We began our convening in December with a discussion of economic justice: what does it mean; where are the tensions in the concept; and how do we move through the practical difficulties of achieving it?

That's paragraph one of part one. Notice what's missing? 

Think of it this way: imagine your boss invites you in to talk about your future and then immediately outlines his goals without mentioning you at all.

And when do the poor religious left actually get mention.

Our initial focus was on the challenge of building a cohesive and sustainable religious movement for economic justice, given sharply divergent definitions of its purposes.

Message: Our interest in you is limited to your usefulness to us.

6. Even more religious left

The Brookings guys are enthusiastic about Pope Francis.

At the same time, he has suggested that the issues linked to the politics of the culture wars have been allowed to displace other concerns. "We cannot insist only on issues related to abortion, gay marriage, and the use of contraceptive methods," he has said. "this is not possible."

Basic writing lesson: the first sentence is supposed to set up the second. It is supposed to explain the context in which the statement is made. It is not supposed to create a new context that will alter the basic meaning of the quote. How do you think they did by that standard?

Not having time for games is itself a game

That's the new uncool quote of the month.

I identified it as The Last Psychiatrist Channels Wittgenstein. It's from TLP's comments on Twilight four and a half years ago.

To get the point, you need to understand that there are serious games and unserious games. Boxing, for example, is a serious game where the point is to damage your opponent so much that he can't fight anymore. If you get into the ring without understanding that but your opponent does you will have a very rough time of it.

TLP's point about Twilight is that love is a serious game with serious consequences. Edward is easily able to convince Bella that he doesn't have time for games because she has already convinced herself that there must be some magic way to cut past all the games and get straight to the point. But what would getting straight to the point mean here?

Jerry and Lisa go to a really good restaurant together. They discuss wine and food together. They both enjoy the experience so they start going to a really good restaurant together once or twice every month. They also start doing other things together. They become a couple. Lisa becomes less and less interested in going out to restaurants. She is perfectly happy eating microwave dinners at home. Jerry asks what is is wrong and Lisa admits that she only pretended to like fine food and drink because it was a good way to meet men and have a relationship. Jerry is a little deceived at this but he really likes Lisa and he figures that he and Lisa can do other things together. Meanwhile, because he really likes fine food and drink, he finds someone else to do that with.

Does that sound like an acceptable arrangement to you? It seems fine to me. Okay, let's replace fine food and drink in the above scenario with sex. "... Jerry asks what is is wrong and Lisa admits that she only acted interested in sex because it was a good way to meet men and have a relationship. Jerry is a little deceived at this but he really likes Lisa and he figures that he and Lisa can do other things together. Meanwhile, because he really likes sex, he finds someone else to do that with."

The point is that once you grasp that you can't separate sex from love while you can separate love from sex, then you should be able to understand why all the "games" that women and men play on the way to love are absolutely necessary and not some ploy to frustrate you.

Postscript: TLP's title for his piece is "The Twilight Movie Review Your Boyfriend Doesn't Want You To Read". He gets that completely wrong. It should be, "The Twilight Movie Review You Don't Want Your  Boyfriend To Read"

When someone accidentally blurts out the truth in passing

I remain unconvinced on Pope Francis. My hope is that I'll have to eat my words, that, several years from now, I'll be writing a post where I say that I'm sorry I ever doubted him.

But I keep reading things that discourage me. Notice, here, for example, how John Allen, seeking to praise the Pope makes a staggering admission in passing:

In Rome the pendulum is swinging from public theater to behind-the-scenes substance this week, as two closed-door meetings tackle two of the most serious challenges facing Pope Francis: Vatican reform and the child sexual abuse scandals.

A more direct, and more honest, way to make the same point would be to say, "He hasn't actually done anything yet."

And that is a little troubling, don't you think, after a barrage of articles about how wonderful he is. John Allen is probably the best English-speaking Vatican journalist in the world and here he is allowing that Francis hasn't actually done anything. Pope Francis was made Time magazine person of the year in 2013 and here is the best-informed journalist we have on the subject casually allowing that the Pope's achievements are just street theatre!

