Pounds of Flesh: Mad Men and Greek Austerity

Char Roone Miller

George Mason University

The black silhouette of a well-dressed man falls through the opening credits of Mad Men, cascading through a cityscape displaying advertisements for the program's world of desire: cigarettes, booze, and women.  As if it lacks even a pound of flesh, the silhouette lightly lands on a couch facing, like the viewer, the television and the products it advertises. Don Draper, the lead character, an advertising executive exceptionally skilled at selling fantasy, occupies the position of male desire that many characters in the program wish they could occupy, a perspective from which all the objects of his desire are easily attainable.  Like the silhouette in the opening shot, Draper is mostly a shadow; the demands of family, friends, and his own body scarcely register.  Nothing he desires costs him very much, yet, no one, it often appears, could ask for anything more. 


(Note: this post contains Mad Men season 5 spoilers - ed.)

Draper embodies an inhuman lightness concerning human problems and responsibilities; he cheats on his wife, neglects his children, smokes continually, receives awards for the work of other people, drinks Old Fashions throughout the day, and denies knowing his brother. Rarely do commitments and promises weigh very heavily on this character. He remains the physical embodiment of the fantasy products he so skillfully sells.

Behind the office doors at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, doubts about this way of life and the costs of doing business pile up.  Set in a center of American capitalism, Madison Avenue in New York City, Mad Men consistently portrays the lack of satisfaction faced by the Don Draper’s of the world. Even Goldman, Sachs, the show seems to promise, can’t sleep at night.  Heavy casualties pile up in the wake of these very successful business people; the sacrifice of family, friends, and colleagues so that people like Draper can make and remake themselves in the interest of making money. 

In the penultimate episode of this season Draper confronts a partner’s appropriation of money from the agency.  Lane Pryce, a junior partner confronted with large bills, forged Draper’s signature on what he thought would be an early Christmas bonus. Pryce took the money in order to maintain family obligations; responsibilities generally neglected by Draper.  The partners, however, give up their bonuses, leaving Pryce holding $7,500 in fraudulently appropriated funds. This crime could have played like so many others on the show, the kind of thing that white straight men easily forgive one another. When Draper discovers the fraud he fires Pryce, not so much for the money as for a loss of trust.  The issue, as with many accounts of the current economic crisis—from American mortgages to Greek sovereign debt—isn’t the money, but rather some perverse demand for trust.  Bankers in Greece, for example, only stand to have their levels of profit lowered by forgiving and restructuring debt; they are not in danger of actually losing money. Draper and the firm will be fine; in fact Draper offers to cover the debt for Price as he asks for his resignation. In the final episode the firm begins to make so much money the partners don’t know what to do with it all.  Just as Draper, flush with enough wealth that he never has to worry about such things, fails to understand the monetary pressure on Pryce, banks and corporations demand trust from workers in an uneven exchange that treats the worker’s demands for money and power as a morally suspect type of selfishness. Pryce, according to Draper, broke that trust and must pay the price. 

Currently, European and American banks demand that Greece pay a similar price. Money piles up in Greek, German, and American banks, even as the extraction of that money costs so many people in Greece so much: unemployment at 20%, a health care system cut by 25%, thousands dropped from disability support, and major sources of public revenue sold to private companies. One symbol of the price of austerity is the 22% increase in suicide since 2009—including a 77-year-old retiree who shouted “I don’t want to leave debts to my children,” just before pulling the trigger in front of the Parliament building in Athens. 

In Mad Men’s first season, viewers learned that Don Draper was an identity assumed by Dick Whitman, when the real Draper was killed next to him in the Korean War.  Draper is long dead; Whitman just acts like him. In effect, every time Whitman claims to be Draper, it’s a crime mirrored to a minor degree by Pryce’s forged check. The position that Draper occupies in order to condemn Pryce’s crime was made possible by a much larger but essentially similar crime.  In the case of Greece the debt that Greeks are being forced to pay was produced through, in many cases, criminal financial exploitation. Goldman Sachs, for example, helped Athens hide its debt by hiding loans as currency trades and by setting up financial arrangements to take over the profits from the airport of Athens. While this may have been criminal the demand for payment still weighs heavy. The ethical demands of money and capital take on a reality lacking in other social relationships (especially for the Draper’s out there). Money’s demands are high for Pryce: the body falling through space in this episode has more weight than a mere shadow; the weight of a hanging body, the weight of Pryce hanging himself behind his office door.

