SKEWING THE HISTORY.

At Phi Beta Cons, Carol Iannone observes a small moment in "Mad Men" that might reassure the Anointed that it was right to destroy The America That Worked^(TM).

This may seem like a trivial point, but it is important to expose the intense propaganda of today’s television shows, designed to make us present-day people feel superior to those in the past, so we will be more content with the chaos of the postmodern, post-countercultural world we now inhabit. And it should also alert us to more serious fabrications and veritable snow-jobs, such as those concerning the condition of women.

Something similar might have been at work in The Help.  I enjoyed the movie, and the blending of historic events with the development of the story worked well.  But the junior league sorority b*****s whose meanness toward the servants who in many cases were the b*****s childhood nannies were cartoonishly artless.  Imagine the In Crowd at Faber College, without any hint of a prep-school upbringing.

Perhaps the fabrications and the snow-jobs are the last act projects of the Silent Generation, who have good reason to affirm their work expanding the blessings of liberty and equally good reason to hide the destructive way in which they destroyed the institutions in order to save them.