“While foundation as roof structure may not create the most efficient tectonic solution, we applaud the geometric inversion and fresh perspective on the “form follows function” relationship. As a side note it’s always disturbing to see the finish details carried out with such haste in the presence of true structural achievement. Grade: B-“
Because you should be. (Seriously read this.)
The potential Times Square bombing got me thinking. I mean, it’s kind of crazy that it was just about sixty blocks away from my apartment, making it easily the closest I personally have ever come to something so terroristy, aside from that awful day nine and a half years ago.
I think it’s such a strange, weird phenomenon. That a man born thousand of miles away, then naturalized into this country – see also: ‘accepted’ or ‘welcomed’ (not to overstate the case: I can’t possibly claim to understand the Middle Eastern immigrant experience) – would want to drive a shitty Japanese SUV into midtown and blow up an area dominated, primarily, by billboards and the M&M store. It seems especially strange to me considering terrorism’s course over the last 100-150 years.
And I say that because terrorism used to be a very localized response to perceived oppression. Think Dostoyevsky’s Demons. Think about our boy, Archduke Franz Ferdinand. Think Algeria. Think Boston Tea Party. Think IRA.
Those are all cases in which a group of extremists, for better or worst, reacted to systemic pressures that existed almost entirely in their immediate vicinity. Suicide bombers, born and raised in Algeirs, attacked policemen in Algiers. Same with Moscow anarchists. With Basque separatists and the Tamil Tigers. And so on. Of course, some of the conflicts were intra-regional, as in the IRA attacking London and other English cities. But always as a reaction to a physical presence at home.
In light of the above, the rise of international extremist terrorism – which has been largely religiously fundamentalist – looks like something of a different beast. Except that, in many ways, I don’t think that it is. Which is to say that, the conflicts don’t really diverge from the ones listed above, they’re simply examples of the pool getting a lot larger. It now, effectively, encompasses the globe, which is how an attack on Times Square can still be an attack based on local pressures.
The only difference being – in terms of the vehicles of said pressure – the oft pointed out substitution of McDonald’s franchises for army bases, Chevys for tanks. Meaning that all of it stems from the great success and attractiveness (or marketability) of Western values and institutions around the globe. What does that say? I think the answer follows that so long as we stand behind our values (and I recognize the fraught maneuver of labeling anything ‘our values,’ and that, to the extent to which ‘we’ can agree on ‘our values,’ that isn’t even addressing the weird implications inherent to, and hidden in, said values (though I haven’t heard any of these objections explained in even a halfway convincing way by anyone anywhere close to a terrorist way of thinking) but which, for simplicity’s sake, I’ll suggest reside mostly along the civil liberties-political fairness axis) and think they are worth propagating, that we are winning in some way. Because, in all but the most egregious cases, we haven’t been imposing any of this on anyone.
Which is all very simplistic, and maybe not even getting at what I wanted to say originally, but there it is.
This post strikes me as odd. It starts out with your typical, straight up, inocuous US Weekly-style lede (“Don Draper is NEAT! Spread inside!”). The main early move is in positing that Don Draper is cool. Um, ah-Duh. This is not only true, but it is actually one of those unassailable facts of living – kinda like a ruler necessarily being one foot in length, or that ice is cold, not to mention the universal shudder we feel at the thought of living in a world that pre-dates the fake mustache (key word: universal). Which is fine. No problem with using that as an entry point in order to talk about Mad Men: as awesome show, as exploring surface and depth, highlighting social inequities, etc.
And that would be fine. But that’s not the ride the author wants to take us on. Rather, he goes from the lighthearted first paragraph (“Draper is suave and cool and awesome, etc.”), into an examination of us, towards a more metaconscious take on what it means for ‘us’ (and, I think, the ‘us’ or ‘our,’ really the subject of the piece, is pretty confused throughout, and alternately means men would want to be like Draper, men who don’t, women who want to be with him, and on and on) to admire, or aspire to, the Don Draper idea. He sees an odd tension in one’s admiration for Draper’s unselfconscious, sleek yet rough and tumble self. And then he makes two claims about ‘us’ (here defined as youngish, urban heterosexual males). He claims that we, for some reason, admire the unthinking mascuilinity despite our knowledge that Draper is, uncategorically, a really terrible person. That we admire him to such an extent that we would, if possible, change places with him. Like, right now. And he goes on to claim that the big hurdle in all of this potential place-trading (aside from a 21st century incarnation of 1980s Eddie Murphy), the REAL reason we don’t have a legion of fedora’d men stumbling drunk into their offices at 11 am so they can bang their secretaries until it’s time to catch the train home, is that it would compromise our authenticity. That to BECOME Don Draper – rather than just be him – would be to give up on some ineffable thing in us (does ‘soul’ translate into hipster?) that is unique, and one of the last vestiges of manhood. “One of the few remaining stable masculine values,” as he puts it.
