Friday round up

1. Two weeks missing

Two weeks ago, my internet went down. We somehow managed to zap the DSL modem and the Router at the same time. Anyway, I was down on Friday so no round up. The next week, I just couldn't bring myself to care enough.

2. Just stop it!

This is the just pathetic:

A study just published in the Journal of Bisexuality provides at least a partial answer about interest in specific types of threesome. Researchers Heather Armstrong and Elke Reissing of the University of Ottawa were interested in heterosexual adults' attitudes toward dating and hooking up with bisexual partners of the opposite sex. They asked 720 participants (a mix of Canadian undergraduates and non-students, ranging from 18 to 60 years old with a mean age of 21) about their interest in a threesome with two partners of the opposite sex across three different relationship scenarios—casual sex; dating; and committed relationship.

You know that you aren't dealing with a controlled sample when you see that they talked to 720 people between the ages of 18 to 60 years but with a mean age of 21!?!?!?! Seriously, what are the odds of your getting that sort of breakdown in anything even vaguely resembling a random sample?

Here is wild guess at what happened. The University of Ottawa is a downtown university. Now, if you sent someone out to do street interviews on campus, you'd get a mixture of mostly undergraduates with the odd person cutting across campus (there is a bus transit station on campus). That highly artificial environment could explain how they managed to get such skewed numbers.

No matter how they got the sample, it's useless and so is the study. If this was just incompetence, it might be excusable, but it wouldn't be unreasonable to suspect that the researchers and the people who published it at the Journal of Bisexuality just might have an interest in seeing certain kinds of results.

3. For what it's worth

A thousand people in the street,

Singing songs and carrying signs,

Mostly say, “Hooray for our side.” 

Buffalo Springfield                                                                                      

Apparently, it's worth little or nothing. Moisés Naím of The Atlantic has just noticed that street protests don't make a lot of difference.

Aerial photos of the anti-government marches routinely show an intimidating sea of people furiously demanding change. And yet, it is surprising how little these crowds achieve. The fervent political energy on the ground is hugely disproportionate to the practical results of these demonstrations.

Naím thinks the problem is that the protests aren't connected to any sort of larger organization capable of getting changes enacted. That is certainly true but there is another, more basic question, he ought to have asked and that is whether the the protests are actually indicative of anything in the first place. If thousands of people show up in the street to protest something, that merely tells you that thousands of people who probably don't have jobs but do have lots of leisure time came out. That tells you very little indeed. 

You cannot, in fact, even be certain that a protest indicates anything about even the views of the people taking part. Who knows how serious or informed they are. Naim cites one study that suggests that the answer is, "not very!" for a researcher who used social media to get 27,000 Danes to show up in downtown Copenhagen to protest for a non-existent cause.

It seems to me that is indicative of something about the liberalism of our time: it's a mile wide and a quarter-inch deep. Less than a quarter of Americans identify as liberal. That's a shocking number given that back in the 1950s most people did. The difference is not in the people but liberalism. The liberalism of our day is a shallow, empty thing.

4. Speaking of the 1960s

Leee Black Childers — yes, Leee with 3 e's — told Andy Warhol that he wanted to be a photographer. 

And Andy said:

"Say you’re a photographer, and you’re a photographer,’... And he pointed across the Factory to Candy Darling, who was one of the great drag queens, and he said: ‘Look at her. She says she’s a woman. She is.’ So from that moment on, I was a photographer.”"

The standard line on Don Draper is that he "stole" another man's identity. When white people take up the music, dress and other cultural practices of different ethnic groups they are accused of appropriation, which is to say theft. A while ago Ann Althouse, from whom I got the above, asked why it is that transsexuals are not accused of appropriating the identity of women. Are these distinctions between what counts as theft and not theft based on a consistent set of principles? And if there are rules are they good principles or stupid principles? "I will kick all short people in the teeth," is a principle of sorts after all.

5. Speaking of Don Draper

He didn't steal anyone's identity, not even in the sense that we mean when we speak of the financial fraud called "identity theft". He appropriates neither the original Don Draper's identity nor does he cash in on him. Don is looking to escape from, not appropriate. 

The Don Draper he becomes is nothing like the Don Draper whose name he assumes.

I think the show is really about family. It's about how your parents, your siblings and your spouse can trap you, without meaning to. (There are persistent rumours, by the way, that Matt Weiner's own family are not pleased with the show at all. Could it be that they think it is about them? They should!)

(Apropos of nothing at all, I have a feeling that either Rachel will return in the final season or someone like her.)

6. No I'm not looking forward to the final season

As I've said before, creators of TV series like Mad Men use the final season to return to their first vision. They start with their best but don't know there will be a second season so while they have a beginning and an end in mind, they have to stretch the middle. That complicates things.

If we look at Breaking Bad we can see the problem. The more that series stretched out, the less plausible Walter's belief in himself as a wronged man became. It became increasingly obvious that he didn't break bad but that he had always been bad. The accusation people make of Don Draper—that he is a sham and a fraud, through and through—was actually true of Walter.

Now that is interesting because it obviously was not the way his creators saw him. They saw him as a fundamentally good man who went bad and needed some for of redemption and they gave him that in the final episode. What they inadvertently proved was that there is something real about character and that a man becomes what he does. By the final season the original premise was no longer sustainable.

The case of Don Draper proves the opposite: that if you try to elevate yourself by adopting the traits and behaviours of people you admire, you will succeed. The longer the series has stretched out, the clearer that has become. But it is also painfully obvious that Matt Weiner doesn't want to believe that; his belief is that people can't change. So now he has to go back to the premise of the first season and ignore the evidence to the contrary that he himself assembled over the past six seasons.

Character counts and you could do a lot worse than following Don Draper's example.

7. In the beginning

If Jesus had never been declared God, we wouldn’t have Christianity. And we wouldn’t have the history of Western Civilization as we know it.

That's Bart Ehrman in a piece called "Why I am obsessed with Jesus". That's a dishonest title. He should have called it, "Why I am obsessed with Jesus even though I don't believe in him".

