UP@NIGHT

…………..Mad Men Casting Contest………………………………..The Wire (Wikipedia)………..

Tonight Mad Men returns.  I liked the show.  I liked it before it became popular.   (It’s not The Wire, but then, hey, what is, except The Wire.)

But now I fear for the youth of the country.  The photo on the left–which I believe I have legally downloaded from the Mad Men web site since it is an advertising gimmick, which is in itself pretty funny–says it all.  You can be in this photo.  And it seems that many people would very much like to be in it, at least judging by the Mad Men mania among the young, many of whom collected in Times Square tonight dressed in period costume.  The photo on the right is of a group of characters from The Wire, a show that struggled to stay on the air.  (Its last season overlapped with the first season of Mad Men.)  It never found a large following in its five seasons, although today it is considered by many critics and viewers to be the finest TV series ever produced.  It is set in present-day Baltimore and one of the things that it is about is how America is broken.  It is highly unlikely that The Wire could have advertised itself by holding a contest that says, you can be in this photo.

Mad Men is great fun.  The acting, the clothing, the furniture, the nicknacks, and that wonderful lighting.   And of course the show is dutifully critical of aspects of the period that it portrays.  As a matter of fact, the narrative arc was apparently meant to swing from the uptight and hypocritical 1950′s to the liberation of the ’60′s.  But something perverse seems to have happened or be happening.  In our dark economic times the atmosphere and staging of the show are becoming the message.  And this message seems to be: it’s kind of okay to forget about how awful and repressive the 1950′s and early 60′s were if its artifacts provide the fantasy or eye candy that we need in order to escape from our own times.  I know, you are going to say that I am going too far.  It’s not the TV show’s fault if it’s seductively adorned.

A short personal sidebar.   I was a child in the 1950′s and a young adolescent in the early 1960′s, yet I can still feel the claustrophobia of the period.  I can tell you that offices were rarely glamorous.  They were enclaves of sexism and repression.  I remember working in one as a mailboy in my teens.  Men were stuffed into cubicles or small offices.  Women worked in outer areas as secretaries–a version of what you see in Mad Men.  The hierarchy was fixed.  I can swear that the men spent half their time either making passes at the secretaries or making juvenile sexual jokes about them, which were not much different from what I heard in the high school locker room.  If I were a girl at the time, I would have said “ick.”  (Of course, I couldn’t actually say, “ick,” or I would have been seen as a sissy.)  What about the clothing, you ask.  Let me tell you, when you actually had to wear this sort of clothing day in and day out or be ostracized for not wearing it, it wasn’t any fun.  (I had to wear skinny ties in a public school until the late 1960′s.)

Perhaps I am getting worked up over nothing.  After all doesn’t the show’s creator, Matthew Weiner, feel much as I do about the period?  But I am not the first to suggest that Weiner may be conflicted regarding his own creation.  (See Natasha Simons.)   The period is romanticized even as it is criticized.  Let’s be clear, the romance is a mistake.  The period was so bad that if I invented a time machine I would make sure that it would self-destruct before it could take anyone back into it.  From this perspective, the Mad Men contest photo does not appear innocuous.  It’s not simply suggesting: wouldn’t it be fun to be on a TV show.  It’s suggesting: wouldn’t it be a blast to be back in that time, when, to paraphrase Ogden Nash, candy was dandy but liquor was quicker.

This season Mad Men will present us with the trials and tribulations of a bunch of middle class folks struggling to build their own business in a day when the economy was still booming.  Escapism surely has its place.  But as we enjoy the accouterments of the characters’ life styles, I wonder how much time we will spend focusing on how far their world actually is from ours.  Which brings me back to The Wire, in which the drug of choice is heroin, not liquor, and upward mobility is not about getting a corner office but avoiding the coroner.  We don’t really want to watch The Wire.  It presents a political and economic system that is ill-equipped to grapple with depth of the corruption that plagues various strata in our society.  It doesn’t provide any eye candy and it certainly doesn’t hold out the hope of a world in which our homes and offices are bathed in sunlight.  If you are going to watch the fourth season of Mad Men, and you haven’t seen The Wire, it might be an interesting experiment to view them together.

