Why do we love Mad Men?
In some ways, I’m sure it’s the same reason we’ll watch Saving Private Ryan or John Wayne movies. It speaks to a time when America wasn’t perfect, but won as if to spite its own deficiencies.
Our exceptionalism was the only reality—the spoils went to the victor, and we were the victors.
Quite simply, it gives many people an hour each week to look back on the not-so-distant past and forget about the gloomy horizon.
In the 1960s , the United States led the world and the sky was the limit; nothing could stop it. Don Draper may have been a misogynist and an alcoholic, but he provided a home safe from the force of foreclosure.
Today, that promise is gone. It turns out that when you shoot for the stars, the fall can be rather harsh.
The concern for me isn’t the fall, though. Lady Liberty has taken some hits on the jaw in the past; she witnessed the Arizona sink and the Twin Towers tumble. The real issue today is our inability to get up, to rally behind the flag and charge forward as we have before.
To anyone who has looked for a job in the past three years, I’m not saying anything revelatory. The economy still hasn’t gotten back up from its great fall in 2008.
As a result, many of you won’t live a better life than your parents. You’ve spent all this money and taken out all those loans for a piece of paper with strings attached, but no promises—seemingly the definition of a toxic relationship.
Meanwhile, those of you who are lucky enough to find a job will face the pressures of an immobile job market. You don’t, and most likely won’t, have options, but your potential employers do. They can skimp on compensation and benefits with little, or no, risk of loss.
It would be easy to point a crooked finger at business for these problems, but at the end of the day the businesses are just the endpoint of our capitalist system. The incentives and pressures to create good, well-compensated jobs, thinking back to Draper, simply don’t exist with our lady still lying on the mat. No homework or shovel-ready project is going to fix that.
This issue has kept me up at night for a while now, but it just seems to be getting worse. It’s gotten to the point where I really can’t find anyone, young or old, who seems to think we’re diverging from woe.
As my mother so eloquently put it after reading a story saying only six percent of Americans think things are looking up, “Where did they find the six percent?”
Our grandparents lived in a world where Pan American wasn’t a nostalgic TV show; it was part of the pantheon of American enterprise. Main Street was packed with shiny cars and the mailman delivered every day, come hell or high water.
It was not just a mad advertisement; it was the promise of an America on the rise. It was the idea of a home-cooked meal and brighter tomorrows.
It sounds ridiculously cliché today, but it was genuine not too long ago. Perhaps that’s why we’re looking back—there seems to be nothing to look forward to.