Now, here is the distinction you need to see. The above quote is what Ehrman does believe now. Here is what he used to believe:

For years — until about eight months ago — I thought the answer was simply that Jesus is the most important figure in the history of Western Civilization. So who wouldn’t be interested in him? And in who he really was?

Notice, the shift. The thing that matters is not who Jesus really was but what he was declared to be. 

Ever since my graduate school days in the 1980’s, I have thought that the historical Jesus is best understood (very) roughly as Albert Schweitzer had recognized: an apocalyptic preacher of doom who firmly believed that God’s utopian kingdom would arrive on earth within his disciples’ lifetime. I have spent a good portion of my last twenty years writing about this view, teaching it to undergraduates, and lecturing on it to public audiences. Part of my drive has been to “set the record straight.” Very few people outside the world of the academy seem aware that the majority of scholars think of Jesus as an apocalypticist. And that is important historical knowledge. So I have wanted to proclaim it from the mountain tops. 

I continue to think that this is the right understanding of Jesus. But now I see that this, in itself, is not the major reason I continue to be obsessed with him. The real reason was probably in the back of my mind all along. But it did not come front and center until I began writing my new book How Jesus Became God. Now it seems blindingly obvious.

Had Jesus not been proclaimed God, nothing like the Christian faith would have emerged. And we would not have our form of civilization.

And the obvious question is: Declared by whom? And there it gets rather tricky. Because to believe what Ehrman believes, you have to believe that this declaration happened very quickly. Otherwise, as he notes in the article at the link, the movement would have died out very quickly. That is actually understating the case. Their leader had been crucified and they ran away in terror. There were lots of other Messiahs crucified and otherwise dispatched by the Romans and all their movements died out. Something significant has to have happened right after the death of Jesus that turned things around.

And not only that, because of this thing, apparently a misunderstanding, all of history was changed. For the better!

Opposites explain: transparency, privacy and secrecy

I want to return to Esther Perel one more time. I discussed her previously here.

No virtue can be understood in isolation. By that I mean that you cannot pull a word like "pride", or "bravery" or "loyal" out and expect it to do the job of making us understand what is required to possess the virtues that go with those terms. Virtues can only be understood if we also have words for what it means not to have the virtue in question.

For example, consider pride. Pride is a bad thing if we oppose it to humility. But pride is a good thing if we oppose it to shame. Someone who does not care to protect their reputation is not a virtuous person. It is not humility to run yourself down by falsely claiming to be more evil than you are. It is even a problem to keep repeating your failures over and over again after you have confessed and made amends for them.

Given that, I think Perel's deepest and most important insight is what she has to say about privacy in marriage:

Transparency is the whole culture. The way a regular person tells everything about themselves on television. The way technology allows us to find out anything—99 percent of the people I see, their affairs are discovered through email or phones. But transparency is also our organizing principle of closeness these days. I will tell you everything, and if I don’t tell you it means I don’t trust you or I have a secret. It doesn’t mean I choose to keep certain things to myself because they are private. Privacy is the endangered species in between two extremes of secrecy and transparency.

I'm sure you can see where I am going. Transparency is a virtue if it is the opposite of secrecy. It is less obviously so if it is opposite of privacy. As Perel says, if transparency is not just a virtue but also "our organizing principle of closeness" we are going to have problems because our privacy will be destroyed.

That jars us because it doesn't strike us that husbands and wives should have privacy from one another. We accept and even demand that couples should have a shared privacy from the rest of the world but privacy from one another is another matter. Not much of it anyway. We all close the bathroom door when we go to use the toilet after all. Other things we aren't so sure of.

It's interesting to consider Mad Men in this regard. The first season episode titled "5G" was all about this issue. It treated privacy and secrecy as if they were the same thing and they are only ever used for betrayal or denial.

The key plot is the one where Adam shows up and confronts Don/Dick. Don says,

"Adam, that's not me."

Later, we find out that Don's privacy has a purpose that is not simply deception. Sitting at the coffeeshop, he and Adam have a conversation:

Don: "What happened to her?"
Adam: "Mom?"
Don: "She wasn't my mother. She never let me forget that."

Privacy is important because it goes to self-definition. It allows us to become something we ant to become. That something new might be good and it might be bad. The important thing is, you are allowed to do it. Your family, your friends, your past, they all can limit you. They don't have to but try telling them that. The people around you when you grew up, especially your family, want you to stay inside a certain personality. They don't want to let you be something else.

Your spouse too. It's safer for them if you remain within a certain set of parameters. They have a legitimate and active interest in who you are. You can't just change suddenly and you owe it to them to change in ways that will continue to make you strong as a couple instead of ways that will drive you apart.

It is, as Don would say, delicate. It has to be handled carefully. Those qualifications made, privacy is important and transparency is no virtue if it robs us of privacy.

Imitatio project: Human nature

The other day I was reading a piece about recent research about women's sexual responses. The research, which is pretty well known stuff, showed that the level of sexual interest women in relationships have declines far more and far more quickly than is the case for men. The conclusion the a number of women journalists writing about it reached was that women just aren't made for monogamy.

Now that is interesting for all sorts of reasons but the thing I want to highlight is the assumption that our moral beliefs ought to coincide with human nature. These writers were saying that we should change our moral beliefs about marriage and monogamy because women aren't naturally inclined to be monogamous. That isn't crazy. Morality should have something to do with human nature.

That said, it isn't hard to think of long lists of things that we aren't naturally inclined to do. We aren't naturally inclined to consider the feelings of others. We aren't naturally inclined to work hard. We aren't naturally inclined to exercise. We aren't naturally inclined to do mathematics. And I could go on and on and on ...

The point being that while it is a positive step to start thinking that the only kind of morality that is worth having is one rooted in human nature, it is silly to make that connection by insisting that we should only be asked to do things that we are naturally inclined to do.

Okay, now let me tell you about something that happened to me this week. Before you read it, though, you have to turn your sneer off. You are no better than this woman and neither am I, so let's think about what her example tells us charitably.