And then there is this from the same article:

As is his custom, Francis is sitting in on the meetings but generally not saying much, preferring to listen to the discussion without injecting himself into it.

I'm sorry, but that isn't encouraging. As I say, I hope and pray that I am as wrong as wrong can be on this but what if this man is just a clever PR master who isn't up to the job? What if he is getting all this good press while sleepwalking into disaster?

Mad Men: Field Trip

I'll tell you what I think is really going on here at the bottom.

Is there any reason to believe that Alan Silver isn't telling the truth about Megan's childish antics? This is exactly the way she behaved back in season 5 when she couldn't get a job. At that time, Don acted the part of the good daddy and got her the Butler shoe ad just like she wanted. Now she is again faced with her own lack of talent and is again acting erratically.

(It's telling, by the way, that her first reaction is to want to fire Alan. Why is it that commentators overlook this sort of failure to face reality in a female character while endlessly castigating men for similar reactions? This is the soft bigotry of low expectations in action.)

ADDED: Imagine you're Allan Silver and this ditz who isn't going anywhere and is becoming more and more trouble fires you. Where is the downside? (Deeper question: Yes, she's hot and easy and has really big breasts but if you're Don, why do you want to stay married to her?)

Tom and Lorenzo point out that all the women in Don's life this week treat him unfairly and that is true. You can see Megan being upset about being kept in the dark but she's a handful and she owes a lot to Don. So does Joan and so does Peggy.

Peggy's make the least sense of all. She has not been happy under Lou. Why is she pretending that it has gone swimmingly? If she already knew that she will be competing directly with Don from now on that would make sense. But she doesn't know.

To ask a rude question: Is this what happens when women get into the workforce in large numbers? The start of the show was driven by outsize egos in rivalry with one another and getting great things done. Now we have a group of people acting to protect their interests through rigid social policing. Both are unpleasant in their own way but one is much more likely to produce good creative work than the other.

The other question that makes no sense at all is why Don accepts the deal that was offered to him. As everyone I've read commenting argues, it was clearly designed to make Don refuse. The harshest line was delivered by Joan: that failure to comply with the stipulations would not only result in termination but reabsorption of his partnership share. That's the part that no reasonable person would have accepted.

A slight break for a reality check here. Lawyers get a lot of abuse but they are absolutely essential to the functioning of our society. No one should ever agree to what Don agreed to without consulting a lawyer.

Everyone hates Betty now

Betty is back and any and all equivocation about her character is now gone. She's awful and no one is trying to hide it anymore. Even people who profess to like the Betty storyline now claim to love it because she is so awful. As Emily Nussbaum put it a few years ago, Betty started as a character whose horrid actions could be explained away because of the way others treated her but slowly came to be fully revealed as "like some hissable Barbie with the most cake". "Cake" here is a very sexual term but, as is so often the case in sexual status pissing matches between women, the cake in question is not the sort of sexual power that men find appealing. That sort of eroticism, as we find out on the school bus, is distasteful to Betty in a way that suggests that she wants the power but doesn't much like or respect men.

An aside, as long as I am asking rude questions: all these shows are feminist on the surface but subversively anti-woman just below the surface. Betty Draper, Livia Soprano and Skyler White are all easy to hate. Mona Sterling you can sympathize with but you know exactly why Roger cheats on her. Even if you sympathize with them, as many do, nobody could fail to understand why these women get treated the way they do. And season five saw Megan start sliding down the same path.

A lot of talk about the show centres on how society treated women back then but the more telling line of inquiry is how this show treats them now.

I don't think Matthew Weiner is entirely honest with himself or us about Betty. There is an interview up with January Jones on AMC's site. The interview starts with a quote from Weiner talking about how great January Jones audition was and then that claim is completely demolished with Jones herself saying that she had to come back twice. And then there is a very telling line that she reports him telling her at the time: “There’s this little scene at the end of the pilot, but I’m not sure what’s going to happen with the character if we get picked up.”

