Donald Draper and the Cultural Revolution

Originally Posted Monday, June 3, 2013

Last night's "Mad Men" was fun to watch.  I was formed by the counter-culture of the 60s, though I didn't experience in the way it is often portrayed on television and in movies.  I lived in a sleepy southern hamlet where people didn't really cotton to that uppity nigger Martin Luther Coon.  I can't say that people were happy when the Kennedy's got killed, but it didn't have the impact that you might see in movies or on t.v. in my home town.  And they were practically giddy when King was murdered.  Governor Wallace was a hero for his public defense of segregation.  It was only through the pages of magazines and the images on the evening news and on television shows like "The Smothers Brothers" and "Laugh In" that I scented the changes wafting in the breeze.  Of course "Hee-Haw" encompassed the cultural imagination of the people surrounding me. 

By the time I left high school and headed "up to the college," I was doing everything in my power to widen the gap between me and those values that I felt oppressing me.  Nehru jackets and love beads and granny glasses at first, earth shoes and food coops later.  I was a hippy, a protestor.  You could tell. I could be identified in a crowd. 

Watching "Mad Men" last night was like living through it all on the other side, of being established and having mastered the cultural standards that were beginning to crumble.  There you are having done everything right, having once been the coolest guy in the room, then. . . boom!  Suddenly you are just old warts and righteous corruption and there is no way to turn it around. 

Or maybe there is.  I'll have to wait and see.  It doesn't look good, however. 

It's funny to me, though, as I've never felt that gap too much, the one between what you were and what others now are.  I transitioned, it seemed, into the punk rock age and played in a pretty popular band (there are recordings I may share some day).  Then, when I was Donald Draper's age, I married a. . . wait. . . so did he!  Even now, though, I don't feel much of an age thing.  Well maybe I do.  In reverse.  But not so much as you might think if you take everything I say on this blog to be a literal truth.  That would be silly.  That would be just wrong. 

Look at this photograph of le petit sauvage.  It reminds me, for some reason, of Brigitte Bardot and her wondrous ability to transition from the fifties through the sixties.  Bardot was fabulous, n'est pas? 

Here she plays one.  Here she is.