Anyway, this woman tells me that she has broken up with her boyfriend. And I make sympathetic noises and ask her how she is dealing with it. And she tells me she is doing okay. And then she tells me that one of the things she has done to make herself feel better is to get a gym membership.

That's human nature. To suddenly start caring a whole lot about your appearance the moment you are out of a relationship. If you've been paying attention, you'll know that women do this all the time. Not every woman does it, and not every woman does it all the time, but it is something women are naturally inclined to do and you can collect examples of it if you are so inclined.

If you're the sort of man (or woman) who is inclined to smug superiority or bitter hatred towards women, then this sort of thing can fuel your nasty tendencies. But what if you're not? What lesson do we take then? Women are naturally inclined to work hard on their appearance in order to get into a relationship but not naturally inclined to keep it up once they are in a relationship. Some women, of course, do keep it up. What's more, my observations tell me that there is a staggeringly dependable correlation between how hard a woman works on her appearance after she is in a relationship and her socioeconomic status. Such women are generally admired, including by other women. But most women aren't willing to make the sort of effort such women do.

Which is why we all know their they're special.

Which is why I discourage sneering. It's too easy to sneer at the woman or man who messes up. To actually learn from the woman or man who succeeds. That is daunting. And they have the same natural tendencies you and I have.

Imitatio project: Don Draper's Guide to picking up women

It's a pretty safe bet that anytime someone tells you that a sketch on Saturday Night Live was hilarious the actual sketch will be lame. That's mostly because Saturday Night Live is usually lame. Here's a clue people: it's Saturday Night and you're sitting at home watching late-night television! That's what losers do. Late night Saturday, anyone who isn't a loser is either out on the town or in bed.

Anyway, Don Draper's Guide to Picking Up Women wasn't funny even though I kept reading people saying it's brilliant. You can watch it yourself at this link until the copyright enforcers find it.

I've transcribed the four easy steps:

1. When in doubt, remain absolutely silent.
2. When asked about your past, give vague, open-ended answers.
3. Have a great name.
4. Look fantastic in a suit, look fantastic in casual wear, look fantastic in anything. Look good, sound good, smell good, kiss good, strut around with supreme confidence, be uncannily successful at your job, blow people away anytime you say anything, take six hour lunches, disappear for weeks at a time, lie to everyone about everything, drink and smoke constantly, basically, be Don Draper.

It's the last one that does all the work trying to be funny and it is telling that they are trying too hard, which is why it isn't funny. And they are trying so hard because they are intimidated. I'll go at these one at a time.

But first, a question: Does Don Draper pick up women?  Obviously, he ends up with quite a few but he doesn't pick them up. That's the first thing to note about his approach: he doesn't have one. Okay, the script is on his side and that is why women approach him but there is a lot to be said for this. The last line of the joke is, "basically, be Don Draper". If you look at the way the role is played, however, you'll notice that is what he does.  He doesn't go after women so much as he goes after the role. He is always trying to be Don Draper and he is always trying to be Don Draper because he is not, in fact, Don Draper.

As I've said before, this makes him like a Greek hero. Read the Iliad and you will see that Hector worries about being Hector. He has a role and he knows he has to live up to it and he worries about falling short of it. That's the opposite of what we are told today. We are told to be yourself and then we are advised to go out and pick up women, working with "a wingman" and a whole lot of other bullshit.

Okay, back to the four steps.

The first is actually really good advice. As a man, you should just shut up when in doubt and the world would be a better place if more of us did. Talking too much is asking for it. Don't do it.

The second isn't quite accurate. Don Draper does give vague, open-ended answers but that is because he doesn't talk about himself much. And that, again, is very good advice.

The third is kind of funny in a way that the writers at Saturday Night Live didn't intend. "Don Draper" is actually a very plain WASP name in an era when people have been trying very hard to have exotic names like Laetitia, Beyonce, Jay-Z and the like. There is a lesson here.

The final bit of advice is just lame but there are some telling mistakes in it. Don Draper would never say "kiss good" or use "basically" as an introductory clause. He usually speaks correctly, elegantly and simply. If he does something else for effect, it really has an effect because it is rare for him to do so. A related point, Don Draper not only wouldn't say "kiss good", he wouldn't say "kiss well" either because he is a man and not a fourteen year old girl.

Take away the inflation and deflation that fails to make this funny, and Don Draper is the strong, silent type and that is a good thing to be.

Imitatio project: Nostalgia

First thought

What do these words mean?

Because there are people out there who buy things. People like you and me. And something happened, something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that's very valuable.

Give up?  think it's the boomer vision of the 1960s.

They're the words that Don says to Peggy at the end of Season 3 to win her over and get her to follow him in starting a new agency. The obvious suggestion is that Peggy, having given up her baby, knows what it is like to lose her innocence.

The whole Peggy and her baby subplot might seem like a lawnmower moment; that is to say it might seem like one of those moments where the show just gets weird and quirky because it can, and "screw you" loyal viewer expecting sense. But it isn't. That plot is all about abortion. But the creators were too chicken-hearted to show an actual abortion so we got this crazy Peggy-was-in-denial-about-being-pregnant plot instead.

But the consequences were exactly the same as if she'd had an abortion. And thus her "abortion" is her loss of innocence.

Why is that the boomer vision of the 1960s? Because every boomer lost their own innocence sometime. It was more likely in the 1970s than the 1960s but the 1960s are the decade with the revolutionary mythology associated with it. As a consequence, boomers narcissistically  project their personal loss of innocence onto the whole decade. Some terrible event, the Kennedy assassination is the usual favourite, changed everybody so that "the way they saw themselves is gone".

Now the fascinating thing here is that Weiner obviously thinks we will see a strong parallel between Peggy and Don here. She lost her innocence by having a heavily disguised "abortion" and he lost his in Korea.

And I hope you can see the problem here. It doesn't fit either character. It makes them both into passive characters whose major significance is what happened to them as opposed to what they did. That's not the way we see them when we watch the show at home but I think it is the way Matt Weiner saw them when he created them.

