Until now, the world that existed at the beginning of Mad Men has slowly been giving way to “the sixties.”  Will Don Draper, and perhaps others, begin to mount resistance?   If so, look for future episodes that show Draper increasingly conflicted by – even antagonistic towards – the times he’s living through.

Do subsequent episodes of the series support the view that Don Draper is growing alienated from, and perhaps antagonistic towards, the sixties?

Why yes, they do.  The best evidence of this comes from last Sunday’s episode, where Don’s wife Megan took him to a new, off-Broadway show.  We saw Don and Megan in the audience while the actors onstage mouthed predictable cliches about the hollowness of consumerism and advertising.  Don Draper could barely contain his disgust, and afterward he hardly spoke to Megan until he gave her a piece of his mind about Megan’s own sudden departure from the world of advertising.

It turns out that the play the Drapers saw was American Hurrah, “an experimental satire [that] . . . jolted New York theater audiences with its nonlinear exploration of social alienation” when it premiered in November 1966.   As usual, the producers of Mad Men deserve enormous credit for getting the details exactly right.  We know it is late Autumn 1966 at the time of the episode, and American Hurrah was premiering in New York at this very time.

The fact that that Mad Men chose such an obscure play for the Drapers to attend is also not an accident.  They wanted to show Don Draper watching an experimental satire that beat its audience over the head with a countercultural message that was thoroughly representative of the times.  They also wanted the audience to see that Don was not amused.  And they wanted the episode to end with Don Draper becoming fully re-engaged in his work again, by firing up the troops and leading the charge for Sterling Cooper Draper Price to finally land their first car account (for Jaguar), which would show the rest of Madison Avenue they’ve truly arrived.  It’s hard to imagine Draper reacting in a way that’s less compatible with the message of American Hurrah.

It’s also interesting that, once again, Don’s wife Megan is leading him into these strange new worlds.  This could be relevant on a couple levels.  First, Megan is much younger than Don (I believe she’s 22 and he’s 40), and the “generation gap” in cultural taste that developed in the 1950s had become a small chasm by the mid-60s.  Mad Men is demonstrating that Don Draper will remain on one side of this gap:  the world of 1940s and early 50s America that he grew up in and remains most comfortable with.

We also know Megan’s father is some kind of Marxist professor who disdains her bourgeois lifestyle and encouraged her to resurrect her acting career.   It’s therefore not surprising that when she took his advice, she finds herself exploring quasi-Marxist cultural productions. This may be symbolic of the transmission of  radical ideas from the academic to the entertainment realms – in addition, of course, to being a transmission of radical impulses from one generation to the next.

All of which may suggest a new, emerging plot line is taking shape in the series:  the generational and cultural conflicts of the 1960s playing out in the Drapers’ marriage.  Now that should be interesting.

Very shortly after the expulsion of Roger Williams, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was rent far more widely by another heresy with roots deep in the colony — the “antinomianism” of Mrs. Anne Hutchinson.

A major reason for the crisis that Anne Hutchinson’s heresy posed for Massachusetts was that she occupied a high place in the colony’s oligarchy. Arriving in Massachusetts in 1634, she and her husband lived close to Governor Winthrop’s mansion in Boston and participated in Boston’s high society. A friend of the eminent Reverend John Cotton, she first confined her religious activities to expatiating on Cotton’s sermons.

Soon, however, Mrs. Hutchinson developed a religious doctrine of her own, now known as antinomianism. She preached the necessity for an inner light to come to any individual chosen as one of God’s elect. Such talk marked her as far more of a religious individualist than the Massachusetts leaders. Salvation came only through a covenant of grace emerging from the inner light, and was not at all revealed in a covenant of works, the essence of which is good works on earth.

This meant that the fanatically ascetic sanctification imposed by the Puritans was no evidence whatever that one was of the elect. Furthermore, Anne Hutchinson made it plain that she regarded many Puritan leaders as NOT of the elect. She also came to assert that she had received direct revelations from God. — Murray N. Rothbard, “America’s First Individualist Anarchist”, Mises Daily, May 22, 2012

Such independent thinking didn’t sit well with the oligarchical Puritan leadership, and a bitter and protracted struggle ensued. The ultimate weapon for the theocrats was ostracism and exile rather than execution for religious nonconformity (although charges of witchcraft could lead to capital punishment); and when Hutchinson and her followers suffered illness and hardship, her opponents weren’t above gloating about it in a most un-Christian manner:

When the ill Anne Hutchinson arrived at her haven in Aquidneck [in Rhode Island where the Hutchinsonians settled], the many months of persecution had left their mark and she suffered a miscarriage, as did her beautiful young follower Mary Dyer, who had stood up to walk out of the Boston church with the excommunicated Anne.

