Is Don Draper the All-American dad?

Is it possible to be a bad man and a good father?

By "bad man" I mean someone who is the opposite of a Boy Scout: self-indulgent, disloyal and untrustworthy; a coward, a cheater and an adulterer.

OK, maybe adultery isn't in the Boy Scout handbook, but you get the point.

If you watch AMC's "Mad Men," you know I'm asking a central question: Can Don Draper — that non-Boy Scout incarnate — rise to the occasion when his children need him to be a parent and not just a provider?

Don and his colleagues on Madison Avenue make their millions by uncoupling language from its meaning. He's spent his adult life expertly reducing every emotion to a slogan, every desire into slick copy and every need into a slide show. The business of Mad Men is to create artificial appetites in an unsuspecting public.

We're told repeatedly that what they're selling is happiness and nobody sells anything better than Don.

To say he's cynical is to underestimate him: Don Draper is a moral vandal.

It's not as if he's trying to disguise himself as anything else. In the first episode Don lays out his perspective on love: "It doesn't exist. What you call love was invented by guys like me to sell nylons. You're born alone and you die alone and this world just drops a bunch of rules on top of you to make you forget those facts. But I never forget. I'm living like there's no tomorrow, because there isn't one."

Can a man who "lives like there's no tomorrow" offer anything to his children? Can a man who makes La Rochefoucauld sound like Mr. Rogers have a positive influence on the next generation?

We learn that Don Draper, whose actual name is Dick Whitman, stole the name, rank, medals and past of the commanding officer he accidentally killed in Korea.

This is not an auspicious beginning in terms of family life, given that a father traditionally passes his surname on to his progeny. The name "Draper" is, for Don, exactly what it sounds like: a slip-cover obscuring the past.

The character played by Jon Hamm disavowed his own tragic, miserable and impoverished history by creating a new identity when returning home from the war. He shape-shifts, morphing into an unprecedented creature, born of his own imagination.

Other characters, in contrast, are defined by their family histories. Pete Campbell, for example, punches the headmaster of a school after being told "No Campbell will ever mix with a MacDonald!" The head of the school rejects Pete's kid because of a battle between two Scots clans in 1692.

Nothing could be further from the life lived by Dick/Don, the self-made man.

Yet his original name — Whitman — is more descriptive of him than his assumed one. As a description of his character, it's accurate: Jon Hamm plays a Wit Man, not a Mad Man.

(And while we'll leave out any reference whatsoever to his first name, let's just say I don't think it's a coincidence.)

Don lives by his flashes of brilliance, his mercurial thinking and his conniving. For eight seasons we've watched him let down, abandon or at least systematically lie to every person who has ever loved him.

And yet a lot of people do love him, including me.

Don is deeply flawed and profoundly weak and nevertheless he inspires love.

I had a father like that. He lied. He was chronically unfaithful to my mother, to whom he was a terrible husband. He had a temper, inexplicable moods and a frantic need for independence. He wasn't around all that much.

And yet he charmed everyone, especially those who didn't know him.

But after my mother died, my father changed. He assumed a mantle of responsibility the way you might put on an overcoat — or a uniform. He didn't evade it or shrug it off. He stopped running away.

Like Don, he realized there was a tomorrow — and that he had to face it.

He had children who would be living in it.

What's important about Don — or any man, or any of us — is not about origins but about legacies. It's not about where you come from, or even where you're going, but what you leave behind.

Gina Barreca
The Hartford Courant
(TNS)

Comment by clicking here.

Gina Barreca is a columnist for The Hartford Courant.