That rings true. Weiner didn't know where exactly this character would go. I suspect the same is true of every character except Don and even he has been modified somewhat. I also suspect that there is a lot more of both January Jones and Jon Hamm in the character's they play than either would like to want to think about too much.

Turning the dial back

What I thought happened most of all this episode is that the dial got turned back to something like season one. Don is now back in a position like he was then in that he is extremely vulnerable to fate. It's not hard to figure out, for example, how Lou would use the information about Dick Whitman if it landed in his hands. And Lou would use it more effectively than Pete did.

When the blonde hooker approaches Don at the meeting where he is being offered a job, it struck me how much she looked like the woman who approaches Don in the bar at the end of the final episode of season five. She is a different actress. To have the same actress would be to give a plausible reason for the recognition which would ruin the plot point. I think the similarity is intentional though and is meant to show growth in Don. I get the impression that the big challenge for Don, in Matt Weiner's eyes, is for him to confront his past only to do it in an appropriate way and not in the way he did at the Hershey meeting.

I'll tell you what I am hoping for. I am hoping the show will, as Bert does in season one, recognize that our secrets are not nearly as important as the current media culture makes them out to be. We'll see what happens. I suspect that the best we can hope for is a sort of non-ending ending that will allow us all to interpret as we wish. That will make for bad art but this is television after all.

Stray bullets

• The movie Don is watching at the beginning is called Model Shop. It was made by Jacques Demy and is one of a number of disappointing films produced when French new wave directors were invited to make English movies in Hollywood.
• The Jimi Hendrix song "If 6 was 9" that plays over the closing credits has one of the all time great rock song openings. Before you blow $1.29 on iTunes, you should know that it devolves into tediously narcissistic noodling that is awful even by Hendrix standards. The lyrics are accidentally interesting. On one hand, the song seems a tribute to individualism. On the other hand, 6 is just 9 upside down.
• Like the teacher, Megan has also been going braless. The braless look was indeed catching on at this time but large-breasted women like Megan didn't adopt it. It was a look that favoured smaller breasted women.
• I love the way Betty checks out the teacher's breasts when the school bus causes her, and them to heave forward. It's blatantly obvious and meant to send a message to the teacher. And then Betty turns and makes an utterly inappropriate remark about them to Bobby. That rings so true. I remember my mother doing things like that.
• I love the Tiki bar in Lou's office.

Friday round up

1. The lonely lives of scientists*

There is a study that says FaceBook may (weaselly language alert) make women feel bad about their bodies.

Most spent about 80 minutes on Facebook every day. The most popular activities were reading the news feed and looking at photos, according to the study. 

Spending more time on Facebook was linked to a significantly greater likelihood that a woman would feel bad about her own body, the study revealed. It also was tied to greater odds that she would compare herself to others. 

That was especially true if she felt like she needed to lose weight, the researchers noted.

Unless, of course, the causality runs the other way. 

This should be obvious enough even for a scientist to figure out. FaceBook is the sort of thing that would appeal to women who already feel bad about their bodies; they can interact without actually being physically present to others. 

* I stole that headline from James Taranto

2. The advice they give

Slate's Dear Prudie column handles the case of a man who is asking his wife for a paternity test for an as-yet-unborn child. The advice Emily Yoffe, who writes the column, gives would certainly be good advice if the facts as are as reported. The problem is that we can't know that; we only have one side of the story.

Yoffe has a disturbing tendency to almost always take a woman's account of her relationship as true. It could be, as this woman claims, that there is no good reason to ask for a paternity test. Then again, who knows.

I'll tell you what would worry me in this case: this woman seems to really, really want a child. The man may be thinking that she really wants this child more than she really wants him. He may, as she claims, have no reason to suspect infidelity but he may also have noticed a significant change in her attitude towards him since the positive pregnancy test. It may be that the child is his but he suddenly feels pushed away. The woman asking the question tells us that this is the first serious relationship for her husband and it has led to marriage and children. If you were this guy, you might just be asking yourself how you got so far so fast given a previous track record like that. He probably hasn't thought things through but he has a sense that something isn't right and he started to fear this one thing because it's better to have a name to put to your problem than to be feeling scared of something vague and indefinable.

