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Maddening Men

I’ve tried to wrap my mind around Scott Locklin’s Mad Men article at Taki’s Magazine, but it’s such a mishmash of bizarre statements and non sequiturs that I can’t quite grasp it. He asserts, for example, that “everyone on this show sports an accent that didn’t exist until around 1980 or so.” Really? I’d like […]

I’ve tried to wrap my mind around Scott Locklin’s Mad Men article at Taki’s Magazine, but it’s such a mishmash of bizarre statements and non sequiturs that I can’t quite grasp it. He asserts, for example, that “everyone on this show sports an accent that didn’t exist until around 1980 or so.” Really? I’d like to see a source on that.

He also says, “most people who enjoy this sort of program tend to work in similarly vapid ‘creative’ endeavors involving selling underpants on the internet, or doing the same sort of nonsense as the ad men on an interpersonal level using some psycho-therapeutic bilge.” Again, I wonder how he knows this.

Locklin writes, as I scratch my head in disbelief,

Mad Men makes the obligatory genuflection at the false god of the counterculture; making dumb nihilist beatniks appear to be somehow in on a secret that the ad men like Draper can’t fathom, when in reality, all they really have on Draper is an inferior drug stash. Booze and smokes, after all, were the background relaxants and cerebral stimulants of America’s greatest years. Booze and smokes split the atom and conquered the moon. Beatnik drugs are responsible for cultural innovations such as teaching second graders how to put a condom on a banana.

The only episode I remember featuring beatniks for any length of time, they seemed like jerks. How he equates “beatnik drugs” with putting condoms on Bananas for second graders; instead of say, Dylan’s Bringing it all Back Home or early Saturday Night Live episodes, is beyond me.

He continues in this vein while employing the sort of rightwing special pleading I’ve come to expect from sites such as Big Hollywood, while offering no genuine insight on an excellent program. He is under the mistaken impression that the viewer is expected to look down upon the characters and feel superior.

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