Shut the door, have a seat

In rewatching Mad Men episodes on a random basis, I had hoped to force myself to rethink the whole series and not simply rewatch the shows I liked the most. My favourite episodes, after all, are the ones most likely to confirm rather than challenge my views. As a consequence, I felt a slight twinge of regret when the random number generator gave me one of my favourite episodes of the entire series for the second show to watch. It's not only great television, it's Don Draper at his best. What we see here is the stuff of heroism. But there's more! We also see the show making a deeply important point about politics and morality.

Because there are people out there who buy things. People like you and me. And something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves ... is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that's very valuable.

The heart of conservatism is an understanding of loss. Conservatives understand that loss is inevitable and that it changes us and not just the circumstances of our lives. From the outside, conservatism can be seen as trying to retain all of the past but it's never that. That's simple traditionalism. Conservatives recognize that we will suffer loss and we will be changed by it and that understanding that is the key to moving forward. And you see that in the rather cryptic statement that Don makes to Peggy when recruiting her to move to the new agency with him.

It happens during an oddly quiet moment of an otherwise fast-paced episode.

The change of self that goes with loss helps explain Don's comment to Betty that "Mourning is just extended self pity," back in season 1. That sticks in a lot of people's craws. It is an overstatement. A more accurate version would be, "Mourning is often only extended self pity." That's certainly what we saw in the way many characters responded to the Kennedy assassination and to the death of Marylin Monroe. Nowadays, we see horrible displays of narcissism in response to every mass shooting.

It's certainly what's in the air today following the shooting of Dallas police officers during a Black Lives Matter protest. We wake up and see that our world has changed and it has changed in ugly ways such that we ourselves have lost something even though we don't know any of the people involved. And the way we saw ourselves ... is gone.

But how do we avoid mere narcissism?

The biggest danger is to feel we are entitled to get back what we lost. That is what drives men in the best neo-noir films. One of the things that makes Don Draper such a good role model (although he is rarely recognized as such) is his willingness to cut his losses. When something is gone, he lets it go. He doesn't come to these recognitions easily. That Betty is a bad wife takes him a long time to face and he can never fully shake the emotions that go with her, although his initial reaction is anger, an anger driven by the feeling that he should be able to control his life, he comes to recognize that he cannot control what happens to him and that she needs to be let go and, much more importantly, he acts on it.

At the same time, he looks to his past for ideals to uphold. Although we call the scenes where Don remembers "flashbacks" they aren't that. They are stories he tells himself, as we all do. The historical accuracy of such stories is less important than the fact that we tell them and keep telling them. It is the retelling of the story that confers value.

The particular story Don tells himself here is important not just for him but for all of us who grew up with distant fathers or with no father at all. Nostalgia is often a feeling for what we never had or only had brief glimpses of rather than for something we had fully and then lost. For many in my generation, that is the relationship we have with our fathers. As boys, we'd watch television shows in which fathers played catch with their sons and wondered what we did wrong because nothing like that ever happened to us. But we loved this distant man anyway and when he was gone we needed some continuity. We couldn't hold on to what we never really had but we needed to find something in him to carry on. Don does that this episode and its beautiful and good.

Okay, now for some disillusionment for those who think the series is historically accurate. Conrad Hilton did not hold the kinds of beliefs that the character with his name does in the series. But that's okay because he acts like a father figure for Don. There is a symmetry between Don finding Conrad and Betty finding Henry. Both are like magical father figures. As typically happens in the series, Don reveals himself to be an adult and Betty reveals herself to be a child. And it is through that interaction that Don evaluates his real father and decides where the continuity and disjunction should be.

You can't live your life reacting to your father. You have to become your own man and you'll nevr do that so long as you are angry at him. Don finds a value in his father that he can treasure. He doesn't become him or even try to.

Television doesn't get any better than this.