So I was debating whether to announce my latest book, Transcendence: On Self-Determination and Cosmopolitanism, in a blog on UP@NIGHT (as opposed to just mentioning it in the “About” section).  There is enough shameless self-promotion on the web.   Then I received the following comment on TPM about my  (playfully critical) blog on Thomas Friedman (which can also be found on UP@NIGHT).   I thought it nice that TPM had recommended it.  The blog was meant to be pretty light reading, dashed off in a moment of agitation.  Obviously this fellow found something galling about it or me.

Difference between you and Friedman. You’re blogging at TPM (sic) he has three best sellers. Yeah, he really should get on your bandwagon.

The comment of this blogger pushed me over the edge.  I may not write bestsellers, but I hardly think that this is a criterion for condemning someone’s work, whether it is blogs or books written for specific audiences.

Transcendence: On Self-Determination and Cosmopolitanism will be published by Stanford University Press, July, 2010.

P.S.  I really don’t have any desire to see Thomas Friedman on my bandwagon, that is, if I had one.

There are a lot of reasons to be embarrassed about being a member of the human species.  Take the way that the “leadership” in Iran is currently behaving.   But then there are reminders of just why the species is worth saving.  Today’s reminder is brought to you by the Japanese group “Sour.”  Enjoy.

(Those in the video are fans of “Sour.”  The creation of a world wide culture does indeed appear to be accelerating, not one that necessarily replaces other cultures, but exists as a new “intracultural “space.”)

A nod to Andrew Sullivan for finding this music video.

Since this Blog began a few months ago it has been called, “Mitchell Aboulafia,” which happens to be the name of the author of the postings. But as the Blog grew in circulation, it needed something a bit snappier (than me) for a title. Hence, “UP@NIGHT.” (The author is a bit of a night owl, but he also wants you to know that he is working away at all hours of the day and night to produce UP@NIGHT.)

I have had some very nice feedback on the site and I hope that readers continue to enjoy it. I know that I have enjoyed participating in “the collective experiment” of internet writing and communication. (And it certainly allows me to be more playful than my academic work.)

P.S. My name will continue to be in the subtitle, for reasons that I discuss in posts below on pseudonyms.

UPDATE: August 21, 2008: On August 20th I added a little feature to the site, a cluster map. If you click on the map, you can see the locations of the visitors to this Blog. I have noticed that on the first day of its use it is not registering all of the visits, but I have been informed that there is often a delay (and there can be more than one visit from one location, since a location is an IP address).

In a television interview with Bob Costas on Sunday, August 10th, 2008, George Bush told the nation, “I don’t see America having problems.” The response: People laughed. “Just what planet does this guy orbit? I mean, really, no problems, George.”

Here is the strange part. George pretty much got away with passing this sentiment off as “state of the art” for a good part of his administration. We didn’t have problems. We had adversaries. Scary ones, indeed. And once we dealt a blow to them, we wouldn’t have any problems. End of story.

The summer of 2002, after the Afghanistan War had begun, but before the war in Iraq had started, I wrote an essay focusing on how there really was something wrong in America, how we knew it, and how we wouldn’t admit it. But it was simply too out of sync with the times to bother editing for publication. I reread it a few years ago and it still seemed out of sync with the times. If we could just deal with Iraq and terrorism, it would be morning (or at least noon) in America….

But now the essay doesn’t seem so out of touch. The war in Iraq is generally acknowledged to have been a terrible mistake and the economy is tanking. And this has opened the door for more somber reflections. So I offer “The Ostrich Factor,” here and now, unedited (except for very minor corrections and photos) from August 7, 2002. Why? Because we really need a major change of direction in this country, and we have one candidate running for President who appears to believe that if only we could just do away with Islamic radicals, America would pretty much be okay (with a few band aids here and there).

