RUSH: I meant to talk about this yesterday, too, and it slipped my mind. I finally watched Sunday night’s Mad Men. I watch it every night but I didn’t get a chance to watch it live. I had to watch it via TiVo, and there was the most incredible scene. Now, this show, if you haven’t seen it, depicts life in the sixties, and it does so flawlessly. It’s amazing. It centers around the advertising business and the people in it and their families. But there are a lot of people who think the show went way over the line on Sunday night. One of the characters is an 11-year-old girl, a daughter of Don Draper and his divorced wife, Betty. Betty is with a different guy and Don’s living alone in an apartment in the city. Occasionally Don gets visitation rights with the kids and he takes them to the apartment in the city, goes out and has dinner, leaves them with a baby-sitter.
Sometimes the kids go over to their friends’ house when the wife has them, and little Sally was depicted — has school started for the most part around the country? It hasn’t started up north? Because what I’m going to say here, this is why the show is in trouble in certain sectors. They basically had this 11-year-old little girl in a masturbation scene with her little ten-year-old, 11-year-old girlfriend. And the reason people are upset about it is that they actually made this little 11-year-old actress do it. I mean you knew exactly what was happening, and then the mother of the friend where little Sally was visiting takes her home, wakes up the mother, Betty Draper, and says, ‘This is crazy. We’re not going to have this. Your little girl was…’ and it’s almost unspeakable, one mother to another describing what was happening, almost unspeakable. Finally the mother says, ‘I don’t want your little girl back in my house ever again, she was,’ blah, blah, blah, describes it. And this causes the mother to think the girl needs a shrink when actually it’s the mother that needs the shrink.
Anyway, the reason there’s outrage is they actually made the 11-year-old actress do it. I mean there wasn’t much left to the imagination here and so some people said, ‘Where are these little actress’s parents? How did they possibly let this little girl do this? She’s 11 years old. I mean acting is one thing, and it’s one thing for actors to say, ‘Oh, come on, mom, it’s just acting,’ and so forth. But this, while it was over the top, this episode was so right on the money in so many ways about little kids and what they think as they’re reaching puberty and what they do as they’re reaching puberty, and how paranoid their parents got back in those days. I don’t know what reminded me of this. It might have been… it was. It was the old NAGs. I don’t know what it was about the old NAGs that reminded me about this, but it was talking about the old NAGs that reminded me that I wanted to mention this to you.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Maryville, Tennessee. Mary, nice to have you on the program. Hi.
CALLER: Thank you so much for taking my call. I wanted your impression on the other storyline on the Mad Men episode Sunday night. When I watched Roger Sterling’s character’s reaction to the Japanese delegation wanting Draper’s agency to bid on their Honda account —
RUSH: Yeah.
CALLER: — and the opposite reaction of his colleagues, it came across immediately to me as a thinly veiled subliminal message to those opposed to the mosque in downtown New York, as not being able to forget and forgive and move on and make nice with everybody regardless of what had happened in the past.
RUSH: Well, let me explain the storyline and then comment on your analysis.
CALLER: Okay.
RUSH: In 1964 the advertising agency of Draper & Sterling, whatever the name is, has just left and formed their own agency, and they’re struggling to get new clients. Their largest client is Lucky Strike cigarettes and they need more. And the Japanese are prepared to let a huge advertising contract to start advertising the Honda in the United States. And pretty much everybody at the agency is all for it, the Honda people have set up rules by which all the competing agencies must make their presentation. Roger Sterling, one of the founding partners, doesn’t want any part of it because he hasn’t gotten over World War II and the fact that the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. He doesn’t want to help ’em, he doesn’t want to take their money, doesn’t want diddly-squat, and in a private meeting with the Japanese and other members of the agency he comes in and insults the Japanese people, who have a translator, and tries to sabotage the deal. His other buddies at the agency, (paraphrasing) ‘You can’t do this, Roger, get over it. You know, we won this war, life goes on, the world’s a safer place, Roger, because people like you…’ Sterling had been in the war.
Now, as far as it having a relationship to the mosque, the episode was filmed nine months ago, before the mosque even became an issue. This show, Mary, I don’t think they have one care in the world about relating to events today. The guy that does this show, Matthew Weiner, is hell-bent on getting the period nature of this show right, and I gotta tell you, Sterling, this guy depicted in a fictional show was not the only one. When the Japanese wanted American advertising agencies to bid on the Nikon camera 20 years after the fact there were some American agencies that would not take it, they would not get involved. Sterling was not unique. There were a lot of people, particularly people that served in World War II who wanted nothing to do with assisting the Japanese to enter the US commercial markets. But I don’t think it had anything to do with the mosque. The mosque hadn’t even risen as a focal point issue when that episode would have been written and filmed.
CALLER: It certainly was timely, though.
RUSH: Well, coincidentally, it did work out, and —
CALLER: Yeah.
RUSH: — I think what you’re getting at is the show portrayed Sterling as a bigot —
CALLER: Yes.
RUSH: — filled with prejudice and hatred who couldn’t get past.
CALLER: Right.
RUSH: And that’s what you see as relating — To you, Roger Sterling was equivalent to the people criticizing the mosque today?
CALLER: I think that just came across to me as what they were getting across and the fact that it was filmed nine months ago was something I wasn’t aware of because it absolutely looks like what goes around comes around and we’re repeating itself. But it just came across as — it was absolutely very good timing in letting that be aired.
RUSH: Well, another thing to consider here, Mary, is that the Japanese had killed people all over the world. They tried to enslave the people all over the world that they didn’t kill. I mean that’s no comparison to Islam. Ahem, ahem, ahem, ahem.
CALLER: Okay. Well, thank you so much.
RUSH: All right, Mary, thank you. I appreciate that call.