Decoding Don Draper

The website AskMen.com just announced that the winner of its online poll to find the Most Influential Man of 2009 is Don Draper.

Don't know him?

Don Draper is the fictional advertising executive on AMC's 1960s-era series, "Mad Men." Actor Jon Hamm plays the ad exec, a seductive, secretive, brooding, chiseled masterpiece of a character.

"It's interesting how drinking, smoking and carousing wins the race today," series creator Matthew Weiner said.

Mr. Weiner, who once put an Ayn Rand novel in the hands of one of the show's characters, probably knows better. The appeal of Don Draper is deeper than that.

Don Draper refuses to be a sacrificial animal. He didn't want to sacrifice himself in the army. He didn't want to sacrifice himself to his needy brother. He doesn't want to sacrifice himself to the suburban norms of early-1960s family life.

He values his own life, and when push comes to shove, he doesn't recognize society's claims on it.

That's the character that won the poll of over 500,000 online voters. Usain Bolt, the world's fastest man, finished second, and President Barack Obama came in third.

Interesting, isn't it?

"Art," Ayn Rand wrote, "is the barometer of a culture. It reflects the sum of a society's deepest philosophical values: not its professed notions and slogans, but its actual view of man and of existence. The image of an entire society stretched out on a psychologist's couch, revealing its naked subconscious, is an impossible concept; yet that is what art accomplishes: it presents the equivalent of such a session, a transcript which is more eloquent and easier to diagnose than any other set of symptoms."

Every day, it seems, another government official is telling the American people to sacrifice a little more of their own well-being and comfort for somebody else's -- for somebody else's health care, for somebody else's country, for somebody else's freedom. For the planet. For the children. For the "stability" of the nation's financial system. For homeowners in trouble. For auto workers in Detroit.

Sacrifice is always described as a virtue.

Yet Don Draper, a character who rejects the idea of sacrifice and consistently acts to preserve his own life and happiness, is the Most Influential Man of 2009.

The U.S. Constitution, which was largely written by James Madison, could have been written by Don Draper. It doesn't say anything about sacrifice. It says you have the right to your life, your liberty, and your property.

And it's not even fictional.

Maybe Don Draper's appeal belongs in the same category with Tea Party protests and Ron Paul rallies, signs that many, many people are tired of being treated like sacrificial animals, and most especially tired of pretending to approve of it.


Copyright 2009

Source note: The Ayn Rand quotation is from her 1965 essay, "Bootleg Romanticism," which is included in "The Romantic Manifesto."

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