The Puritan leaders of Massachusetts Bay, preoccupied for years afterward with the Hutchinsonian menace, characteristically gloated in righteous satisfaction at the misfortunes of Anne and Mary. The theocrats were jubilant and the Reverend John Cotton, Governor Winthrop and the Reverend Thomas Weld all hailed Anne’s and Mary’s sufferings as the evident judgment of God. It was typical of the Puritans to hail the misfortunes of their enemies as God’s judgment, and to dismiss any kindness shown them by others as simply God’s will and therefore requiring no gratitude to those showing it. — Ibid.

Furthermore, as Rothbard notes:

To the Puritans of Massachusetts, Aquidneck was an abominable “Isle of Errours” and the Rhode Island settlements were “Rogue’s Land.” Massachusetts began to plot to assert its jurisdiction over these pestiferous settlements and to crush the havens of liberty. Indians were egged on to raid the Providence and Aquidneck territories. Massachusetts then shut off all trade with the Rhode Islanders, who were thus forced to turn to the neighboring Dutch settlements of New Netherland for supplies. A son and son-in-law of Anne’s, visiting Boston, were seized and very heavily fined by the authorities, and then banished from Massachusetts on pain of death. — Ibid.

Before she died, she would take her antinomianism to what Rothbard, with approval, feels to be its logical extreme:

Soon, however, Mrs. Anne Hutchinson, ruminating in the free air of Rhode Island on the meaning of her experience, came to an astounding and startling conclusion — and one that pushed the logic of Roger Williams’ libertarianism far beyond the master. For, as Williams reported in bewilderment, Anne now persuaded her husband to give up his leading post as assistant in the Aquidneck government, “because of the opinion, which she had newly taken up, of the unlawfulness of magistry.”

In short, the logic of liberty and a deeper meditation on scripture had both led Anne to the ultimate bounds of libertarian thought: to individualist anarchism. No magistracy whatever was lawful. — Ibid.

Rothbard’s account of early America — Conceived in Liberty (1975) — is definitely not what we’re taught in government-run schools. You can purchase it here, or read it online here. Rothbard’s article is excerpted from that book.

Thomas Friedman

I dedicate this post to Tom Friedman, one of the most pedestrian, overrated intellects of this or any other age.

A BBC documentary … was aired on SBS-TV in Australia in April 2012. In it, several cosmologists discuss ‘the unthinkable’—perhaps the big bang was not the beginning of everything after all. It seems that scientists have discovered a new law. Well, not actually new—just one that has been treated as if it didn’t exist for the last half century or so by ‘big-bangers’ such as Stephen Hawking, Roger Penrose, Paul Davies, Edwin Hubble, et al, namely the law of Cause and Effect.

The program explains that the concept of the big bang postulates that “everything we see in the universe today—us, trees, galaxies, zebras—emerged, in an instant, from nothing. And that’s a problem. It’s all effect and no cause.” We are then given five different explanations from five different scientists concerning what this cause may (or may not) have been.

— Russell Grigg, “What Happened Before the Big Bang?”, CMI, May 20, 2012

Prof. Michio Kaku would like to redefine “nothing” to mean something without certain attributes.

Prof. Andrei Linde wants to invoke the eternally-inflating multiverse hypothesis, which places the cosmos we live in somewhere among 10 to the power 10 to the power 10 to the power 7 universes.

Dr. Param Singh thinks our universe didn’t result from the Big Bang but is the fortuitous aftermath of a previous collapsing cosmos that underwent a lucky “big bounce.”

Prof. Lee Smolin believes that every black hole can give birth to a universe under the right conditions.

Dr. Neil Turok needs ten dimensions (plus time) and at least two pre-existing “branes” (membranes) that happen to collide with each other, the friction point of their intersection resulting in our cosmos.

