‘Mad Men,’ the sixties and the culture war over health carepolitics

The current emotional polarization around health care reform is not so much about specific issues – rising medical costs, reprehensible insurance industry practices, the number of uninsured. It reflects a deep division in American culture that began in the sixties.

Forty years after Woodstock, it’s clear that a major shift happened in that decade, politically, socially and psychologically. Despite the communal love fest, Americans had begun “bowling alone.” Crime rates started to rise, as did divorce rates. Quite suddenly, in 1965, a vast majority of people stopped identifying themselves as Democrats or Republicans and became Independents.

As we lost the moderate center, the country began to square off into “right wing” conservatives and the “liberal elite.” There was a massive loss of trust in institutions: government, corporations, and professions, including doctors and scientists.

And here we are today, watching the extremist behavior at recent town hall meetings on cable TV, still fighting the culture wars that started in the sixties. This time it threatens to derail health care reform.

A summer of death threats and fanatics packing guns

Frank Rich has an excellent essay on Woodstock, “Mad Men,” and the sixties in New York Times.

[W]hat most endures from America, 1969, is not the peace-and-love flower-power bacchanal of Woodstock legend but a certain style of political rage. The angry white folk shouting down their congressmen might be — literally in some cases — those angry white students whose protests disrupted campuses before and after the Woodstock interlude of summer vacation ’69. …

What makes the show [“Mad Men”] powerful is not nostalgia for an America that few want to bring back — where women were most valued as sex objects or subservient housewives, where blacks were, at best, second-class citizens, and where the hedonistic guzzling of gas and gin went unquestioned. Rather, it’s our identification with an America that, for all its serious differences with our own, shares our growing anxiety about the prospect of cataclysmic change. “Mad Men” is about the dawn of a new era, and we, too, are at such a dawn. And we are uncertain and worried about what comes next. …

The ad hyping the season premiere depicts the impeccably dressed Don Draper, the agency executive played by Jon Hamm, sitting in his office calmly smoking a Lucky Strike as floodwater rises to his waist.

To be underwater — well, many Americans know what that’s like right now. But we are also at that 1963-like pivot point of our history, with a new young president unlike any we’ve seen before, and with the promise of a new frontier whose boundaries are a mystery. Something is happening here, as Bob Dylan framed this mood the last time around, but you don’t know what it is. We feel Don Draper’s disorientation as his once rock-solid ’50s America starts to be swept away. We recognize his fear that the world could go mad. …

The political rage at the young, liberal Kennedy administration in some quarters that year [1963] was rabid and ominous. When Adlai Stevenson, then ambassador to the United Nations, spoke in Dallas that October, jeering zealots spat on him and struck him with a picketer’s placard. Stevenson advised Kennedy against traveling there. Dallas rushed to draft a new city ordinance restricting protesters’ movements at lawful assemblies and passed it on Nov. 18. We need not watch “Mad Men” to learn how that turned out.

Oh, to be back in the idyllic summer of 1969, when the biggest sin committed by the rebellious mobs at Woodstock was getting stoned. Something else is happening here in our anxious summer of 2009, when instead of flower-power and free love there are reports of death threats and fanatics packing guns.

Sources:

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Frank Rich, ‘Mad Men’ Crashes Woodstock’s Birthday, The New York Times, August 15, 2009