Think of Don's return from Korea in season one. What was his plan? He has to have known that he would be recognized immediately when he got off the train. So why did he even get that far? Was he planning to step off the train and put a finger to his lips so everyone would be quiet until the other authorities were gone?

None of it makes any sense. And I think it doesn't make sense because Matt Weiner has always conceived of Don not as a deserter, that is, not as a guy who acts, but as someone nursing an old wound. ("Teddy told me that in Greek, “nostalgia” literally means “the pain from an old wound.” It’s a twinge in your heart far more powerful than memory alone")

Here's the problem, you can't disdain nostalgia if you like and watch Mad Men. The whole appeal of the show is nostalgia. If you hate the show, you can hate nostalgia. If you hate the fact that other people love the show, you can hate nostalgia. But if you like, even just a little bit, you can't do that.

So , whatever else he does, Matt Weiner has to justify the nostalgia. At the same time, he has to be true to the porogressive liberal notion that the past is so tainted with sex and racism that it is EVIL!!!!! and that the only justification for past culture is that it led to future culture. The old wound is what allows the show to both embrace and reject the past. Well, Weiner thinks it does anyway.

More tomorrow ...

Imitatio project: Revealing your shame

I'm down to the last of the limiting factors for my Don Draper type character "J.A.C.":

He has burned some bridges by admitting publicly that he has a shameful past.*

I have two (related) preliminary points to make here.

The first is, don't do it. Don't reveal your shame. There is a telling moment early in the novel Lord of the Flies, where young Ralph is talking with another boy. The boy asks him if he can use a nickname for Ralph and Rakph says, sure, "Just don't call me what they call me at school." Then the other boy says, "What's that?" Then Ralph, the stupid loser, tells him that they call him "Piggy" at school. Ralph is called "Piggy" from then on.

Don't, don't, don't advertise your weak spots. The other kid only knows that Ralph has a weakness because he tells him. And, just in case this isn't obvious, shame = weakness.

I remember, for example, a staggering number of women whom I met back in university and the years just after who would tell me, for no good reason, that they felt sexually inadequate. Or they would tell me about their previous boyfriend and the reasons that relationship had gone wrong. Not women I was dating, just women I was getting to know. We'd be talking and they'd just blab this stuff out.

I know why people do this. They think that saying something like this is going to make others treat them more kindly. To be honest, I've made the mistake myself more than once. But it doesn't work. In the other person's mind, it puts an asterisk beside your name forever. Even if the guy whom a woman has told of her feelings of sexual inadequacy sticks with her, he will always be looking for failure from her thereafter.

That brings me to the second related point and that is that a lot of good liberal types will actually advise that we air our shame. They believe that only good can come from this. But what happens when you do the thing that all the good liberal nannies tell you you should do and the results are negative?

The grand irony of Dick Whitman’s long exile from the world and feverish need to cover up his true self is that his greatest fear of discovery turns out to be true: people abandon him the minute they find out who he is. Just as Betty walked out once she found out Don wasn’t, in fact, a football star who was angry at his father but instead simply poor white trash, the partners of SC&P forced him out the minute he told them all about his Whershey Whorehouse antics. For a decade and a half, he’s lived in mortal fear of being found out and it turns out all his fears were well-founded, from his perspective. Megan’s the only person who stayed with him after hearing the truth of him but it’s been a struggle from day one for the two of them to stay connected and with last night’s angry monologue after finding out he screwed her over yet again, we find out that Megan isn’t quite as committed to this marriage as she tries to appear.

Tom and Lorenzo, who make the above observation, upon being informed that they have committed heresy against liberal nannyism, immediately attempt some backfill by insisting that this is only the way it appears from Don's perspective as opposed to how it actually is. 

But what other possible explanation is there for the rejection. This is just a desperate attempt to avoid reality. Tell people where your vulnerabilities are and they will exploit them. The reason we know Betty is heartless bitch is that she does reject him instead of admiring him for what he has overcome. (To be clear, Don's serial infidelities would be reason to leave him, but that isn't why she does it. She leaves him because she learns of his secret identity. And don't give me any bullshit about it being because he was "living a lie" because everyone has shameful secrets, including Betty herself, and she knows she does.)

Now, there is an argument that says that Don's weaknesses can become strengths. That is to say that he could turn around and claim that his self-made status as a man who grew up in an under-privileged home and made something of himself. And sure, he could do that but that isn't what happens here. Dick wants to shed his heritage.  You may think that he should have done otherwise but you're not him and it isn't your place to make the decision for him (that's why I call this attitude "liberal nannyism") . He's allowed to do that (as is Bob Benson, by the way, and note that he is far more of an intentional fraud than Don and yet gets nothing like the criticism that Don does.)

 I hear some thinking, "But why should he be ashamed of who he is?" The answer is that he isn't ashamed of who he is. What drives Don is that he doesn't want to go back there. You see that very clearly in Nixon vs Kennedy in season one. Don is running away from his identity not because he is ashamed but because that isn't what he wants to be. As Bert puts it, "a man is whatever room he is standing in". Don doesn't want to be what he used to be.

And this shouldn't shock us. Don's story is only a more dramatic version of what all of us do when we move out of the house and into town. We go to a new environment where the people and things that used to define us are no longer present to limit us.

College-educated white liberals always want to force other people's "authenticity" on them. They want black people to like "black" music and culture. Meanwhile, though, we always allow ourselves the freedom to adopt whatever persona we want. That is what is happening here, a bunch of comfortable white people are rejecting Don when they find out who he really is. Don't kid yourself about this, this is the way the game works.

In any case ...

In any case, the milk is spilt now and J.A.C., like Don, must live with the consequences. The thing is, he doesn't want to be Dick Whitman. Nobody does and only a spoiled child of privilege would be so stupid as to suggest that he go embrace his "authentic" identity.

The most honest account of this in all literature, by the way is in the Lemon Girl's favourite novel Mansfield Park.  It's heroine, Fanny Price, is in a position very much like Dick Whitman's. She comes from a family struggling on the margin and is sent to live with wealthier cousins. She is very much the outsider in her new environs. However, she refuses an offer of marriage that the aunt and uncle she is staying with think she should accept and she is sent home to her poor family in the hopes that she will learn her lesson.

