Everybody—well, at least five—is talking about how much they luv Don “Mad Men” Draper’s chef d’œuvre, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke,” which I’ve mangled just a bit in my headline. Well, let me just say that when I came home from Vietnam and saw this manipulative masterstroke of capitalistic co-option on TV, I wondered, just a little, what the fuck I had been fighting for. Because, for one thing, I never got a free Coke the whole time I was there.
Afterwards
The only people who ever gave us anything in Vietnam was the Salvation Army, and they only gave us socks—kind of nice, because socks are very important in a war, and, once we were in Vietnam, the Army never gave us socks or underwear. Underwear I could do without, and did, but socks are essential. The downside is that Salvation Army socks are, or were, the worst socks in the world. If you were sentient in the Fifties, you may have seen bums walking around with faded white socks hanging down around their ankles (because no elastic). Well, now you know where those socks came from.
Afterwords II
I’ve riffed, rather extensively, on Mad Men for the Bright Lights Film Journal here and here
