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This is weird, weird, weird ... but fun! Thanks to reader Alf for sending it along:

Who talked Dylan into putting on that unspeakable wig?

I just noticed that we hadn't discussed the lollapalooza "Mad Men" season finale. Was that great TV, or what? A work colleague said the series, which had grown rather sluggish this season, completely redeemed itself in these last few episodes. Couldn't agree more. If you're a "Mad Men" fan, and you haven't been reading Slate's TV Club discussion of it, run, don't walk (start here for the multipart analysis of the finale). A few random notes from me:

+ Betty Draper is a horrible b*tch. She just is. I don't blame her for leaving the cheatin' dirtbag Don, but she is such a spoiled, narcisstic brat for the way she treats her kids. Leaving them alone for Christmas so she can fly to Reno with her lover so she can get a divorce? She's always been one of my least favorite characters, because of her chilly self-absorption and latent hostility to her children, and I could only work up sympathy for her as a victim of Don's philandering. I do think it's a fascinating development that both Betty and Don now realize -- well, Betty more explicitly than Don, but I think Don gets it too -- that they only fell for each other because they were enamored of the perfect but false image each offered to the other. When Betty found out Dashing Don was really a Hick Named Dick, she dropped him. Don's realizing that Betty wasn't really the virginal perfect suburban wife he thought he'd married shattered him briefly, but also freed him. I was really put off by Don's angrily calling Betty a "whore" in their confrontation at the end -- who is a multiple cheater like him to call any woman that?! -- but then I realized that what I was seeing was not a statement about Betty, but a statement about Don's fakey-fake icon being broken. That is, his esteem for Betty depended not on affection for who he is -- all his lovers have been anti-Bettys, in that they've been warm, motherly and fun -- but on a sexist-based glorification of her image as the Virgin of Suburbia (not literally a virgin, but the Perfectly Pure Suburban Wife). Don's got a Virgin-Whore complex that drives his immature relationship with women.

(I think it may be hard for people born in the 1960s or later to appreciate how this sort of thing distorted gender relations. I'll never forget a friend's father giving us 14-year-old boys advice about women: "There's the kind of girl you want to have fun with" -- meaning, a girl who'll put out -- "and the kind of girl you want to marry." He explained that if a girl you're dating won't sleep with you, you know she might be marrying material. He wasn't kidding. But if memory serves, I'd say that man was about 10 years younger than Don Draper. That was another world.)

+ Joan is back! She and Roger are my favorite characters, and her return to the series full-time was inevitable. I think we can all see that those two are headed for marriage, as soon as her brutish husband gets killed in Vietnam, and Roger figures out how to ditch the young nitwit trophy wife he left his admirable wife Mona to marry. I thought Roger had one of the best lines ever the other night when he got off the phone with the new Mrs. Sterling, who'd called to obsess over the Kennedy assasination. He told Don, "She's obsessed! That's the most interest that girl's ever had in a book depository."

+ I really don't like the petulant crybaby Pete Campbell, but his character is one of the better ones on the show (Vincent Kartheiser is terrific in that role), and I have to say that his and Trudy's marriage is probably going to emerge as one of the more interesting relationships in the next season.

+ Departed characters: I will miss Kinsey, though I can see why he had to be left behind for thematic reasons. He was an underperformer who had an outsized opinion of his abilities, based on his status as a Princeton grad. In the more competitive economic order emerging from the breakup of the old one, a talented outsider like Peggy is more valuable than someone like Kinsey. I suspect we'll see Sal, the gay art director, again. There's no way we lose Betty, but I'll be very, very happy that in Season Four, the action will move from Ossining back downtown.

+ There's been lots of speculation over what Don meant when he pitched coming to the new firm to Peggy. From the TV Club discussion:

Don goes back to Peggy with a more elaborate sales pitch, explaining why he needs her: "Because there are people out there who buy things, people like you and me. And something happened, something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that's very valuable."

Question for you guys: What on earth is Don talking about here? The Kennedy assassination? Or some other, more generalized American loss of innocence? Either way, the pitch works; Peggy's eyes well up with tears when Don tells her that if she doesn't join up now, "I will spend the rest of my life trying to hire you."

Here's what I think it is. Remember, until Peggy confessed to Pete that she had his baby, Don was the only character who knew her secret. He knows that like him, Peggy has a terrible, life-changing trauma in her background, one she's triumphed over, and kept her secret. I suspect it's starting to dawn on him that the reason he's so good at advertising -- and that she's such a natural -- is that they both understand to the marrow that good advertising works by bridging the emotional gap between what is and what we would it to be. Privileged Paul Kinsey can't possibly know that. Peggy, like Don, has lived it. That gives them a huge creative advantage.

