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Heather Havrilesky writing at Salon starts her latest take on Mad Men with this observation on suburbia,

The American dream, for all of its countless joys, has an inescapable mediocrity woven into its polyester-blend fabric. When you have bills to pay, babbling mouths to feed and a lawn that needs mowing, some essential part of your identity is subsumed by the hungry maw of family life.

Granted, for the most self-involved among us (i.e., me and you), there’s a spiritual release that comes from being trapped and tagged. Somehow, through the endless drudgery of whipping up meals and wiping little butts, we’re emancipated from the endless drudgery of questioning our worth and purpose on the face of the earth.

Observations like this aren’t necessarily critical in the negative sense. It says a lot about Mad Men and which the story line weaves together with its narrative of what has would become the great age of consumption. Mad Men looks inward enough; Don Draper a serial womanizer that has assumed someone else’s identity ironically has his wife see a psychiatrist. While these characters inner lives are important the show also examines the turns we took as a society. Sure the great 60s counter-culture had some lasting effects, but it was really the Don Drapers and their wives that were responsible for questioning the status quo. In between wrangling new accounts, changing diapers and doing a hell of a lot of smoking they were the first generation to wonder why things were the way they were. Why did they follow the great modern western civilization recipe for a happy life - well paying job, perfect house, perfect spouse, 2.2 children, the two martini lunch and a teevee and stereo to boot and still felt like something was missing.

The Siesta by Frederick Arthur Bridgman 1847-1928. Bridgman was born in Alabama, but by 1866 he had joined the atelier of Jean-Léon Gérôme in Paris where he studied art. Not an impressionists or neoclassical, he was something of his own branch of art concentrating on and best known for his painting of scenes and people of what was then French Algiers he was an American Orientalist.

Dissent from the Front Lines

When will we listen to the troops? I’m not talking about soldiers used as props for a George Bush photo op, telling reporters what Washington wants to hear. The military is disciplined and thus accustomed, from Gen. David Petraeus on down, to toeing the official line. But the Iraq war has also produced brilliant messages of dissent from the ranks that should cause us to stop in our tracks and reconsider what we have wrought. First, a group of sergeants came forward, and on Tuesday it was the captains’ turn to speak out.

In “The War as We Saw It,” an eloquent Op-Ed article published in The New York Times in August, seven sergeants summarized the futility of their 15 months of fighting in Iraq: “To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is farfetched.” After penning that crie de cour, two of the soldiers died in Iraq and a third was severely wounded.

On Tuesday, The Washington Post printed “The Real Iraq We Knew,” by 12 former Army captains, all of whom served in Iraq. It begins: “Today marks five years since the authorization of military force in Iraq, setting Operation Iraqi Freedom in motion. Five years on, the Iraq war is as undermanned and under-resourced as it was from the start. And, five years on Iraq is in shambles. As Army captains who served in Baghdad and beyond, we’ve seen the corruption and the sectarian division. We understand what it’s like to be stretched too thin. And we know when it’s time to get out.”

Reality keeps intruding on the Right’s narrative that they own the military. These thoughtful folks, the sergeants and captains would, one presumes be what Rush Limbaugh called phony soldiers.

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