First off, let me say how happy (and relieved) I am to have Pete back. He is (I’m not kidding or exaggerating) the most astute and courageous commentator on American politics these days.

And Carl’s most recent musings on “Imagine” are more like a book than a blog. Join me in begging him to put all his musico-political essays into book form.

John-Paul Spiro of Villanova (who vindicates his university’s singularly excellent humanities program by showing that only a deep liberal education makes real commentary on pop culture possible) and I present a more elaborate attempt to show how Mad Men tells us a lot about who we are. One especially astute criticism of our effort is that part of the selective nostalgia for the way of life presented in the early episodes of the series should have included that work just used to be less careerist and more fun. There was even an upside to all that casual smoking and drinking.

There’s undeniable progress at the workplace through the Sixties and Seventies, as positions of creative leadership become open to previously excluded Americans, and things are generally better when it comes to justice, health, safety, relational autonomy, and productivity. But when it comes to truth, personal character, and personal happiness, the record is more mixed. The show seems to end with the insight that there’s nothing about techno-progress (especially via the screen) that makes it either more likely or less possible for the one true progress to occur in the particular lives of free and relational persons.

In general, we reform conservatives deploy selective nostalgia to determine how things have been getting both better and worse. And we don’t really buy the claim that the Google campus is more fun (even with the free pudding and child care) that Sterling Cooper was in 1960. We can even see that the sexism of Sterling Cooper has been displaced by the ageism of Silicon Valley. John Lennon’s imagining is a long distance from the real-life imperative these days to remain “forever young.” The mad men in suits in New York were, in several ways, more casual and less tamed than the men and women always in jeans in California.