Grigg’s summary:

Discerning viewers of this BBC program will have noticed several things:

1. Almost all the concepts of the big bang are now under attack by secular scientists, e.g. that everything came from nothing, that everything was once contained in a singularity, the beginning of time, the origin of the laws of physics.

2. All the ‘solutions’ to the problem of what happened before the big bang involve pre-existing universes or conditions, at least one of which is said to have existed for ever, despite the second law of thermodynamics (which says this is an impossibility).

3. The proponents of these ‘solutions’ provide no physical evidence whatsoever in support of their ideas.

4. Not one says how his postulated first universe came into existence. — Ibid.

Can this profusion of confusion about the Big Bang hypothesis be a fulfillment of G. K. Chesterton’s obiter dictum — “For when we cease to worship God, we do not worship nothing, we worship anything” — with “anything” being redefined as “nothing”?

There’s no doubt that Smash started strong.  The premise of the show – a look backstage at the artistic and financial struggles of a Broadway show coming to life – has tremendous potential, but it could have been painful if the musical developing before our eyes wasn’t a credible theatrical production.  That’s not a problem with “Bombshell,” the fictional play in Smash that is a musical treatment of Marilyn Monroe’s life:  it is packed with razzle-dazzle, catchy songs, and flashy choreography.  Smash passes the first and most important test for a series dramatizing the behind-the-scenes action of a Broadway play: the show itself is entertaining, and something you can easily imagine on Broadway.

The cast is also loaded with talent.  Veteran actresses Angelica Houston and Debra Messing play the show’s producer and lyricist/co-writer, respectively, and both do a fine job bringing their characters to life.  The two central characters are the actresses vying to play the lead role of Marilyn Monroe in the play.  Ivy Lynn is a singer/dancer with extensive experience in the chorus who has still never played a star part.  Ivy is scheming, underhanded, and willing to do whatever it takes to finally break through, and she’s played to perfection by Megan Hilty, who has a strong stage pedigree but relatively little acting experience.

Ivy’s competition is Karen Cartwright, a wide-eyed ingénue who just stepped off the turnip truck and into the big city for the first time.  Her innocence is underscored by the fact that she’s from Iowa, which everyone in Hollywood and New York knows is the embodiment of rustic cluelessness.  Karen is played by Katherine McPhee, a finalist in season five of American Idol who also has little acting experience.  Her performance throughout the season was consistently strong and, to me at least, surprising, because I disliked her on American Idol.  However, McPhee’s role on Smash shows that she’s become a very strong singer, and she makes her character credible and sympathetic.

Ivy is originally selected to play the part of Marilyn, with Karen as a kind of understudy, but there are many twists and turns on the road to Broadway, and they lead to an agonizing amount of uncertainty about who will ultimately be Marilyn.  This is not definitively settled until the final moments of the last episode.  The back and forth struggle between Karen and Ivy for the part – a struggle later joined by a bonafide Hollywood star played by Uma Thurman – practically turn the issue of who will play Marilyn into a battle between good and evil.  It’s a bit more nuanced than that, though, particularly because we learn that Ivy is a tragic figure who may be headed towards a Marilyn Monroe-type crackup herself.

All this is well and good, and it kept me hooked from week to week.  But I was disappointed with how things ended up, in part because I thought the wrong actress was finally chosen to play Marilyn (no spoilers here), but mostly because the depth and quality of the early episodes noticeably declined as the season progressed.  The writing became more hackneyed, and by the end Smash bordered on being a generic soap opera transported to a theatrical set.  A famous playwright once said all’s well that ends well, but Smash didn’t end well at all.  In fact, the ending was a bit of a rushed, embarrassing mess, which is ironically what the play’s producers and writers feared would happen with “Bombshell.”

Nevertheless, there are enough interesting loose ends to give Smash one more chance when it returns.  I’m not optimistic that the show’s creators will deal with them successfully, but it’s worth giving Smash a few weeks to see if the series re-captures the verve and complexity of the first two-thirds or so of season one.

Humans have 23 pairs of chromosomes, including one pair of ‘sex chromosomes’ which are XY in males and XX in females. Thus the Y chromosome is passed down only through the male line, from father to son.