Your thoughts about the final episode, and where the series goes from here? Share them in the comments thread.

It seems that former Miss California Carrie Prejean once made a video of herself walking alone up the Appalachian Trail, and it's now public. Excerpt:

"It was me by myself. There was no one else with me. I was not having sex," the controversial beauty queen told TODAY's Meredith Vieira in New York.

Prejean admitted to making the video of herself and sending it to her boyfriend when she was 17 years old.

I cannot for the life of me understand why any sane person would make a video, or allow a video to be made, of herself or himself having sex, in any way. Aside from the ick factor, you know it's bound to come out one of these days. It will be interesting to watch how many teenage idiots over the next 20 or 30 years will be humiliated as adults when the Too Much Information stunts they carried out online come back to humiliate them as adults. It will be interesting to correlate that population with the same population of 40 and 50 year olds who really, really regret that youthful tattoo, now that they're all wrinkly and saggy.

From an interview with acclaimed memoirist Mary Karr:

I wonder if finding your faith helped your writing. You say in Lit, when you're cautiously becoming Catholic, "It isn't the ritual of the high Mass that impresses me. But the people--their collective surrender. If I can't do reverence to that, how dead are my innards?" Does that acceptance of surrender help with your confidence? Your voice is so self-critical. You don't even give yourself credit for a good suicide attempt. You were like, lamest suicide attempt ever!

Well, the shrinks make a big deal out of it--it was a suicidal gesture, that's what they call it. I didn't actually put my hands on myself, so I'm a fuck-up. We know that. But yes, [my faith is] unbelievably helpful. And maybe it's no different than people doing the Power of Now or whatever. I think the Holy Spirit takes a lot of forms.

I really do write based on prayer. You could see that as talking to your most sane self or your sober self. Somebody said to me, "So, you think you've had all this success because God likes you better than other writers?" And I said, "Absolutely!" Because of my faith, I do have a sense that I'm supposed to be alive on the planet. Which, given the way I was brought up, I didn't exactly have going in.

Does that make sense? Talking about spiritual matters to a secular audience is like doing card tricks on the radio. It's like, "This is really cool, everybody," and they're like, "Yeah, OK!" So I know that it sounds a little nutty.

I don't it sounds that nutty, and I'm definitely part of the secular audience. I read you and Anne Lamott, and you're both people who never thought they would be spiritual but have become spiritual, and the way you write about spirituality is very comforting. It is self-acceptance, ultimately, so I think done well enough it can be relatable.

It's really just about not wanting to kill people on the subway. It's also about not wanting to kill myself when I get home for wanting to kill people on the subway.

I talk about the difference between happiness and joy. I can honestly say I was depressed for so much of my life that I think I knew how to be excited or enthusiastic, but I certainly didn't know anything about joy. Just that simple [feeling], when you run into the ocean.

As regular readers know, I'm a big fan of "Mad Men," but I've not enjoyed this season. I don't care for Betty Draper, and I think the more the serial drama spends time in Westchester, versus the Manhattan office, the draggier it gets. A few weeks back, I told my wife that if we hadn't bought a season pass for all the episodes on iTunes, which is how we have to watch it in our house (we don't get AMC on basic cable), I probably would have drifted away from it.

Happily, last week's episode, which featured the Big Reveal (I won't say what, to protect those who haven't seen it), was first-rate, and brought me back into the game. We haven't had a chance to watch this past Sunday's episode yet (will do so tonight). I do want to commend to your attention Benjamin Schwarz's critical but very admiring essay about the show from the current Atlantic. Here's an interesting, insightful passage:

But even if the portrayal were as "dead-on" as The Times assures us it is, that portrayal is hardly neutral. In describing a scene in which sexist badinage is exchanged at an account meeting, McLean correctly points out that "the series is critical of this limited view and is not afraid to spell [its criticism] out." That stance--which amounts to a defiant indictment of sexism and racism, sins about which a rough moral consensus would now seem to have formed--militates against viewers' inhabiting the alien world the show has so carefully constructed, because it's constantly pressing them to condemn that world.

And that stance is responsible for the rare (and therefore especially grating) heavy-handed and patronizing touches in an otherwise nuanced drama. Must the only regular black characters be a noble and cool elevator operator, a noble and understanding housekeeper, and a perceptive and politicized supermarket clerk? Must said elevator operator, who goes unnoticed by the less sensitive characters, sagely say when discussing Marilyn Monroe's death, "Some people just hide in plain sight"? Get it--he's talking about himself. He's invisible. Even worse, that stance evokes and encourages the condescension of posterity; just as insecure college students feel they must join the knowing hisses of the callow campus audience when a character in an old movie makes an un-PC comment, so Mad Men directs its audience to indulge in a most unlovely--because wholly unearned--smugness. As artistically mistaken as this stance is, it nonetheless helps account for the show's success. We all like to congratulate ourselves, and as a group, Mad Men's audience is probably particularly prone to the temptation.

