Richard Cohen: Upwardly Mobile "Mad Men" America Will Never be Seen Again

Aside from his multiple infidelities, prodigious drinking and having the personality of a mud wall, what finally caused Betty Draper to separate from Don Draper, her husband and the protagonist of the wildly popular series “Mad Men,” was a clutch of Heineken beer. As Don Draper knew she would, Betty purchased the beer for their home: He had infuriatingly pigeonholed her as the typical upwardly mobile housewife of the early 1960s. The American Dream, it turns out, is about 5 percent alcohol.

The Heineken affront was the last straw, a bizarre crisis even for the “Mad Men” series. In a trenchant essay in the New York Review of Books, Daniel Mendelsohn explains the show’s appeal by saying it “represents fantasies, or memories, of significant potency.” For me, the memory — now, alas, a fantasy — is the assumption that Americans would get richer and richer, and that, if you were an ad man or a client, it made sense to market products to the affluent. Heineken, imported and thus hardly prole in origin, oddly represents an America that used to be and we may never see again.

I direct you to a recent Wall Street Journal article about Procter & Gamble. This iconic American company — Ivory, Tide, Bounty, Gillette — has introduced a dish soap at a bargain price. It’s called Gain and it represents P&G’s attempt to attract less-affluent customers, not out of the goodness of its corporate heart but because the middle class is shrinking. It has been said that God must love the poor because he made so many of them, but in this secular age he is getting some help. The sorry American economy is doing its share....