3. Identity theft?

The most fantastic element of the saga — the fact that Don stole the identity of a wealthier, more accomplished dead man during the Korean War and has lived it ever since — is there because it’s central to the series’ theme: that the American advertising industry is dynamic, but fake and inauthentic,because much of American society is just the same.

That is one of the 956,000 results that Google gives for the search string, "Don Draper stolen identity". The assumption that Draper stole his identity is widespread. It's not a claim that he stole his identity for it is made with far too much certainty to be anything but an assumption; the people who say this don't think they need to argue the point; it is as obvious to them as the fact that Don Draper has black hair.

I don't think it's true. At the very least, true identity theft means taking something that is someone else's and Dick takes almost nothing more than a name from Donald Draper and, except in cases of copyright, to take the same name as someone else in no way robs them of the full use of it.

The real Donald Draper was an engineer. Dick Whitman didn't set out to become him. He didn't set out to pass himself off as the other Don Draper. He didn't write cheques against the other guy's account, didn't apply for jobs on the basis of the other guy's record. Dick Whitman used Don Draper's name along with his serial number to apply for a driver's license and then went to work as a used car salesman.

I think Esther Perel, whom I wrote a post about a few weeks ago, describes perfectly what happened in the transition from Dick to Don when she described why people have affairs:

Very often we don’t go elsewhere because we are looking for another person. We go elsewhere because we are looking for another self. It isn’t so much that we want to leave the person we are with as we want to leave the person we have become.

When Don tells Anna Draper that he wants to get married, he suggests that she should meet Betty. She brushes the idea off. He wants to take care of her, says he owes her "this whole life". She tells him he'll have a family and that it will be good for him, "this is a chance at a whole new life".

4. Toxic Shame

One of the most popular explanations of why people behave like Don Draper behave the way they do is "toxic shame".

Toxic shame, according to the theory, derives from childhood fear of abandonment. Your parents didn't meet your needs and you blamed yourself. You convinced yourself that the way to please them was to appear to not have needs. This habit carries on into adulthood. These bad habits cause us to interact with others in ways that are ineffective.

I can't make up my mind about it. Part of it seems absolutely correct. I see my own bad habits match the theory. On the other hand, there have been long periods of my life when I have avoided these bad habits. I wonder if the problem is not that we have these childhood behaviour patterns but that a serious crisis of confidence can cause us to revert to them.

5. Me too!

Wish I'd written this:

“Mr. Campbell, who cares?” is one of my favorite moments of the show and maybe even of TV history. There’s so much about it that’s brilliant, from the way that it instantly subverts a seemingly very important plot point to the way it cuts to the quick of every thematic point the first season has been building. We’ve been trained for so long by television to look at these sorts of big, character-defining mysteries as the only things that matter, and on most shows, the revelation of Don’s true identity would have had serious, world-shattering consequences. Here, it’s just a thing that Bert ultimately doesn’t give a shit about. For the most part, nobody is ever as interested in us as we are in ourselves, and that’s a hard lesson to learn. Pete expects Bert Cooper to behave like a character in a story who really cares about the protagonist’s big secret; Bert Cooper is just a man who’s old enough to know everybody has secrets.

Read the whole thing. 

The author of the above piece makes the very good point that one of the bad story-telling habits of our time is to make everything hinge on the big revelation. This reflects a popular psychology that says that getting the truth out will make it possible to progress. Having everything build up to this moment only to have nothing change is more like what actually happens in life.

Mad Men: Season 7, episode 2: Sincerity and authenticity

Get me in a room!

Dion says that all the time. Someone, say Ken, says that a particular company is reportedly looking for a new agency and Don says, "Get me in a room".

Remember this?

The Japanese have a saying, 'A man is whatever room is in.' And right now, Don Draper is in this room.

That is Bert's answer to Pete's claim that Don Draper is really a military deserter named Dick Whitman back in the episode "Nixon versus Kennedy" in season one. It is significant now because Don Draper is not in the room. He is not in his office, he is not in the conference room. And if he isn't in the room anymore, who is he?