He's right about that, and he's also right to say that the quality of the writing and the characterizations on the show wholly overcome its limitations. But what Schwarz picks out is in part why "Mad Men" is a SWPL staple. Harry Stein voices a common conservative complaint about the show. Excerpt:

No mystery there, since in its depiction of the fifties and early sixties, Mad Men faithfully reflects the dominant liberal view of that era as a time of rampant materialism, spiritless conformity, and reflexive bigotry. The corollary is that we were redeemed--liberated--not just by the civil rights movement but by the antiwar, feminist, and sexual-liberation crusades that followed. So ubiquitous is this view that its adherents can scarcely mention Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, or Leave It to Beaver, even in print, without sneering. Almost any graduate of today's public schools will tell you, and plenty of their aging antiwar moms and dads will agree, that their grandparents were racist, sexist, and shockingly homophobic, and that's before you even get to the hypocrisy that characterized their interpersonal relations.

In this view, needless to say, we are so much better than all that today. As New York Times op-ed columnist Timothy Egan summed it up in his paean to Mad Men, the half-century from then to now has been a steady "march toward a more tolerant, equitable, less socially inauthentic society." And sure, there is plenty of basis for that judgment. My father-in-law, Moe Turner, used to beat himself up over how, growing up in Arkansas under the American version of apartheid, he'd been so blind to the evil playing out daily before his eyes. Nor can excuses be made for any number of other social attitudes that prevailed back then. But what Moe and his buddies also understood was how much about that despised time was good and worthy, and how much we have lost with its passing.

I think that's true too. The problem with either demonizing or canonizing any era in history is you see what you want to see. Of course by far the dominant narrative in our news and entertainment media has been that the Sixties were a glorious time of revolution and the overturning of the hated, oppressive '50s. On the right, we have tended to locate in the Sixties the locus of all our contemporary problems. The thing we conservatives struggle to come to terms with is this question: If everything was so great in the Fifties, how come it all went to hell so fast in the Sixties?

In its limited way, "Mad Men" gives a partial answer to that. Though I was born in 1967, and in the small-town Deep South (geographically and culturally a very, very long way from midtown Manhattan and Westchester County), I can recognize some of the same cultural values and behavior depicted on the show as true to life in my town in the 1970s (for much of America, the Sixties didn't arrive till the Seventies). But I don't think "Mad Men" tells the entire story of Life Before the Sixties. Does anybody believe that? If "Mad Men" stays around for a while, and traces the arc of its characters, I would expect it to show that the liberation many of its characters yearn for and struggle for won't turn out to be what they expected. It is a downbeat, melancholy program, and that's fine. Again, if it's true to its pessimism, it won't make the mistake of following these characters till, say, 1970, and finding them all fulfilled and high on life. Because that's not what happened in real life, is it?

As I've mentioned here before in connection to "Mad Men," the book to read is Alan Ehrenhalt's "The Lost City," which traces changes in Chicago and community life after the war. Ehrenhalt points out that the Fifties we all long for, of cohesive communities, clear standards, better behavior, was purchased at a price in personal autonomy that few of us today would be willing to pay. "Mad Men" explores in part that cost, e.g., women having to learn to put up with their husbands philandering. And yet, as Ehrenhalt cannily observes, the kind of people who escaped those sorts of places and went on to write films, plays and books about them were typically unhappy rebels. The kinds of people who remember those days as mostly good, happy times aren't often heard from. Anyway, I'm sure liberals and conservatives who are both fans of "Mad Men" watch it differently. Liberals may watch it with the smug self-congratulation about which Schwarz complains. My suspicion is that conservatives who like the show are drawn to it in part for its tragic aspect: that is, we know what's coming next for these people, historically speaking, is not the hoped-for liberation, but a new and different kind of misery. There is no exit from the human condition.

One more thing: You know what I would like to see? A period drama like "Mad Men" set in a black community around the same time period -- a middle-class black neighborhood in Washington, DC, say, in the final years of segregation, as the civil rights movement gained steam. Once when I lived in DC I took a cab ride with an older black gentleman driver. We passed by a desolate stretch of Northeast, and he talked about how when he was a young man, all this was thriving. He said to me that believe it or not, life was pretty good in some respects under segregation. That old man was not wishing for the return of segregation. But he was acknowledging the bitter truth that all the gains in freedom his community made in the Sixties also occasioned some fairly catastrophic losses. That would make for a great serial drama, don't you think?

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Dig it!...

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