… Michael Hammer at the University of Arizona in Tucson and colleagues, some from Israeli universities, analysed 18 sections of the Y chromosomes from 1,371 men. They came from 29 different populations, including seven Jewish (Ashkenazi (European), Roman, North African, Kurdish, Iraqi and Iranian, Yemenite and Ethiopian Jews), five Arabic (Palestinians, Lebanese, Syrians, Israeli Druze and Saudis) and 16 non-Semitic groups.

The close similarities within the Jewish Y-chromosomes, even from widely scattered populations, was compelling evidence that they all come from a common ancestor. The study also showed that Arabs are closely related to Jews.

Dr. Harry Ostrer, director of the Human Genetics Program at New York University School of Medicine, one of the co-authors of the paper, said:

‘Jews and Arabs are all really children of Abraham … And all have preserved their Middle Eastern genetic roots over 4,000 years.’

The study also showed that the Jewish populations had generally remained genetically isolated from gentile populations all this time. It is further evidence that modern Jews largely kept the Old Testament laws (albeit with extra man-made traditions) for centuries after they were dispersed, until quite recently.

— Jonathan Sarfati, “Genesis Correctly Predicts Y-Chromosome Pattern: Jews and Arabs Shown to Be Descendants of One Man!”, CMI

What about those “lost tribes” we keep hearing about? And what does “British Israelitism” have to do with it? Sarfati explains:

(Click on image to enlarge.)

Some have promoted the idea that the British people are descended from the 10 allegedly ‘lost tribes of Israel’. Alas, a major feature of British Israelitism is that it ignores or explains away the weight of biblical evidence, which must be normative for the Christian. It also ignores the well-documented history of the Jews after the close of the Biblical Canon, but places a heavy weight on non-biblical accounts of dubious reliability. Fact is, the tribes were not lost. The Bible is clear where the tribes went, and that representatives of all tribes returned from Israel (Ezra 6:17). The prophetess Anna was a Jewess from the tribe of Asher (Luke 2:36), which proves they were not ‘lost’ even by the time of Christ. Even later, James wrote an epistle ‘To the twelve tribes scattered among the nations’ (literally ‘To the twelve tribes which are in the diaspora/dispersion’) (James 1:1), and it would be hard to know where to mail it if 10 of the tribes had been lost! — Ibid.

Is it “Once a Jew, always a Jew”? Yes, says Sarfati:

Since the coming of Christ, the barrier between Jew and Gentile has been broken down (Ephesians 2:14). Now both Jews and Gentiles can become one in Christ Jesus (Galatians 3:28, Col. 3:11).

Note also, the true biblical definition of Jew is purely one who is a descendant of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. It has nothing to do with religion. Biblically speaking, one is born either a Jew or a Gentile, and one remains this way till death. The Bible calls Gentiles who converted to Judaism ‘proselytes’, not ‘Jews’ (Acts 2:10–11). Conversely, a Jew remains a Jew whether he believes in Jesus Christ or becomes an atheist. The first Christians were all Jews, and I myself am a Jewish Christian; conversely many Israelis are secular. — Ibid.

The fact that modern Israel is overwhelmingly secular and continues further in that direction daily has implications for U.S.-Israeli foreign policy far beyond this discussion.

Sarfati’s conclusions:

The Y chromosome evidence is consistent with the Bible’s teaching that Abraham would be the ancestor of a great nation, namely Israel or the Jews, and that the Arabs are also children of Abraham (via Ishmael). It is also consistent with the biblical teaching that all Jewish priests are descendants of Aaron.

The same evidence confirms that all Jewish people groups today really are physical descendants of Abraham [the Bible], not from Khazar converts [Arthur Koestler's theory], while the British people are not physical descendants of Abraham ["British Israelitism"].

Jesus Himself, while fully God, is a Jew and a descendant of Abraham. Both Jews and Gentiles can become spiritual descendants of Abraham by believing on Jesus. — Ibid.

When you consider how Satan has targeted the Jews for extermination since the beginning of time, it’s nothing short of a miracle that the children of Abraham still exist!

“… They even make virtues out of ‘humility’ and ‘turning the other cheek’ and ‘loving everybody.’ Because it alleviates their guilt. It’s much nicer to pretend to yourself that your passivity makes you a saint, rather than just another gutless puke who won’t take a stand for what’s right.”

