Word: boomer
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...think that the ideological battles of the '60s have continued to shape our politics for too long. They haven't shaped the lives of the American people. The average baby boomer, I think, has long gotten past some of these abstract arguments about are you left, are you right, are you big government, small government. You know, people are very practical. What they are interested in is: Can you deliver schools that work? I'm working really hard, can I get some health care that I can count on? Do we have a foreign policy that deals with our enemies...
...sure that what I was exposed to was all that different from what Bill Clinton was exposed to. He's squarely a baby boomer. I'm sure that what I was exposed to was different from what John McCain was exposed to, because there's a much bigger gap of years there. But you know, the truth is that my education was a pretty standard liberal-arts education. So I was exposed to thinkers on the left. At the same time, I was reading Milton Friedman and Friedrich Hayek, and I was growing up when Ronald Reagan was ascendant...
Well, maybe not quite. But allow a baby boomer his memories. (To be honest, I probably didn't call them fat cats either.) And allow Hair--or so even some professed fans of the show have pleaded--to remain in the mists of '60s nostalgia. After a flop 1977 Broadway revival and a not-much-more-successful 1979 movie version directed by Milos Forman, the feeling seemed to harden that the Age of Aquarius was over and trying to bring it back would look hopelessly out of touch, even silly, in this cynical new millennium...
Nostalgia is tricky for TV, which tends to render it as camp, sap or clichéd commentary. Mad Men could have been another index item in the boomer-centric '60s-history textbook that includes We Didn't Start the Fire and The Wonder Years. The New Frontier. The social upheaval. The same old times a-changin' again...
Unlike the typical '60s reminiscence, Mad Men doesn't have a baby-boomer perspective. (Creator Matthew Weiner, 42, was born after the boomer cutoff.) Its sensibility is closer to artifacts of its time like The Apartment or John Cheever's Wasp-character-study stories. In Mad Men, the boomers are a market for Clearasil or the children of the Drapers and their friends, largely unseen and unheard. (In a new episode, Don instructs his grade-school-age daughter how to mix a Tom Collins for guests...