The World is Changing Right Now
Frank Rich in the Sunday Times:
What makes the show powerful is not nostalgia for an America that few want to bring back — where women were most valued as sex objects or subservient housewives, where blacks were, at best, second-class citizens, and where the hedonistic guzzling of gas and gin went unquestioned. Rather, it’s our identification with an America that, for all its serious differences with our own, shares our growing anxiety about the prospect of cataclysmic change. “Mad Men” is about the dawn of a new era, and we, too, are at such a dawn. And we are uncertain and worried about what comes next.
In his new book “1959: The Year Everything Changed,” Fred Kaplan writes about the forces that were roiling America in the year before “Mad Men” begins. It was in 1959 that Berry Gordy founded Motown, that G. D. Searle applied to the F.D.A. for approval of the birth-control pill, and that Texas Instruments announced the advent of the microchip. The year began with a Soviet technological triumph, the launching of the spacecraft Lunik I, and ended with an embarrassing capitalist fiasco, Ford Motor’s yanking of the ignominious Edsel. Along the way the first two American soldiers were killed in South Vietnam. “By the end of 1959,” Kaplan writes, “all the elements were in place for the upheavals of the subsequent decades.”
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To be underwater — well, many Americans know what that’s like right now. But we are also at that 1963-like pivot point of our history, with a new young president unlike any we’ve seen before, and with the promise of a new frontier whose boundaries are a mystery. Something is happening here, as Bob Dylan framed this mood the last time around, but you don’t know what it is. We feel Don Draper’s disorientation as his once rock-solid ’50s America starts to be swept away. We recognize his fear that the world could go mad.
Thank you, Frank Rich, for the reminder… with all this recession, political stagnation, and right wing extremism, I was forgetting to look up. The view is comforting.
