Harry Stein: What “Mad Men” Gets Wrong
… we kids growing up in the fifties were better off in all sorts of ways. Mad Men has lots of fun showing the Drapers heedlessly clouding their children in secondhand smoke and letting them run around in dry-cleaner cellophane. But in that less fearful and blissfully P.C.-free age, we also learned independence and resilience by roaming the neighborhood unsupervised and playing dodgeball at recess. And though it’s hard to imagine in a time when eight-year-olds are robbed of innocence by everything from Miley Cyrus to the smutty double entendres of Two and a Half Men, our TV shows—Wagon Train and, yes, [Leave it to] Beaver—offered lessons in bravery, honesty, and doing the right thing. In school, our teachers and history texts stressed America’s founding ideals and the remarkable individuals who’d struggled to bring them to life, and we came of age with a straightforward, uncynical love of country wholly alien to children today.
Full article @City-Journal.org: What Mad Men Gets Wrong
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