“The Ostrich Factor”

I can feel It. I am sure you can too. It’s no secret. It is there in the shadows of your neighbors’ smiles. It is there behind the strained avowals that America has become a land of solidarity since 9/11. We feel that something has gone wrong with America, and whatever It is preceded the horror of 9/11 and will not disappear in a struggle against its perpetrators. Certainly It is difficult to diagnose and discuss. And in political circles virtually impossible. Jimmy Carter was the last significant political figure who was willing to take on the role of messenger regarding It, famously pronouncing that there was a “crisis of the spirit” in America and a “national malaise.” He actually used the bully pulpit to raise questions about whether the nation had lost its bearings. For his efforts he was trounced in his bid to be reelected by Ronald Reagan, a man whose handlers told us that It did not exist, and that it was really “morning in America.” Of course Carter didn’t lose the election solely because he spoke of these matters. But his attempt to address them left a footprint so deep that no politician since has been willing to engage in a sustained discussion of them.

Politicians do not discuss them. We do not discuss them. We try to bury them as we do the feelings for an ailing friend. America is just fine, thank you. And soon it will be morning again…once we take care of foreign threats and get the economy rolling.

But the economy did roll in the 1990′s, and it was a high time for many. On this we can all agree. Yet if this as good as it gets in America, just where are we? Will posterity remember that we became the promised light on the hill as the Nasdaq went into orbit? Quite the contrary. We dreamed even less than usual of vital collective undertakings during these years. Think for a moment. Just what was our last great national mission? Was it going to the moon, ridding the country of poverty, extending civil rights to all? And who in power speaks of such matters in anything but platitudes these days? We laud past deeds and mouth vacuities about glories to come. We wear little flags on our lapels. But we focus on early retirement. And we certainly don’t discuss whether we have lost our way or if our collective life is meaningful. We prefer the of pretense of “I’m ok and you’re ok.” Is this what happens when great countries enter their twilight years?
A sometimes wise individual once told me that people will buy almost anything when they are unhappy. He was referring to goods, consumer items, commodities. There is no doubt a lot of truth here. More than may be obvious at first. For as any psychologically inclined type will tell you, when there is malaise, depression, ennui, anomie, insecurity, lack of direction, alienation, etc., people will find all sorts of ways to compensate, especially when they are unwilling to confront them and acknowledge them. One way is filling up one’s time with mindless and mind numbing activities, consuming for the sake of conspicuous consumption, for instance. Another is to give oneself over to mania or frenzy–Dow 20,000. Another is to find demons to blame for whatever may be making you feel uncomfortable. The latter may be an especially congenial path if you have spent most of your adult life deeply accustomed to fending off a powerful and dangerous adversary such as the Soviet Union. As a matter of fact, our attitude toward “It” appears to be coupled with our attitude toward adversaries. Allow me a seeming digression.

When was the last time that you counted the number of wars that we have been involved in over the last fifty years? There was the Korean War and the Cold War, the latter some forty years long. There was the war in Vietnam, in the Gulf, in Grenada, assorted military actions, countless proxy wars, and now a war in Afghanistan, a war on terrorism, and maybe a war in Iraq. However, it seems that foreign nationals are not our only adversaries, for we have also had wars on drugs, poverty, cancer, organized crime, etc. We have had a lot of wars. I know, some will say this comes with superpower territory. And surely many of them were necessary, you will say. But I say, we seem to have a difficult time thinking about problems and getting motivated to do something about them without framing our response in terms of war. There are surely historical and cultural explanations for this phenomenon. I will leave them to the side here. I will say that whatever else our track record shows, it shows that we have often exhibited a rather peculiar mind set since the end of the second world war. Think about it, a war on drugs, a war on poverty, a war on cancer, etc. It’s really quite a strange way to approach these problems. Yet we have come to take it for granted. If we have a problem, we throw a war at It.

This brings us back to It. We are a practical people. We like to draw the lines in the sand. We like to solve problems. We like to move on. But no one seems to know where we should be going. The frontier is dead and the New Frontier turned out to be a bust. We live from pay check to the promise of a comfortable retirement. We feel that something is deeply wrong but can’t put our finger on It. How then will we deal with It? What will be our response? To even acknowledge that we have lost our way has come to seem unpatriotic, a denial that it is morning in America. Surely there will be a temptation to handle it by moving into familiar territory. And war I am afraid is very familiar territory. If I were living in Iraq right now, I would be losing a lot of sleep, because Americans are losing a lot of sleep, and they don’t know why, and they are not discussing it. One thing is for certain, however, whatever It is will not go away with the defeat of Saddam Hussein or any other two bit villain.