His overarching argument – fed into by the two issues laid out above – basically boils down to two questions: how does the 21st century male own ‘manhood’ without being a dick? And how does he avoid dickhood without being a pussy?
Um, ignoring the rash simplifications about a ‘generation’ – itself a concept suffering linguistic stretch marks for all it’s misuse over the last decade or two – I want to offer up a word on the matter. I’d like to stand up – I like to picture myself in a PTA-type situation, getting called on in some kind of large assembly, the back of heads I’d become familiar with suddenly becoming faces, standing up slowly because I’m sore from the uncomfortable plastic chair – and point out that this is all kind of dumb.
There is a simple solution and it has everything to do with worrying as an activity that some people seem to partake in pretty much all the time. With the struggle to be who you want to be, in a completely un-Army way (unless, you know, you want to be in the Army or something). And it’s at the heart of what bothers macho-man Don Draper, and it also plauges the effeminate, real-life, would-be Don Drapers. The above argument is problematic on the subject of worry in two main ways (discounting the generation thing, again), mostly in its misunderstanding of personality, and in the argument’s own role, as perpetuator (I title I’m currently, by the way, selling to Marvel – probably for millions and millions of dollars) of this cosmic type of Worry that leaves people paralyzed, unable to do much more than read articles online worrying about being a dick/pussy/etc.
There is a necessary give and take to the process of building one’s personality. And that’s precisely what a personality is – built. Or crafted, maybe. You don’t – at least since the totalitarian-y pressures of adolescence – want to give up on the essential you-ness that diffentiates you from everybody else. Even if you’re the only person who can sense that difference. At the same time there’s a whole lot of of not-you’s out there in the world and you’re probably going to come into contact with some of them at most points along the way. And there’s a third element at work here, and it has to do with where you’d like to end up – how you’d like future-you to end up down the line, out in that big scary, world of not-you’s. Which is to say that there is no shame in wanting to be a certain way in that world of not-you’s, and then trying very hard, over the long haul, to be that way. The only shame is in the temporary pose. The momentary persona. Or, conversely, in not trying because that would be ‘giving in.’ If you want to be like Don Draper – a kind of repugnant figure, once you scrape away the sheen, with permanent, debilitating emotional issues – then do it. Just do it. Wake up everyday and try to be Don Draper, and go out and do terrible things, and labor on until you are just about as close to being the archetypal asshole as possible. That IS authenticity. Don’t worry about it. You can be an asshole – can consciously try to be an asshole – and not succumb to inauthenticity. That’s a bullshit excuse. But that’s not why you should avoid that fate. You shouldn’t want to be Don Draper because he’s so cripplingly rotten underneath that shiny veneer.
About the article’s role as perpetuator (and I know that the article is about more than just this, but it does come across, to a large degree, as focusing on issues that can’t sound anything but whiney): it simply is. There is a difference between being fully self-aware and being overly self-conscious. The former is pointed outwards and understands the self as existing in a system of which it is a part, and uses that knowledge to its own end. The latter is more nitpicky, and destructive, and turns inward in a way that can be nothing but unhealthy for the length of the internal stay. And I think a lot of this boils down to that difference between surfaces and depths. The fact that to the unsure – the worrisome – the confident look impossibly sure and comfortable, and they don’t understand that underneath of that is a stance. And by a stance, I mean a choice. The choice to, in the face of crippling worry, not succumb. Meaning that the natural poise of the confident isn’t so much natural – is even ‘inauthentic’ under the criteria spelled out in the article above. And the choice is not born of ignorance. It’s born of awareness. Of knowledge. Comes from a conscious assessment of one’s values and experiences, and the understanding that worrying itself is a kind of limitation. And one of the rock-solid beauties of being human is that habit transforms. You do something long enough and it comes to be. You go to the gym and, yes, you get fit. But a person can also pray herself into God, talk himself out of alcoholism, and so on. And one can choose their path out of worry – so often, even, that it becomes the default setting. Which is why being a perpetuator of worry is so troublesome. It’s solipsistic. It offers no escape. There’s only more maze. And, when escape is possible, nothing could be worse than more maze.
And this is now a lot longer than I had intended, but there it is. And to think I could probably have summed it up in a few sentences.
This is all we get. Don’t whine. Don’t overthink it. And try to stay awake.
TheMatrixOnVHS 