Austen handles this theme with an honesty that no modern writer would. She gives us the full horribleness of a life of poverty. And it's not just a financial poverty but a moral and cultural one too. Fanny sticks by her principles but she does so at a horrible price. This makes Mansfield Park unique among the Austen novels in that it is the only one where we get a full glimpse of just how heavy the price of failure is.

Don Draper, unlike the many people who find it easy to criticize him, knows exactly what this price is. He knows the soul-destroying squalor that comes with "authenticity" and he isn't going there. (At least until Season 6, which is not only the worst but the most morally dishonest season of Mad Men.)


So that is where our hero is. Where does he go next? I'd better think of something by next Monday.






* The complete set of limitations are:

• JAC didn't have a strong father to provide him with a good example of manliness
• He grew up in a feminized environment driven by social policing and dubious sexual morals
• He has a drinking problem.
• He has a a lot of romantic baggage that he brings along from the past.
• The replacement he found for his first failed relationship is another weak and ineffectual woman who never grew out of her princess stage. 
• He has burned some bridges by admitting publicly that he has a shameful past.

I've written about them all in this set, just click "Imitatio project"  below to see all the posts on this project.

Imitatio project: more mommy issues

Moving along with my five limiting personality factors that a Don Draper type character would have, the next two are

• He has a a lot of romantic baggage that he brings along from the past.
• The replacement he found for his first failed relationship is another weak and ineffectual woman who never grew out of her princess stage. 

 I'll begin by throwing you a curve ball. There is an interview out there where Matt Weiner says his mother was something like Betty Draper. He said it response to someone who argued that the portrait of Betty is too negative. I wonder what she thought of that?

What do his parents think of the show?

“I think they love the show,” he said.

He thinks? They haven’t told him?

“Ah, not really. I think they like to tell other people more than they like to tell me.”

 Hmmmm?

Now read this:

After my first day on the set, I met Weiner for dinner at L’Ermitage hotel in Beverly Hills, AMC’s base for out-of-towners. He was outside finishing a cigarette. Earlier in the day he commanded, “Don’t say I smoke!”

Why not? His face changed, and he seemed about 12 years old. “My parents don’t know.” I found that appealing, though I could see him wince once he said it.

Those quotes are from a New York Times Magazine profile of Weiner that came out during the second season. Reading it, you can see that Mad Men is a mythologized version of Matt Weiner's own life. His parents had moved out of New York to Baltimore and they had nothing good to say about the city. Young Matt visited his grandparents in the city and did fun stuff like see Hair. So the home family in Baltimore and the fun grandparents in New York became the models for Henry and Betty and the fun grandparents in New York were the inspiration for Don and Megan's apartment in New York. (Read the story I link above and you'll find a rich vein of evidence as many of the things Weiner talked about unguardedly back in 2008 have since shown up on the show.)

So let's go back to Betty because she is the person through whom Matt Weiner is working out his mommy issues.

“She is an incredibly beautiful woman who married a man she barely knows because he looks good on paper. Her mother has just died, and she’s realized that when her beauty disappears she will cease to exist. She’s not enough for her husband, and she doesn’t want to accept it. She’s terrified of dealing with that problem because she cannot get divorced, she cannot be single, she cannot start over. She is somewhat puritanical.”

No, I don't think that Betty is exactly like Weiner's mother but Betty went to college and then became a housewife and Weiner's mother got a law degree and never practiced. At times Betty seems to read like the creation of someone who read The Feminine Mystique and then brutally forced history to fit the theory—that is certainly the way most critics read her—but she makes much more sense if read as the creation of a man who has not successfully blown up the relationship he had with his mother. Or, to approach the problem from the other end of the telescope, many of the things that don't make sense about Betty sound like the sorts of things a guy who hasn't outgrown his mother would see in a romantic interest.

Rebuilding the structure

So, I think we are in a position to understand Don better than his creator. Abigail, the stepmother, isn't real. She's just a  caricature and not a believable character at all. Betty is really Don's mother and not his first wife. His, or my recreation of him J.A.C., has a hard time relation to women because he has all this baggage of the relationship with his mother hanging over him.

But that still leaves a puzzle. The temptation is to say that Don marries an infantile Megan and that is his fault. I don't see that. Megan's faults strike me as very much her fault and not his. She just isn't enough woman for him.

Our era doesn't see that. We blame the man for everything. 

Imitatio: a drinking habit

I started a mint julep before settling down to this one.

There are very serious problems with the way Mad Men handles Don's drinking.

The big one is that it, like the entire entertainment and literary field, the show has not absorbed the disease theory of addiction. The key point is this: Addiction to alcohol or drugs is a cause and not a symptom. Alcoholics drink because they are addicted to alcohol and not because they have character faults or because they have deep psychological problems or because they have a bad habit of anesthetizing their feelings instead of "dealing with their issues".

You may want to dispute that. You may feel that alcohol abuse is a function of psychological problems or bad ways of dealing with stress. And you can believe that if you want, it's still a free country. But here is the thing: YOU! ARE! WRONG!

You're entitle to your own opinions but not your own facts. And here is what you need to know: every single therapy based on the theory that alcoholism is a symptom of other problems has been a miserable failure. There are no exceptions.

On the other hand, the twelve-step method used by alcoholics anonymous, which is based on the assumption that alcoholism is a disease, has had incredible success. More success than every other method of helping alcoholics live ordered lives put together.

So here is the question: Is Don an alcoholic? If he is, then he needs to go to an AA meeting.

This question has dramatic implications as well. Why? Because whether he is or isn't alcoholic has nothing at all to do with his character or psychology. It's like getting cancer: it's not your fault!

Now it is your fault if you don't do anything about it; it is your fault if you ignore the symptoms.

