I rolled my eyes HERE a few months ago re: the lie that is "The American Dream" and how much its actually fucked over people for hundreds of years. And now we see a new article about Mad Men anticipating the decline of this so-called American Dream:
Finally, there are the two Donalds – Draper and Trump. When Mad Men ended, the idea of a Trump presidency was still the stuff of a wise-ass comedian’s after-dinner turn. It is tempting to conflate these two narcissistic, weak, manipulative, pathologically selfish, deeply insecure and eventually slightly pitiable men, given how much they seem to have in common.
But the show’s creator Matthew Weiner does identify a fault line that continues to be gallingly exploitable in American public life – there is always room for a talented grifter if he knows which buttons to push. Don Draper would probably have found Donald Trump crass. But he would have found a line, if ever Trump had wanted to open his chequebook. Because business is business. After all, what is advertising if not the ultimate fake news? Mad Men was ahead of the curve all along. But, like the best period dramas, it was a warning from history too.
Maybe not as spot-on as my own analysis from before, but you get the picture.
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