Mr. Interlocutor

This is the second in what will be a series of attempts to explain what was right about Minstrel shows. I know, I know, it's an incendiary subject. But difficult issues are part of any genuine examination of virtue. 

Here is a verse (there are many variations) from the song most of us know as "Careless Love". 

Once I wore my apron low,
Once I wore my apron low,
Oh it's once I wore my apron low,
You'd follow me through rain and snow.

Now some things are obvious. Like the story: he loved her until he got her pregnant and then he disappeared. Not so obvious is that this song is of British origin. It's obviously been tweaked into a blues song along the line but we can see the British origins in the four line with threefold repetition rather than the three line with double repetition typical of the blues. But that's a subject for another day.

The thing I want to hammer on here is that songs like this—and there were hundreds telling this basic story—were originally always sung by men. Yes, by men!

This is one of those things that needs explaining and, not surprisingly, lots of people have explained it. The most common explanation is a feminist one that the songs worked as a form of social control. Men sang these things to scare women into conforming to expected behaviours. There is probably something to that.
It breaks a little, though, if you listen to the actual songs. In "Careless Love", for example, the sympathy is entirely with the woman. These songs also added a certain glamour to what these women did.

The reason why songs like "Careless Love" were sung by men is that assuming a role, any role, is a dangerous thing because people will take you for the role you are playing. If you play the role of being an easy-going guy at work, for example, it won't make any difference that you actually work hard every day. People will assume you don't.

And thus the reason a woman couldn't sing a song like "Careless Love". (An aside, the problem with a lot of feminist explanations is not that they are "feminist" but that they are simply wrong; there is usually an equally feminist explanation that has the extra virtue of being right.)

Every culture needs a performance genre that allows actors to put on some sort of mask and freely assume roles. "Freely" meaning that role won't stick to them. A man singing "Careless Love" didn't worry that that role would stick to him. The roles in the Minstrel show—which included all sorts of impersonations including female impersonation—offered that freedom. My point here is not that there wasn't lots of racism in Minstrel shows. There was. But that wasn't all there was. In fact, virtually every aspect of modern American culture owes huge debts to the Minstrel show.

And we still need it because, oddly enough, when we separate the role from the performer as happens in the Minstrel show, those roles become public property. It is like putting ways of living beside one another in a store. You can sit in the dark and imagine yourself in these different roles. Like clothing on the rack at a store, the roles don't belong to anyone.  They are there for you to take as your own.

That the roles are hollow caricatures is actually a strength in this regard. The more filled out, the less appropriate they are for wide use.

Don Draper—whether his creators realize this or not—does the same thing to a certain idea of male virtue. He didn't create the role. It was hanging around on the rack in the back because no one thought it had any attraction for modern buyers. And it is a bit of a hollow caricature.

It turns also out that it is a lot more appealing than anyone expected.

There is a challenge here, tough. He can't get too real. The role was only possible for an unknown like John Hamm. The guy himself has to remain anonymous because the second he gets too closely associated with the role, it will lose its usefulness. He seems to recognize this. He grows beards off season which has much the same effect as washing the blackface off.

Oh yeah, the role he is playing is derived from Mr, Interlocutor.

If you are joining me here, this series starts here.

The next post in the series is here.

Vimy Ridge and WW1

Although Quebec is my home, I am trapped in Ottawa for professional reasons. And Ottawa is not a  bad place to be trapped in especially from about August 15 to October 15 when it is at its best.

Today, downtown is all clogged up because there is a special ceremony to commemorate the battle of Vimy Ridge. It's a worthwhile thing to celebrate so it seems a little wrong to carp but carp I must. This stuff is beginning to acquire an aura of compelled worship.

Seeing this stuff, it isn't hard to imagine how we  could slip back into having official state religions.

Not unrelated
I remember about twenty years ago now being at the war memorial (one of Ottawa's few genuine architectural treasures, along with The Langevin Block, the library from the original Parliament Buildings and the New Train Station). Anyway, a group of young men had been dressed up in WW1 uniforms for the occasion. At the end of the ceremony these guys marched away and the crowd broke into spontaneous applause.

Behind them, a small group of old men in blue blazers and grey flannels collected their canes and walkers and shuffled off ignored. They're all dead now. They deserved better.

In the privacy of our conscience?

It's a familiar expression, "the privacy of conscience". Sometimes we even speak of this "privacy" as a right.

Before Holy Week, I left off the discussion of conscience with a discussion of Greek and Jewish notions of conscience. That seems a lifetime ago now and I was tempted to just give up on Linda Hogan. I'd lost direction on that project.