And it's not just Don who is worrying about the room they are in.

• Pete and Ted are not in the room for the partners meeting so take part by teleconference.
• Then Pete has a thing about working his way up to another office and how meaningless that seems in the new LA office. 
• And Roger wants to know why they aren't in the conference room.
• Don wants to know where Lou sat in the room where Don wasn't.
• Joan is in a room where her identity is split between two jobs, she even has two doors.

Those people see their identity much as Bert describes it in the first season. If they can get into the right room, they are confident they can establish their identity through their performance.

Okay, let's take a break and talk about sincerity for a moment because sincerity has a lot to do with identity and which rooms you are or are not in. Here is a paragraph from a review of a recent book about sincerity.

Before he arrives at sincerity’s present-day rarity, Magill agilely traces his subject through the ages. The word first appeared as a description of objects. A sword was “sincerely” bronze, meaning pure. When, around 1533, sincerity first began to be used to describe people, it referred to faith. The definition broadened when, in the Elizabethan era, the birth of theater, along with the relaxing of sumptuary laws, meant that it was more difficult to tell sincerity by appearance.

The birth of theatre and the relaxing of sumptuary laws! If you aren't familiar with the term, sumptuary laws were laws that prevented prosperous merchants from dressing as well as the nobility. These laws are universal. They spring up in medieval Europe and Japan, for example. Those two societies were pretty much unaware of one another's existence so neither can be said to have picked the idea up from the other. Both societies had an identical need: when trade started producing a wealthier  merchant class, laws needed to be passed so that it was possible to tell the real nobility apart from the newly wealthy merchants.

I trust that the relevance to Mad Men is clear? If you combine that with theatre, the notion of playing a role, and you have our central problem. Why is Don Draper really Don Draper? Because he is and he remains Don Draper year after year even though he "really" isn't, whatever that means.

If that is the problem, then sincerity can seem like a solution.

Do you have Jesus in your heart? That's a question about sincerity.

If you don't like sincerity, you can always try authenticity. That's Peggy's approach. Her need is not being in a room but to be in a relationship. It's not quite that she is no one without a man; rather it is that being in a loving relationship will validate her sense of self.

The two approaches to personal identity aren't mirror images of one another. Proving your sincerity is ultimately a matter of performance. If I ask if you are sincere, you can make promises but ultimately the proof is in your performance. If I ask if you are authentic, then your performance is no help. Think of Senator Elizabeth Warren having claimed to be aboriginal. She can't back that claim up by performing as an Indian. That performance would to undermine her claim and the better the performance was, the more it would undermine. Authenticity claims to be something that is left over when you peel away all the performance. It is something you have even when you aren't in the room.

What sincerity and authenticity do have in common is that they both rely on others to recognize us.

Sincerity works like this. The delivery boy can wear a Hugo Boss suit when he takes a package to the conference room and that gets him into the room with the right clothes on (and here you can see the point of sumptuary laws) but he can only cause confusion. To pull the trick off, he needs to get others to recognize him as legit. They have to recognize not just his right to be in the room but his legitimacy in a certain role.

Authenticity is what Peggy wants. Peggy needs to be loved because she thinks love is going to validate her sense of self. No, that isn't very feminist but it is in line with her character so far. If she is really going to change, she needs to see her identity in her performance and not in some hoped-for authenticity that needs to be validated by others.

If your Peggy, you are looking for something that feels deeper. I would argue that it only feels deeper. Peel away the cover, and authenticity is a cask of vapours.

Don Draper's guide to parenting

I think just about everyone misread what happened between Don and Sally.

What they miss is this: a good parent-child relationships has to be unequal.

There was a great kerfuffle a few years ago when some minor celebrity said she loved her husband more than her children. People told her they were going to turn her into social services so they would take her children. Really! The thing is that she was right, although I don't think she realized why.

