RUSH: Folks, Mad Men starts on Sunday night, season four, ten o’clock on AMC. (interruption) You don’t know what it is, Snerdley? Oh, Snerdley, you have got to watch this. I would suggest, Snerdley, that you go out and get the DVDs. You don’t need to have seen the previous three seasons to start this one. It would help. I have never in my life seen a television series that does a better job of putting a period together. They’ve got the sixties down pat. This is about Madison advertising, Madison Avenue advertising, Mad Men in New York. I mean the homes, they smoke at the office, they drink at the office, the women smoke when they’re pregnant, they drink when they’re pregnant. The kids play with plastic bags from the dry cleaners. The appliances, the furniture, the wardrobe, it is to a T, it is identical. The story lines, the dialogue, the mannerisms, they have totally — I think the guy’s name is Matt Weiner — totally captured the period, totally captured the era. Of course the sixties is a very nostalgic time for me, that’s when I was a teenager growing up. And I got into radio when I was 16, 17 years old. I started becoming familiar with the advertising business, and it’s got it down to a T. And season four starts on Sunday night.
Now, there have been a lot of reviews. The reason I bring this up is there have been a lot of reviews. The fake journalists in entertainment media get the first four episodes to review to write their stories. And there’s one that ran in the LA Times yesterday. It is by Meghan Daum. I’m going to take a break and when I come back I want to read this to you because this woman writing is just amazed at how much things have changed from the way women lived, the way they dressed, the way they behaved in the sixties. She’s stunned by it, such as, women smoking when they were pregnant. My mom smoked. Look at me. Look at my brother. Yes, look at my brother. My mother drank when she was pregnant. We played with the dry cleaning plastic bags. We knew not to suffocate ourselves. They let us go outside for hours in the neighborhood playing with friends and riding bicycles all over town without a second thought. In fact, they kicked us out of the house to do this stuff. There was no such thing as a playdate.
I remember when I was in Little League baseball, after your first year you make the league, you make the team. The tryouts the next year, I show up and I’m a catcher for the tryouts, I’m a big guy, I’m already in, here come the young schlubs. I’m 11, here come the ten-year-olds, and I’m already in, I’m catching for batting practice as these kids are trying out. And I got my head tangled up chasing a wild pitch in the backstop, the fence, the typical chain link backstop. I cut my head, a pretty big gash, and the coach, ‘Just put some dirt on it and get back in there, Limbaugh,’ and that’s what I did, grabbed a handful of dirt, rubbed it on my head and went back. Today this guy would be sued, he would be fired, he would be run out of town. And here I am alive to talk about it, my friends.
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RUSH: Things are still bad in Kansas City. I talked to a friend of mine. Obama was in there not long ago for something. I guess the NAACP meeting was there or something. Anyway, the poor blind prostitute is still working the streets in Kansas City. I mean, you really, really have to hand it to her, folks. After I cut my head on a chain link fence in Little League baseball, the coach said, ‘Put some dirt in there. Just throw some dirt on it.’ I didn’t cry about it. I wasn’t crying, by the way, folks. ‘Just throw some dirt in there.’
Now, this Mad Men story. This is Meghan Daum. ‘The fourth season of ‘Mad Men’ starts Sunday, and with it another round of opportunities to both marvel and gasp at how much things have changed since the early 1960s. Much of the genius of the show, of course, lies in its ferocious attention to period details. From the entrenched womanizing and nonstop drinking and smoking (even while pregnant!) to children who play with plastic dry-cleaning bags and family picnics that end with a flourish of litter shaken insouciantly onto the grass, ‘Mad Men’ leaves no antediluvian stone unturned.’ I just laugh myself silly when I read these feminazis looking back on that period, and they can’t believe it. They are appalled. I played with dry cleaner bags.
My mother smoked when she was pregnant with me — and, believe me, I don’t remember a thing about it. It didn’t bother me at all. She smoked when pregnant with my brother. She drank when pregnant with both of us. It wasn’t that long ago and it wasn’t the end of the world. We knew not to suffocate with the plastic bags. I remember we were driving down to see my grandparents in Kennett, Missouri, and I got mad a my brother and I started pouring talcum powder down his mouth and my mother is looking from the front seat, ‘What are you doing?’ I said, ‘I’m trying to make my brother pretty. He’s ugly. I’m trying to sweeten him up. I want him to smell good.’ I was pouring talcum powder in his mouth and nose and so forth, and my mother says, ‘Give me that!’
We didn’t stop the car, we didn’t go to the emergency room. These are things that happened. We rode around on bicycles. Now, granted you can’t do that today with all the rapists, purse snatchers and muggers still out there, but we had no helmets. No helmets whatsoever. People smoked in restaurants. I remember it wasn’t that long ago I loved to go to 21. I loved to go into 21 in New York and have a cigar after dinner, everybody else was doing the same thing, have some B&B, maybe a little port with the cheese course. It wasn’t long, though, some namby-pambies came in and started complaining about it. But what was great was that the waiters always said, ‘Well, if you don’t like the cigarette or cigar smoke move over to another part of the restaurant.’ They didn’t tell me to move. They told the person that didn’t like the smoke to move. And that was in the early nineties. But it’s funny. You ought to read some of these reviews of Mad Men, the women reviewing the way this show is depicted. It’s dead on, and they can’t believe any of these people survived five years.
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RUSH: I told you earlier today I had to go get a key man insurance physical today. These things are required for key people. And I am the key man at EIB, because if something happens to me there is no EIB, which is a problem. So I get the key man insurance. And I love the doctor, don’t misunderstand. This is just an example of the way things are these days compared to the way they used to be. I went in there, got a blood test, they do that, and the stress test and all this. And this also happened in Hawaii back in December when I had that faux heart problem, turned out not to be a heart problem, blood test. Today and back in December, normal, both cholesterols, the good and bad, on the low side of normal. And the doctors and nurses are looking at that, ‘It can’t be, it just can’t be.’ I said, ‘Why?’ ‘Well, look at you. I mean you’ve had roller coaster weight all of your life, you’re 59 years old, you ought to be on Lipitor.’
So they tested again and the cholesterol’s totally normal. Blood sugar’s normal. And they get frustrated. ‘It shouldn’t be that way. You know, you really ought to be on Lipitor.’ ‘Why?’ ‘Well, because you should have high cholesterol, and you don’t have it yet, but you will.’ ‘Well, okay, we’ll deal with it if I ever do.’ I just find that everybody gets caught up in all of the panic, everything is a crisis, and everything is going to kill us. And it’s a power that the ruling class has to keep us all under some sort of control. In New York they want to abandon salt from the diet and trans fats and so forth. All of this is just absurd.