The Lost Country (Review of TV Show Mad Men) By Rod Dreher,

www.culture11.com ^ | October 8, 2008 | Rod Dreher,

[Publius804]

The Lost Country

Mad for nostalgia? Don't be.

By Rod Dreher, October 8, 2008

The most emblematic scene in “Mad Men,” the justly acclaimed serial drama now in its second season on the American Movie Channel, concluded an episode in September. Father Gill, an idealistic young Jesuit priest serving in 1962 Brooklyn, methodically removed all his priestly garments as he prepared for bed. It was as if he were divesting himself of armor, deconstructing a façade. Wearing his undershirt and his trousers, the priest sat on the edge of his bed, picked up his guitar, and thrashed out an impassioned version of a Peter, Paul and Mary song.

My first thought: Oh God, here come the felt banners and “On Eagle’s Wings.” My second, more considered thought, was something an orthodox Catholic graybeard told me after listening sympathetically to one of my rants about how the Sixties generation ruined the Church: “You know, the Sixties came from somewhere.”

In his 1995 book The Lost City, about Chicago in the 1950s, Alan Ehrenhalt warned against the way nostalgia and poetic memory tempts contemporaries to falsely idealize the past. Though Ehrenhalt chastised liberals who demonize the world of the Fifties as nothing but a nightmarish corseted burlesque of Joe McCarthy, Jim Crow, and Cardinal Spellman, he rapped conservatives for idealizing it as the last good decade before the Sixties ruined everything.

“We don’t want the 1950s back,” Ehrenhalt wrote.

[SamAdams76]

We tend to remember only the good things about the past. That's why it seems so desirable to go back to the 1950s - or early 1960s.

In reality, if we were suddenly dropped into 1961, most of us would be desperately looking for the time machine to take us back to 2013 within a few days.