But that is not the way this show (as well as hundreds of other TV shows, movies and novels) handles alcoholism. It treats Don's drinking problem as if it is a symptom of the way he lives and of the way he handles his problems. And all that is, to use a technical term, bullshit. (Notice the double standard by the way: none of the habitual users of marijuana or LSD have any problems.)

Having a drink at the end of a stressful way is not a bad habit. It will not lead to ruin. It will not cause you to explode like a boiler because you have been ignoring "the root causes" of your stress. In fact men, who are more likely to to do this, tend to have far fewer stress-related diseases than women, who don't tend to handle stress with a drink.

Okay, I hear you say, but Don drinks too much. Yes he does. But how do we explain that? If we put it down to alcoholism then it has no implications at all characterwise.

I think the way out of the problem is to treat it merely as a bad habit. In real life, that is a bad approach because a heavy drinking habit is often, but not always, a sign of alcoholism. But the show can't have it both ways and, since the show has chosen to present Don's heavy drinking as related to his psychology and character, we have to treat it as a bad habit.

Implications for my character J.A.C.? He has to have a bad habit that he has formed through long practice that he needs to overcome. I'm not sure it should be alcohol because, for the reasons stated above, alcohol tends to muddy the issue. I'll have to think about it. (My first inclination is to go with something sexual because, in my experience, the most common bad habit men have is to stick with a woman they are having regular sex with even though she is bad for them and they ought to dump her.)

Imitatio project: so where was I?

Last Tuesday, I suggested that any attempt to make a more positive type of "Don Draper" than what Mad Men offers us is faced with certain limiting facts. And since I am starting something new here, I am going to assign these facts to a new fictional character with the initials J.A.C. They are:

• JAC didn't have a strong father to provide him with a good example of manliness
• He grew up in a feminized environment driven by social policing and dubious sexual morals
• He has a drinking problem.
• He has a a lot of romantic baggage that he brings along from the past.
• The replacement he found for his first failed relationship is another weak and ineffectual woman who never grew out of her princess stage. 
• He has burned some bridges by admitting publicly that he has a shameful past.

I'll deal with just the first two today.

• JAC didn't have a strong father to provide him with a good example of manliness
• He grew up in a feminized environment driven by social policing and dubious sexual morals

Let's begin with the show. It overdoes these things quite a bit. Dick's natural father is a hot-headed man prone to drinking too much. He also doesn't trust anyone. His adoptive father is a pimp. Dick's birth mother is a prostitute and his stepmother becomes a prostitute when times get hard. That's not just hard times, that's Dickensian!

With an important difference: Dickens had actually experienced hard times and Matt Weiner experienced a life of privilege from the very beginning. Weiner has no notion of what people are like. It's not inconceivable that a woman who says, "Communists have souls but they cannot be saved," would, in difficult times, resort to prostitution. But she'd be a lot sneakier about it than Dick's mother is in the story.

But it is extremely unlikely that  she'd do such a think in the first place.

A dishonest man lives here

The important thing to grasp is that Draper uses his past as a kind of mythology. Nobody else seems to have grasped this. They take his flashbacks as factual remembrances even though he couldn't actually have experienced some of the things he has flashbacks of (the most notorious of these being the flashback to his own conception).

And even this mythology isn't enough. Dick also has an encounter with a hobo who introduces him to "the hobo code" back in the first season (one of the best episodes ever, BTW). This hobo code is what gives him the basis of his own personal moral code. And the thing that code gives him is the warrant to reject his own father's morality.

When we reduce Dick to these essentials, I think we begin to see a fairly recognizable type. His parents both advocate strong morals but show little capacity for love and both show themselves to be hypocrites because they can't maintain their high moral standards in the face of life's vicissitudes. That sounds like, well, that sounds like a whole lot of people.

In other words, Matt Weiner has used all this mythology to take a pretty common childhood blight and distance it a bit so that it makes worthy fiction.

But what about the dishonest mother?

So these first two limitations are not limitations at all. That older Don retells the story of Dick's youth this way is a healthy and honest way to deal with parental relationships. Every young man (or woman for that matter) needs to confront their father's moral limitations.Father's have a tendency to sell you a moral code that is based on the way they wish life was rather than what they know it actually is.

No, Don's he problem is that he doesn't blow up the relationship he has with his mother. Weiner has a good thing but ruins with a lot of Freudian bullshit. His chief problem is that he is still fighting with his mother as an adult. He has relatively little trouble finding male father figures to relate to. It's his relationships with women that are a problem.

So our fictional character J.A.C. is still struggling with the his mother.

Imitatio Project: Some preliminaries

I'll start with a couple of quotes. First BobinCT commented yesterday:

I think that part of the ambivalence that people feel about Draper is that he himself is ambivalent. He really is trying to be Don Draper, but you never get the sense that he ever thinks he has succeeded. This goes back to Season 1 when he goes out to pick up the birthday cake and doesn't come home until hours later with a dog no less. Aside from the office,and even there increasingly, he always seems to be at loose ends. He's done the family things--holidays, birthdays, funerals--because that's what was expected of him. He thinks he wants to be Don Draper, but why? Why is being Draper so much better than being Whitman? He never fully answers that question for himself in his own mind. The irony is that his core, that which enables him to set himself apart from others, is pure Dick Whitman, from whom he tries to escape. From what we've seen in the flashbacks, Dick Whitman was a good kid, who suffered at the hands of bad parents. But he didn't become like them, something in him enabled him to rise above that.

And then something I said about Don Draper back in 2011:

Well, let me tell you about an argument I had with an English professor back in university. We were reading Lucky Jim and I was defending an unsympathetic character from that novel named Margaret Poole. After class the professor approached me and said, "How can you like her, she is a psychotic, neurasthenic b____?" And I said, "Yes she is but she is because Kingsley Amis made her that way and I think he was cheating." 

Yes, Dick Whitman never seems to succeed fully at being Don Draper but is that because the trick can't be done or is it because the show's creators won't allow it? This is an argument I've been having with myself about the show for a long, long time. I'd put it this way: Is Don Draper greater than the people who created him? Can we read this text in ways that the people who created it never intended but that is truer than their intentions?