The passage above kind of encapsulates my ambivalence about the novel HUNTER: A Thriller, by Robert Bidinotto. There’s much to enjoy and appreciate in the book, and it promotes some ideas with which I strongly agree. But in my view it’s taken a little farther than I, as a Christian, can endorse. It’s not merely that I disagree with the Randian point of view on display here; I think the treatment weakens the argument (and the story) in some ways.

I usually do a synopsis of a novel’s opening chapters when I write a review, but the peculiar structure of this story makes that hard to do without spoiling the central surprise (if surprise it is). So I’ll mostly talk about the concepts underlying the story.

The central issue of this book is the early release of dangerous felons into society. Our justice system, as Bidinotto paints it (and he says all the atrocities in the story are based on true events) is that in order to take pressure off the courts and prisons, we’ve set in place a system that automatically pleas down criminal charges, and then shortens even those abbreviated prison sentences through early release for “good behavior.” This early release is facilitated by a naïve network of social service agencies staffed by do-gooders eager to let the prisoners out, proud of their “success” in rehabilitating them. But when those prisoners kill again, these do-gooders feel no responsibility.

This story focuses on a group of three inmates who are being released ahead of schedule, and who proceed immediately to take revenge on their former victims, who testified against them.

But there’s a vigilante out there, an accomplished killer who takes it on himself to protect the innocent and impose the death penalty where the justice system will not. In a conventional thriller, this character would be ambiguous. The violence he commits would begin to destroy him, and he would make some terrible mistake that would turn him into the very thing he hates.

None of that here. The vigilante is the hero of Hunter. The author’s position appears to be that our justice system is so badly broken that the only recourse left to decent society is private revenge and an eye for an eye, until reforms are made.

I see this as a weakness in the book. Not merely because I’m a Christian and believe in forgiving my enemies (a concept this book rejects with contempt), but because it makes the hero pretty one-dimensional. He’s a man without flaws, who looks into the Abyss and is not looked back into in response. In a public confrontation with “experts” on criminal rehabilitation, he has all the facts at his fingertips and reduces his opponents to impotent silence—and the news media report it as it happens, without spinning the story to make him look like a dangerous fanatic. I found that pretty unrealistic.

If I’ve given the impression that this is an anti-Christian book, I want to correct that. Although the influence of Ayn Rand is pronounced and is acknowledged by the author, one explicitly Christian character is identified as being on the side of what the author might describe as “the angels.” And he does take pains to make it clear that some of the Christian do-gooders are sincerely mistaken, and open to correction.

I should make it clear that I actually enjoyed Hunter quite a lot, and agreed with much of what I read. That I felt the message was taken to an extreme, and that some of the characters lacked depth, doesn’t alter the fact that the book moved right along and provided many satisfactions. I do recommend it (cautions for language, violence, and adult content), provided you’re prepared for the sort of thing it is.

Lars Walker is the author of several fantasy novels, the latest of which is an e-book, Troll Valley.

In this first novel of an ongoing series, Noah Braddock, San Diego surfer/private eye, is approached by the mother of his former girlfriend. The girlfriend, whom he had deeply loved, broke up with him years ago under pressure from her parents, when she went off to college. But now she’s gone missing, and they’re desperate enough to come to Noah for help.

And he, of course, can’t resist the appeal, even coming from them. But things get messy very quickly, and soon he’s forced to delve deeply into his lost love’s personal life, discovering things he’d much rather have never learned.

I’ve often written about the archetype of the American private eye. Particularly the fact that he’s often a figure of male fantasy. What guy, in his heart, doesn’t sometimes dream of living unfettered, setting his own hours, having uncommitted sex with a series of dangerous dames, and being the Spillaneian Jury?

Noah Braddock seems like a prime example of this paradigm. He combines two occupations that appeal to every guy’s inner Peter Pan—the P.I. and the surf bum.

And yet, Noah is an oddly responsible man. I thought his strength of character, paradoxically, a weakness in his character, if “character” is understood in its purely literary sense. It seemed odd to me that a guy this mature would choose a lifestyle that might as well have a sign reading “Perpetual Adolescent” taped to it. He seemed to me more suited to conventional police work (though he tells the reader he tried that and got bored) and a traditional marriage.

But that’s just my quibble. Others may disagree. I enjoyed Killer Swell, and will probably return to the Noah Braddock series.

The usual cautions for language and adult themes apply.

Lars Walker is the author of several fantasy novels, the latest of which is an e-book, Troll Valley.