A parent who gets their emotional needs satisfied through their relationship with their children is a bad parent. It's not fair to the child. A good parent gets their emotional needs satisfied through their relationships with other adults, preferably a spouse. That way they are always able to give more to the child. Paradoxically, loving the child less is the more generous and giving way to love them. Anything else is just narcissism pretending to be love.

I read various recaps and see people celebrating Sally as Don's possible salvation and I am filled with horror. That would be deeply dishonest. As I've said many times before, Mad Men is chronicling a cultural disaster; it would be awful to have it end being just one more example of that disaster like Oprah Winfrey. Don does not need Sally's love. I'm sure he appreciates it but he doesn't need it.

The really important detail here, and I haven't seen anyone else note this, is that the real problem for Sally is Sylvia. That, and not Don's lie, is what troubled her the most about going to the apartment. Don has let his daughter down and now he has a chance to show her he can be a good father. That, and not her approval, is what he really should be doing. On that reading, her saying she loves him is important because now he is back in that room at least.

And I know a lot of people are going to hate this but the key is that no one, but no one, respects Betty.

Related to the above, consider two lines. First line, Sally talking to her friends at school about the death of another girl's mother says, "I'd stay here until 1975 if I could get Betty in the ground." She is at the age where kids often transfer their primary loyalty from their mother to their father.

I know, "But, but, but feminism, Betty Friedan, the problem without a name!" Don't care, Betty is a lousy parent.

Second line, Sally and Don are arguing about one another's lies to the other. Sally, as everyone notes says, that is more embarrassing to catch Don in a lie than to let him lie to her. Don's answer is, "So you just laid in wait like your mother." And then Sally says, "Do you know how hard it was for me to go to your apartment? I could have run into that woman!" She means Sylvia.

Before I go on, note how casually Sally accepts Don's characterization of Betty.

Okay, now on to the real problem. That is what upsets Sally and not any of Don's other lies. She wants him to be a father and not another child like Betty. And that is problem he pulls off the road to solve.

But how do solve that problem?

They talk about adult problems. Sally gets to see that adults don't know the answer to everything. That's important because every kid goes through a stage of thinking that being an adult means knowing how to deal with everything. And now she sees that it isn't like that. And then Don plays a game of pretending they are going to dine and dash. That's a scared child's solution and it's what Dick Whitman would do. The key to actually being Don and not the Dick inside him, is not being like that. And Don shows Sally that he knows the difference. If I am right, it is seeing that that makes Sally feel better.

Stray bullets

• I've said this before and I'll say it again, a good book to contrast with Mad Men is about is The Duke of Deception by Geoffrey Wolff. It's the story of a man who passed himself off as an aeronautical engineer despite having no training. It's a different story, which is why I say "contrast", and understanding how it is different helps to make Don's good qualities easier to see.
• I read about thirty recaps over the last two days. This is something that, trust me, I will never do again. I did because I have begun to suspect that most are just glorified plot summaries. I now know that most recaps are just glorified plot summaries. I can't help but think that the real point of most recaps is to save people the trouble of actually watching the show.
• This episode did not deal with race well. It didn't really deal with race at all. It flattered its audience and the audience are now patting themselves on the back for being so perceptive and wonderful and totally non-racist. I mean, it's not like good liberal New York City has the most segregated schools in the nation or anything.
• Ginsberg's cruel joke about Peggy's loneliness when he suggests that "masturbate gloomily" is an agenda item for her Valentines' Day rang completely false. Even to have suggested that women masturbate in a general way might have only passed muster in 1969 if the remark were made in an all-male environment. To say so of a particular woman who was your boss would not have been acceptable even in a locker room.
• Two telling quotes from recaps I read:

1. I beg you, Matt Weiner, please don’t try to make Lou sympathetic by revealing his wife is dying of cancer or something: In a morally ambiguous world, it’s refreshing to have someone hate.
2. This leads her to the offices of SC&P, where she runs into Lou, who is a piece of human trash who should be disposed of immediately.

The people who said those things, these are from recaps from the LA Times and the Washington Post, are no doubt firmly convinced that it is not they but others who are the haters. The second is the worst; what do you call it when someone Godwins themselves?