The key to such a reading, as I've said many times before, is Roger Sterling. He is a type of character who is instantly recognizable because he represents an entire moral tradition.

There is a type of dramatic tradition—Japanese Noh plays and English medieval morality plays are examples—which possess a set of stock characters immediately recognizable to the audience. Such characters partly define the possibilities of plot and action. To understand them is to be provided with a means of interpreting the behaviours of the actors who play them, just because a similar understanding a similar understanding informs the intentions of the actors themselves; and other actors may define their may define their parts with special reference to these central characters. (After Virtue by Alasdair MacIntyre p. 27)

From the moment Roger Sterling walks into a scene in any of the first four seasons, we know where we are. Watch any episode and you will see what I mean. In the pilot, for example, Don Draper's character is drawn out for us in a few short brush strokes when Roger walks into his office and banters with him about the big meeting coming that day. We've been watching Don for a whole 10 minutes at that point and we still don't have any sort of grip on him. It's how he responds to Roger that makes him come alive.

And from that moment we are captivated.

The funny thing is I don't think Matt Weiner had a clue what he'd done in creating Roger Sterling. The evidence for this is that he wasn't a full member of the cast for the whole first season. I think they even planned to write him out of the show with his two heart attacks that season. But they didn't and all you need to do to understand why is to watch that first season—almost every scene with Roger sparkles. Weiner knew he had to have Roger, that's the thing about a stock character, everyone knows they are needed. What Weiner didn't see was just how incredibly important that character was.

A lot of the credit for this lies with John Slattery and he saw it because he wanted to keep working. What he saw was that a certain kind of moral limitation also gives a certain kind of moral freedom. Whereas everyone else (with the possible exception of Joan Holloway) had to be played with a certain ambiguity, Roger can be direct in a way that others cannot be. As a stock figure in a morality play (and Mad Men is very much a morality play) he is expected to have all sorts of scruples in his public presentation but no actual morality. Like Captain Renaud in Casablanca, that allows  Slattery to glory in a certain kind of rakish tendency: "When God closes a door, he often opens a dress."

Now the reason MacIntyre is interested in these characters don't just exist in fiction, they are essential to certain moral ways of life too.

So it is also with certain kinds of social role specific to certain particular cultures. They furnish recognizable characters and the ability to recognize them is socially crucial because a knowledge of the character provides an interpretation of the actions of those individuals who have assumed the character. It does so precisely because those individuals have used the very same knowledge to guide and to structure their behaviour. Characters specified thus must not be be confused with social roles in general. For they are a very special type of social role which places a certain kind of moral constraint on the personality of those who inhabit them in a way which many other social roles do not. (MacIntyre ibid.)

To get what MacIntyre is getting at here, think of teachers and police officers. These people fall in love and lust just like the rest of us but they can't do so when they are in character. It's not that they will be punished for doing so, though they may well be, but that they will stop seeming credible as police officers or teachers if they do this on the job.

There are many good examples of this in the first season. For example, in the episode which Right Guard is introducing aerosol antiperspirant, the junior executives start horsing around in Don's office. He encourages them almost as if he is one of them but he doesn't join in. He can't.

Why not? Because he wants to be like Roger, a point that is emphasized when Roger shows up a few moments later and he and Don go outside to discuss the Nixon campaign with Bert. We can see that the guys in the office continue with their horseplay but these two have to be different because they are under moral constraints that others aren't. Again, it's not the fear of punishment that is the constraint. The junior executives have, if anything, more reason to fear Bert Cooper's wrath than Roger and Don do. No, the difference is that if they join in others will stop seeing them as really being the characters they are. They can't take off their Noh-masks.

Now I could go on and on about this, and I will over the summer, but the important thing to grasp is that Roger Sterling is a sort of replacement father figure for Don. He is a certain kind of father figure that our culture rejects and I'll fill begin to him in a bit on Monday. 

Imitatio project: What's real?

I'll begin by quoting myself:

Which brings me to the Mad Men backlash feared by Rosin's colleague Seth Stevenson,

I’ve sensed brewing Mad Men backlash this season. Some whine that the plots are slow. Some argue that the advancing era doesn’t lend itself as well to stylish art direction. But the most common complaint I’ve heard is that Don Draper has failed to progress as a character and is congealing into a grim, awful man. I actually find that a fascinating development—I’m impressed by a show that, steadily over the course of several seasons, manages to turn a sexy pop culture heartthrob into a figure both reviled and pitied.

And there is a sort of impatience with many fans of the show. No matter how much they love Don, they want him done away with. Some want to see him superseded by Peggy or Ginsberg or some other new generation figure. Others want him to change and become the new sensitive man that Esquire will soon be writing about. The backlash that Seth feels brewing is driven by a feeling that the change isn't happening fast enough. Don just keeps being Don.

And I hope, although I suspect my hopes will be crushed, that he never changes. I hope he remains what even Rosin can see, although she doesn't like it:

By this crisis calculation, Don is the last honest man standing. Unlike in the earlier episodes, he is not stumbling around blindly. Unlike everyone else around him, he sees himself clearly and he understands what’s important to him. He does not care about a race vigil. He doesn’t care about Betty’s rules. He doesn’t even so much care about his children, as he confesses in that heartbreaking speech.

And all I can say is, good for him for being a man.

We live in an anti-man culture and that culture fears Don Draper. It needs to bring him down, to destroy him.
 
Yesterday, I found something absolutely pathetic that shows us why this pathetic era needs to destroy Don Draper.

“My girlfriend is a Mad Men madwoman,” says Eugene, a 26-year-old software engineer from Manhattan. “The show combines her love of all things old-fashioned with — so she tells me — ruggedly handsome men dressed in fine-tailored suits.”So how can modern guys compete with Don Draper’s retro-sexual appeal?

That's from an on-line dating website that also includes articles for men and women looking to present themselves as better prospects for dating. They have advice to give but, before we get to that, let's learn a bit more about Eugene and his relationship with his girlfriend.