But then yesterday I was rereading the first chapter of book 2 of Sense and Sensibility and something hit me. I wouldn't say I know exactly what it's about right now and I might never know but there was something typically brilliant in the way Austen showed Elinor's moral reasoning play out.

Stoicism revisited

Here is an opening sentence to ponder:

However small Elinor's general dependance on Lucy's veracity might be, it was impossible for her on serious reflection to suspect it in the present case, where no temptation could be answerable to the folly of inventing a falsehood of such a description.

And we're off into book two. Try to imagine what it was like for a contemporary reader to read this. Most likely, you would have just returned Volume one to your lending library and paid a fee to pick this one up. It would be a lot like watching a television min-series. You'd break from the action a while and you need to be reintroduced.

It's hard to imagine how anyone could do the job better than Austen does above. We are reminded of the big finish at the end of Book one and put right back into the action. The place we are put back in is right between Elinor Dashwood's ears. Austen is going to spend an entire chapter showing us how Elinor Dashwood's moral reasoning works.

Studiously Uncool (3)

Ladies Room
This episode will end with a modern song called "the Great Divide" by the Cardigans instead of some vintage selection. Is this the only time this happens? It might be. In any case, it tells us that this episode ended up somewhere it shouldn't have gone. A show whose strength is getting the style right, should not use music that doesn't fit.

And Matt Weiner has no one to blame but himself that it does. He wrote it.

The title is obviously intended to recall Marilyn French's novel The Women's Room. That novel begins, "Mira was hiding in the ladies room." Getting out of the ladies room into the women's room is her first big step into freedom; this thanks to someone has crossed out the word "ladies" in "Ladies Room" and replaced it with "Women's Room." This change is meant to indicate her becoming aware of a change in attitude brought about by the women's movement.

By calling the episode "Ladies Room" we are meant to understand that this show will give us a picture of what things were like before things changed. And therein lies the problem because although the series creators have no problem creating male characters from this era who are admirable and worthy of emulation, they clearly do not want to create any such female characters.

The other problem with taking this particular ideological approach is that it requires the creators to portray Betty Draper as a victim rather than as a independent human being. She must be molded to fit the  Betty Friedan view  that smart college girls who became housewives were being smothered in meaningless lives.

The result isn't a ghastly mistake like the Salvatore Romano character. It's more of a slow moving failure. You just can't like Betty Draper. We're supposed to pity her but we end up laughing at her for being such a feeb.

To the end of Book one

The rape of the locks
When Willoughby procures a lock of Marianne's hair—and we never really know whether she actually says yes to his doing so—Elinor takes this as proof that the couple are to be engaged.

This sort of interaction seems ambiguous to us today. Perhaps we might sense something special about a woman willingly handing over something that was once part of her but that sort of signal seems to have no place in our modern exchanges.

Studiously Uncool (2)

Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

NB: I think that the fairly obvious goal of the creators of Mad Men, to, as the NYT put it, explain "why the 1960s had to happen" will not be met.  I think that the narrative got away from them and it got away right from the beginning. However, I think in failing, they have inadvertently done something else very right. 


The very fact that the NYT felt the 1960s needed to be justified tells us that something has begun to unravel. What I think the series does is to track a cultural tragedy. It does so successfully because it gives us two prime representatives of male virtue who by their very style expose the emptiness of the boomer moralistic fantasies about themselves. 


At this point, there are two Mad Men. There is the pathetic shallow failure it most likely will end up being or there is the potential triumph it might pull off against all odds.

Falling Man
The credits are perfect. The reference to the Falling Man is audacious but spot on. And it tells us something very important about the show to follow. This is not just a series about the 1960s. It is a looking back to try to make sense of events. No matter what the creators think they are doing, Mad Men is and only can be an attempt at theodicy. Like Chronicles and Kings in the Bible it is an attempt to give moral meaning to a catastrophe. Far from justifying the 1960s, it has to tell us how our culture went wrong beginning in the 1960s. If it doesn't do this, the series will fall apart.

The guy who plays Pete Campbell summed it up perfectly in this quote to the NYT:

“There is a large portion of America that doesn’t feel about America the way we did in 1960, and I think we want to know why we don’t,” said Mr. Kartheiser, 29. “We want to know what went wrong.”

I don't know where the "we" comes from here as Vincent Kartheiser wasn't born in the 1960s, but he is right. That is what the show is about: Why did God allow his chosen people to be slain by barbarians?