This interview is amazing, and gives even more character perspective.

And for the record, I can't stand your posts, Rosie…

Your comments aren't even "playing devil's advocate," as much as they show time and time again that you. just. don't .get. it. It's not the show you love to hate, you just hate it.

There! I just added my first intelligent comment!

Do you honestly, in all fairness, actually believe that Matt Weiner is "hinting" that the American Civil Rights movement was the product of privileged white people and that poor and working class blacks played no part in it? Is that your implication? Other than a tortured reading of a sentence about the Russian Revolution, do you see evidence of that elsewhere?

"DL: You kind of have to be privileged to be part of a movement because otherwise you can’t take time off of work.

MW: Well, yeah. They talk about this with the Russian Revolution, it wasn’t made out of people growing up in poverty, it was a lot of sons of doctors that made the revolution happen."

What is he trying to hint in the above remarks?

I also have a problem with something Weiner said in his interview:

MW: My favorite line in that whole story line is Paul saying to her, “Can’t it wait? Why can’t it wait?” That’s the understanding of it. And by the way, privileged white people who have good politics have made a huge difference in that world. They were very, very important to the world changing. I wasn’t just trying to ridicule him. They were the people that actually, I was trying to show, why do you go down there? It’s more complicated.
RL: It’s sort of like, the straight women speaking up about AIDS is what helped move that along.
MW: Right, absolutely. And the fact that the people who are activists are often, intolerant or insufferable or egotistical or whatever else it is, or privileged, y’know?
DL: You kind of have to be privileged to be part of a movement because otherwise you can’t take time off of work.
MW: Well, yeah. They talk about this with the Russian Revolution, it wasn’t made out of people growing up in poverty, it was a lot of sons of doctors that made the revolution happen.”

What is Weiner exactly trying to say? That overprivileged white liberals were the most active in the Civil Rights movement? Their actions were the ones that counted? And what is with this statement that one has to be priviledged in order to participate in a social movement? What is he saying? That the majority of underprivlidged non-whites DID NOT participate in the Civil Rights movement?

Do you watch the show? Did you see the scene, that Weiner created, showing a bus full of African Americans?

I have a longer argument on this issue at the Mad Men livejournal community, but in short, I think you're misinterpreting the situation. I don't think that anybody wants to force Duck out. I think that Duck doesn't want to play second-fiddle to Don, and made it perfectly clear that as President of Sterling-Cooper, he would only permit Don to stay on under terms that Don found unacceptable. At any point during his last scene, Duck could have moderated his position, but he forced the owners to choose between him and Don.

Since that was the choice before him, it's entirely logical that Powell opted for the superstar with the national reputation rather than the unstable alcoholic who had already left PP&L in disgrace two years earlier. It's not "ludicrous"; it's the most rational business decision that he could have made in that position.

I understand that it might be easier for a priviledged person to participate in something like that . . . but if a person had studied the Civil Rights Movement, he or she could see that a great number of underprivlidged people DID participate in the movement. They had sacrified a great deal. I'm only surprised that Weiner had not noticed or remembered this, during the interview.