Jewish World Review Oct. 21, 2008 / 22 Tishrei 5769

Mad men in crazy economic times

By Rod Dreher

http://www.JewishWorldReview.com | Here's something you never thought you'd see: a Republican president going live on national television early in the morning, announcing the partial nationalization of the U.S. banking system — this, in order to save capitalism.

As one economic observer quipped, "The Bush administration, which took office as social conservatives, is now leaving as conservative socialists." Watching this demoralizing spectacle, I nearly choked on my morning coffee. Should've had a drink instead. We are truly living in Cloud Cuckoo-Land.

Meanwhile, Sarah Palin (R-The Colbert Report) continues to annoy with her effusive chirping about how much, goshdarnit it, she loves the USA. She kvetches about all the "finger-pointing backwards" going on in the campaign. Well, she would, wouldn't she?

Yet there's a sense in which Ms. Palin's complaint is not just a political tactic but also reflects a deeply American sensibility. We are not a people distinguished by a sense of history and the claims the past has on us. We are the original progressive nation, an Enlightenment people destined to create a new order of the ages. Philosophically and dispositionally, Americans are pragmatic, optimistic and unrooted, hence our dynamism, expansionism and dedication to individualism.

There is liberation in this. From the beginning, immigrants have left behind the dead weight of history in the Old Country and remade themselves and their family's destiny here. Peasants who labored in poverty and oppression from time out of mind sired doctors, lawyers and engineers on the fertile "green breast of the new world."

The phrase is F. Scott Fitzgerald's, and it comes from The Great Gatsby, his great Jazz Age novel of the dark side of American liberty. Fitzgerald writes of a country corrupted by materialism and hedonism and the illusion that, in America, one has the freedom to escape the human condition.

"Gatsby believed in the green light," Fitzgerald writes of his tragic protagonist, Jay Gatsby, a self-made tycoon trying to escape his past. The ambitious Gatsby moved among the destructive rich, bound to nothing more than their whims and appetites. Daisy Buchanan compares him to an advertisement, which is true: He embodies a false ideal of the good life. It's a life that measures happiness by material wealth and personal liberty — which is to say by the absence of the constraints imposed by poverty and duty, which has forever been the lot of the vast majority of humankind. We have our own Gatsby in Don Draper, the 1960s New York ad executive in the acclaimed TV drama Mad Men. I have been thinking of Don Draper, played brilliantly by actor Jon Hamm, during these last few tumultuous Wall Street weeks, as Americans have witnessed the beginning of our own long disillusionment with the permanence of our wealth and power.

Draper, like Gatsby, is a prosperous nobody from nowhere who created a new identity for himself and inhabits it as if his lie were true. He is compulsively but joylessly unfaithful to his wife — Don definitely believes in the green light, though barreling through it gives him little pleasure — and she has thrown him out. In last week's episode, Don found himself in Palm Springs, lounging at an estate in the company of a nubile and willing young aristocrat. The rich aesthete invites him to become her lover, joining her jet-set gypsy caravan as they traipse sybaritically from resort to resort.

It's a fantasy of eternal youth, of endless pleasure, of personal happiness in freedom from bonds of obligation to the past or the future. Don is tempted. And then, at poolside, he notices a flaw in his cocktail glass.

And the crack in the tea-cup opens/ A lane to the land of the dead — so wrote the poet W.H. Auden in his bleak meditation on Time's power to destroy illusions of permanence. The crack in the cocktail glass appears to have broken the self-destructive spell bewitching Don's imagination. Or perhaps he'll go to even greater lengths to avoid facing the truth of his limits and his life. We shall see.

And for us? Perhaps the cracking of our collective confidence in the wealth-generating system will be a salutary reckoning. Our riches and the liberties they purchased were not based on reality, but on putting full faith and credit in the false hope of the Everlasting Now.

Where has that put us? Broke, with a socialist Republican administration borrowing unimaginably vast sums to prevent the debt-based implosion of our national Potemkin suburb, where the stoplights are always green.

Mad men? Deranged, the lot of us, for we thought it would last forever. So now, pass the gin, and brace for interesting times. Brother, can you spare a lime?