Steve Sailer writes: With Mad Men finally going away, it’s worth noting again how much the engine behind showrunner Matthew Weiner’s fabulous career has been the racial-ethnic anger and resentment he has carefully nurtured throughout what has been, objectively, a very pleasant and privileged life: he grew up in beautiful Hancock Park in Los Angeles, his father is head of The Leslie P. Weiner Neurological Care and Research Center at USC, he attended and briefly taught at Harvard-Westlake in the Hollywood Hills (the most prestigious prep school in Los Angeles), then went on to Wesleyan U., and then into a successful career in the entertainment industry.
Here’s another interview, this time in Paris Review, in which Weiner explains what his Mad Men was all about:
“These men don’t take no for an answer, they build these big businesses, these empires, but really it’s all based on failure, insecurity, and an identity modeled on some abstract ideal of white power. I’ve always said this is a show about becoming white. That’s the definition of success in America—becoming a WASP. A WASP male. The driving question for the series is, Who are we? When we talk about “we,” who is that? In the pilot, Pete Campbell has this line, “Adding money and education doesn’t take the rude edge out of people.” Sophisticated anti-Semitism. I overheard that line when I was a schoolteacher. The person, of course, didn’t know they were in the presence of a Jew. I was a ghost.”
A newspaper article from when Weiner was a student at Harvard-Westlake in 1981 estimates its student body was 40% Jewish, although in his earlier interview with David Samuels, Weiner insists Jews were much more of a minority at Harvard-Westlake. These implausible memories of his being oppressed for being Jewish in the heart of the second biggest concentration of Jewish wealth and power in the world at the time are incredibly important to Weiner’s sense of himself.
Comments to Steve Sailer:
* We Jewish people don’t all have an aversion to Anglo White Protestants. It’s true that many of us have experienced the feeling of not being quite accepted in group or club settings that are dominated by Anglo Whites, but we don’t all become bitter Weiner types. Unfortunately, Weiner has a media soapbox, and the media rewards ethnic and gender grievance mongering.
* Two things that fascinate me are:
1) Why is the Anglo-Saxon Protestant acronym prefaced with White? Isn’t White assumed? Are there black Anglo-Saxons?
2) After all the obvious hatred and general despising and loathing Jews feel, and generally dish towards ASPs, why do the ASPs remain the Jews biggest non-Jewish fanclub?
No matter how many times a Weiner whines what he says above I can only imagine some gentrified ASP in a country club somewhere applauding the Weiner and resolving to invade another Mid East country to make up for the slight.
* Jewish culture has this useful habit of redirecting memories of internal unpleasantries onto outsiders.
* Well, Weiner saw it out to the bitter end. You’ve got to give him credit for perseverance. My God, to have the stamina and physical well-being to be able to hate so much every morning you wake up, driven by it, day in, day out.
1. He killed off his most hated character in the show–Betty Draper (the ultimate, blue-eyed blonde shiksa, the type of girl every Jewish boy beat off to incessantly from the time he was ten or eleven)–by giving her lung cancer in her late 30s and having her sitting silently and coldly at the kitchen table smoking a cigarette while her daughter washed dishes in the background, the same daughter who’d just left college to watch out for her dying mother. It was absolutely brutal and vulgar, a gleeful killing, had be watched to be believed. I’ve never seen a character treated less sympathetically in a so-called high brow drama.
2. He made the main WASP character the author of all that liberals and progressives think is wrong with this country–cynical corporate consumerism–because, as we know, WASPs have absolutely dominated advertising and media since WW2–it’s not even close. After suffering a near mental and physical breakdown, Don Draper finds himself at a hippie commune type retreat, knows he’s made his life and the lives of his closest and dearest shit, and just when everyone thought he would jump off the cliff and into the Pacific–the commune is CA, of course–he finds humanity in another WASPish (if much less impressive and important) person and is rejuvenated. He greets a brilliant CA morning in a Yoga Session surrounded by other middle-aged hippies and the idea for a new ad campaign hits him–the show ends with Coke’s famous 1971 commercial about Coke being the real thing–the Hilltop commercial.
We’re made to understand, WASPs never change, there’s no spiritual depth there whatever (unlike all those “outsiders”). Draper is just onto his latest manic-depressive cycle of brilliant creation followed by tawdry collapse. More important, WASPs use people and things–the environment, others’ emotions, etc. It’s just the way they are.
Absolutely appalling–again, Weiner demonstrated no sympathy whatever for his main character, he pins all that is awful in America on him, treats him as some demi-demon type figure we should all be afraid of. The Koch brothers all rolled into one in 1970.
* Back when the New York Stock Exchanged was created in 1792, there were 24 signatories. 5 of those signatories were Jewish, at a time when Jews were far less than 0.1 percent of America’s population.