Eugene, whose girlfriend is “militant” about watching the show (“She has to turn it on; she has to hold the remote”) says he’s definitely heard suggestions about adopting a Mad Men aesthetic. “She sometimes drops hints: ‘You’d look great in a skinny tie’ — but it hasn’t reached the point where I’ve bought a whole new wardrobe,” he says.

Eugene has folded a few retro bits into his look, though. “I’ve recently gotten into the art of wet shaving using an old-style safety razor and shaving brush,” he says. “I think she gets a kick out of watching me shave this way. I’m also looking into incorporating suspenders into my formal wear.”

I'm a big fan of old-fashioned shaving but notice why Eugene is doing it: "I think she gets a kick out of watching me shave this way". He's not shaving this way because it gets him a better shave but because he thinks his girlfriend likes seeing him to do it. 

I usually avoid putting things this crudely but Eugene's problem is that he is a total pussy.

So, what was the advice that the expert gave Eugene?

“Instead of trying to compete, I’d just roll with it,” says Isakson. “Find out why she’s caught up in Mad Men. Is it the era, the characters, the clothes? Have a good conversation about the show the next time you watch it together. Find out what she likes about it and then play off of that.”

If your girlfriend’s into the era and the clothes, host a Mad Men viewing party where everybody dresses up as their favorite character, suggests Isakson. Or learn how to make cocktails — a martini for her, an old-fashioned for you — and serve them up while watching the show together.

Incorporating a few 60s touches into your wardrobe is another way to show you’re paying attention to what she likes.

Have a party where everyone dresses up as their favourite character! 

The question we need to ask ourselves is what is it to really be a character? As opposed to dressing up like them for a Mad Men viewing party. Not to be Don Draper himself—because that character is under the control of scriptwriters who want to impose a cheap and shallow morality on him—but to be the Don Draper type. For, again, the people who write the tripe I quote here accidentally give the game away in revealing just how enormously appealing he is. 

 “He’s an observer,” says Isakson, who received hundreds of flirtatious messages from smitten women while posting as the character. “He stays on the outside. He’s curious about human nature but wants to be removed and not reveal anything about himself. He’s very guarded with his personal information.”  

That's getting there but most of all, Draper is a guy who does stuff instead of playing at being a character.  Most of the criticism of Draper is pointed at his duplicity and deception in adopting a new name and persona and his serial affairs but his appeal comes from the fact that he really does these things. Dick Whitman, unlike Eugene, is really trying to be Don Draper.

And before you get really worked up about how this is so terribly unfair to women, you need to explain to us why so many women watching the show get so wet they have to change their panties at every commercial break. 

I'll wrap up with Eugene:

Eugene, who regularly watches with his girlfriend, says pointing out Draper’s rampant infidelity is his secret weapon. “I’ll go out of my way to point out his sleazy cheating ways during an episode,” he says. “I’ll tell her, ‘I can’t believe this guy would treat his pregnant wife this way. What a dirt bag!’” 

But notice that Eugene isn't condemning Draper's infidelity because he, Eugene, believes in fidelity. He's doing because he is threatened because a  a fictional character gets his girlfriend wetter than he can. He's talking this way because he thinks this sort of talk appeals to women. 

Really trying to become something you aren't isn't living a lie. Living a lie is what modern men like Eugene do. If some hot babe offered herself to Eugene and there seemed little chance his girlfriend would find out, he'd be in her in a flash. Assuming he wasn't cowed into "fidelity" by performance anxiety.

Mad Men: Moving on from here

One of the signs of just how shallow our culture has become is the way all commentary on Mad Men dries up in the 24 hours after the season finale every year. At precisely the moment when we are actually in a position to analyze the show in a meaningful way, the news cycle demands that we move on.

So I thought I'd take a different approach to this year's wrap up: instead of looking back, I'm going to look forward. Here is the project I'm working on, imagine that, instead of watching next season, I decided to write a piece of fan fiction instead. If I were doing that, what would I have to build on?

The answer to that is both obvious and evasive. The obvious part is that our hero has an old-fashioned kind of masculine virtue to draw on.  He was trying to be a certain kind of man.

Now our culture both demeans and honours such a man. The demeaning part is the assumption that Don is living a fake life and needs to allow himself to be the man he really is. To continue to be Don Draper, we are assured, is to risk massive breakdown and failure. Keeping it all boxed in like that is, we are told, a recipe for failure.

Before going on, notice that that explanation is old-fashioned and wrong. It's based on nineteenth century pneumatic physics that was used as a metaphor for nineteenth century psychology by Freud. It treats our emotional self as if it were a steam-powered machine needing safety valves to let off the pressure before it builds up and explodes. And that is important to note because that 19th century psychology was wrong. Men (and women, for that matter) who "hold things in" don't explode and lose control. The better you get at controlling your emotions, the less likely you are to have some sort of giant character meltdown. It's the man who is constantly venting and complaining who has no self control and blows up.

As an aside, where this season's show went deeply wrong was in the huge shift from good storytelling to Freudian bullshit that happened right from the beginning of the season but especially in episode 3 "The Collaborators". Basing your fiction on discredited pseudo-science like Freud is to guarantee failure, so that is the first thing to thrown overboard.

There are some other things that we cannot disregard because they are facts of Don Draper's life. So as to avoid confusion, I'll assign them to a new character whom I will refer to by his initials JAC.* Let's start with some limitations:

• JAC didn't have a strong father to provide him with a good example of manliness
• He grew up in a feminized environment driven by social policing and dubious sexual morals
• He has a drinking problem.
• He has a a lot of romantic baggage that he brings along from the past.
• The replacement he found for his first failed relationship is another weak and ineffectual woman who never grew out of her princess stage. 
• He has burned some bridges by admitting publicly that he has a shameful past.

I'll analyze those one at a time beginning tomorrow.


* Short for Jules Aimé Costigan. I share a lot common with Dick Whitman. I was not an orphan who grew up in a whorehouse but my Grandmother was. My religious background is Catholic not protestant but, again, there is a fair amount of similarity. I also shared Dick's desire to become a newer, more manly man. That said, JAC is a fictional character.