Mad Men: Penultimate
So, I was wrong about Don Draper’s deep, dark secret. It’s not that he’s Jewish. (I tip my hat to Max.) But what, exactly, is it? What did Dick Whitman do in Korea? All right, he switched dog tags with his lieutenant officer, the real Don Draper. That’s certainly some kind of infraction. But it’s not desertion. Whatever his name, he still deserved the Purple Heart – I think. It was unclear: did the dropped cigarette lighter cause the explosion, or was it enemy gunfire? Next week: the season finale, when all is sure to be made even murkier still.
I’m not talking about the water-cooler full of crème-de-menthe when I say that the election-night party at Sterling, Cooper must have been an eye-opener for our younger demographic, to whom it may never have occurred before that anybody actually voted for Dick Nixon in 1960, much less wanted him to be President. Didn’t everyone know that Camelot was rising in the mists?
(I remember my father’s boasting that he was the only man in Bronxville who voted for Kennedy. He would continue this boast by insisting that his vote had nothing to do with shared Irish Catholicism, and certainly not with the fact that the Kennedys had lived in Bronxville, too, for a while. No, my father voted for a natural-gas-pipelines-friendly plank that LBJ brought to the party. Or so he said. My mother’s enthusiasm was more genuine. I don’t think she knew or cared a thing about Jack, but from day one she self-mockingly worshiped “Zhock-a-leen.” Despite their equestrienne girlhoods, my mother and the First Lady shared a powerful streak of American aspiration.)
Kathleen says that that Mad Men is by the far the most interesting television program that she has ever seen, “aside from Masterpiece Theatre and such.” And that’s the beauty part. Finally, American television is cranking out top-drawer shows the likes of which we’ve been importing from Britain since the repeal of the Stamp Act.