If WASPs historically worked to exclude Jews from the establishment, they obviously weren’t trying very hard – even as far back as the late 1700s.
Of course that’s not the point. Jewish leaders understand that maintaining Jewish solidarity requires setting up a boogeyman to keep the Jewish population in a state of perpetual fear, anger, and loathing. If Jewish intellectuals have to falsify history to make Jews seem like marginalized outsiders, that’s a small price to pay for maintaining Jewish ethnic identity.
* Strangely enough, throughout almost all of American history that particular group was indeed called “Anglo-Saxon” for such totally logical reasons. That’s why Mexicans and other Latin Americans often use the shortened term “Anglo.” Then some time after WWII it was gradually replaced by “WASP.”
When there’s a correctly descriptive term that has been in use for centuries, it’s quite odd for it to suddenly be replaced by much less accurate term, and I’ve always wondered how that came about. Perhaps it was a sociological attempt to distinguish between the “elite WASPS” and the general Anglo-Saxon population, including nearly the entire South and much of rural population.
* The term WASP gained currency with the publication of (the ever dapper) E. Digby Baltzell’s 1964 book The Protestant Establishment: Aristocracy and Caste in America. Before that, Wikipedia tells us, the first published mention of the term was in 1957 by sociologist Andrew Hacker. According to Hacker’s usage, the ‘W’ stood for ‘Wealthy’ rather than ‘White’ (which makes more sense because less redundant).
Alternately ‘Anglo-Saxon’ could be taken to mean ‘English-speaking’. Therefore WASP would mean an an English-speaking white Protestant. Hacker’s usage makes more sense though because the term is usually used to refer to upper-class whites — usually Old Money, New Money, or Ivy League educated.
MORE COMMENTS TO STEVE SAILER:
* There would be no appreciable difference if say, Joss Whedon wrote “Mad Men.” Or any difference in the stuff about racism, sexism, anti semitism, either.
What is important about Matthew Weiner is not that he’s a Jew. He might as well be a different species from Michael Bay, Adam Sandler, and Rob Schneider. No, what is important is that Weiner is a middling upper class guy who resents not being King.
That’s it basically. His whole anti-White guy, anti-Middle Class, anti-American schtick is the same as Joss Whedon’s. Other than sexy vampires, you could mix up Buffy the Vampire Slayer and Mad Men and not tell which scene was which other than better production values in Mad Men. Anti-suburbs? Check! Nuclear family source of all evil? Check! White guys either sexy and bad or nerdy and sexless and icky? Double Check!
Steve both Weiner and Whedon have the same beef. They hate The Man, when in fact they are part of … The Man. A big part. Just not the boss.
* Jews getting mugged/robbed/otherwise attacked by Black criminals in NYC in the late ’60s-early ’70s was one of the reasons for the rise of neo-conservatism.
* For generations, people like Matthew Weiner have been redrawing the pictures we have in our heads of America’s past. So, it’s interesting and useful to speculate on their ethnic motivations and biases, especially when Weiner loves to talk about his ethnic motivations and biases.
I speculated about Weiner having strong opinions on his part-Jewish fellow students at Harvard School not being Real Jews because in his interview in The Tablet with David Samuels he goes on at some length about how only 15 out of 120 students were Jewish and then returns to the topic saying only 10% of the students were Jewish but they were high achievers so everybody overestimates what percent were Jewish. He’s quite worked up over the statistics of 34 years ago.
How do we charitably reconcile his memories with a 1981 newspaper article, which may be an article he even refers to in his interview, saying the student body was 40% Jewish? One possibility is different methodologies for treating part-Jewish kids statistically. If your dad is, say, Tony Curtis and your mom is Janet Leigh, maybe you’d be counted as part of the newspaper article’s 40%, but you wouldn’t count in Weiner’s 10%.
Or maybe Weiner is just delusional.
* Free birthright trips to Israel are set up to get Jewish kids to fall in love with other Jewish kids on the trip or with Israelis.
Elliott Abrams, grand high muckety-muck of Middle Eastern policy in the Bush Administration, wrote a not very controversial book in the 1990s about how to cut down on intermarriage.
I could pull up a lot more examples like this.
Look, Weiner is another example of the kind of powerful guys I want more of on my side: Jews who tend to be natural concentric loyalists. I want them on the side of their fellow American citizens.
Conservatives tried a long experiment in not subjecting them to any kind of reasoned critique. At first, back about 1969, it seemed to be working, but in recent decades, it’s stopped working. If a privileged group is above criticism so they don’t fear being embarrassed over hypocrisy, they will tend to indulge their most self-servingly contradictory stances, like nationalism for Israel and globalism for America.
As an alternative, I offer a fair compromise: patriotism for America and Israel. But of course there’s little pragmatic reason to settle for this when you can have it all because you are above criticism.