The dapper Draper resembles in style and privilege Christine Lagarde, the managing director of IMF, who the Guardian recently described as elegantly serene, even as the fiscal demands she forces on Greece inelegantly fractures Greek serenity. Ignoring the damage and violence that austerity inflicts on the bodies of living Greeks, she advocates for cuts in education of Greek children, cuts in medical support for the old, and the privatization of public resources. Sounding like Draper’s response to Pryce, she points out the ways that ethics demands that Greeks pay their debts and that money be treated as the preeminent marker of fairness. Debts (to banks) must be paid. “Do you know what? As far as Athens is concerned, I also think about all those people who are trying to escape tax all the time. All these people in Greece who are trying to escape tax.” German Prime Minister Merkel, The Wall Street Journal reported, also asserted the ethical status of paying debt at the cost of great suffering. “It is more important that the new (Greek) government stick to the commitments that Greece has made to the international community and its partners in the European Union.” Forbes Magazine called the renegotiation of the debt by the Greeks 'disgraceful.' “Greece committed a grave injustice,” Richard Salsman argues. “Contrary to convention, morals and money go hand-in-hand.  The Latin root of ‘credit’ is trust.”

Christine Lagarde

The camera's attention to Pryce's dead body does more than symbolize the hypocrisy of the banks and the human costs of financial demands. The very sight of the bloated body provokes a visceral response to the abstracted violence of money and forces a confrontation with the values and flesh excluded from monetary systems of value. Pryce's dead body, moreover, like the sovereign’s material body, confronts the viewer with the equality and immanence of animal flesh.  

The financial crisis is about money but it’s never really about money. It’s about the trust, faith, and belief that people put into money. It is about the production of value in the human body. Gilles Deleuze writes in Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation about novelist K. P. Moritz’s description of the execution of criminals and the affect of their meat: “the horror of sacrifice he feels when he witnesses the execution of four men, . . . . ‘thrown on the wheel’ or over the balustrade; his certainty that in some strange way this event concerns all of us, that this discarded meat is we ourselves, and that the spectator is already in the spectacle, a ‘mass of ambulating flesh’; hence his living idea that even animals are part of humanity, that we are all criminals, we are all cattle . . . . This is not an arrangement of man and beast, nor a resemblance; it is a deep identity, a zone of indiscernibility more profound than any sentimental identification: the man who suffers is a beast, the beast that suffers is a man.” Pryce’s flesh in Mad Men makes visual an affective response to the abstract suffering produced not by torture on the wheel in the name of a political sovereign but by the costs of money, credit, and debt to notions of popular sovereignty and equality. The “we” that is concerned here is a “we” made flesh in the body through which money circulates.

Even though it invites a response to the world in abstract, non-sensual, and immaterial terms, money is not an escape from life.  Money moves in relation to life and bodies, establishing the value and meaning of matter.  Money is one of the factors involved in our affective response to the universe, effecting how we see, what we see, and the meaning of those physical responses.  Money receives its value in relation to flesh even as flesh, weighed in pounds or kilograms, priced in dollars, euros, yen, and pounds, receives its value in relation to money.

Great White Hope: The National Martin Luther King Memorial

Char Roone Miller
George Mason University


The U.S. census recently reported that the income gap between the richest and the poorest in the United States has doubled since 1968 (from a ratio of 7.69 to 1 to 14.5-to-1 in 2010), the United States is currently active in not one but three major wars, and there are more black men in American prisons today than there were slaves in 1850.  You don’t need a crystal ball, or a giant granite one, to know Martin Luther King’s response to this condition.

In spite of the justifiable and touching power the new Martin Luther King Memorial on the National Mall in D.C. takes from our nostalgia for the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s, it fails to move us any closer to understanding or realizing how a living monument to King's dream requires our resistance to militaristic and economic forms of oppression.  The Memorial whitewashes any sense of King as activist, disrupter of power structures, and critic of economic systems.  It hides the struggle demanded by King.

A figural 30 ft-tall sculpture of MLK emerges partially formed from a block of granite, called The Stone of Hope, which appears to be the middle third of a giant boulder, sliced out and pushed from between the other two slabs of rock—The Mountain of Despair—towards the tidal basin on the National Mall.  The colossal white granite memorial, located at the cartoonish address of 1964 Independence Ave., SW DC, sternly faces the Jefferson Memorial, with its back towards the Lincoln.

None of the fourteen quotations carved into the wide marble wall that arcs around and behind the statue of King refers directly to King's work against economic injustice.  One quotation, from his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, does suggest the audacity of his desire that all people receive three meals a day.  Unfortunately, this phrase becomes a touching platitude when removed from demands for state action or public policy.  The architect carved two additional quotations onto the sides of the statue of King, including one that has provoked significant criticism in which King appears to be describing himself as a “drum major for justice.” 

King’s original quotation suggested that he didn’t mind being deprecated in the service of the cause even if critics wanted to call him a “drum major for justice.”  Exactly the meaning suggested by the redaction; Maya Angelou said that edit made King look like an "arrogant twit."  The Foundation missed the point, but, worse, they missed an opportunity and wasted valuable space with a clichéd phrase, when King authored so many pithy statements of purpose.  King's remarks, for example, concerning the seat of the national government are remarkably appropriate for display in Washington DC:  “We will place the problems of the poor at the seat of government of the wealthiest nation in the history of mankind.”  The statements displayed on the memorial fail to provide much meaning to King’s vision, even as they strategically lack any reference to his economic demands.

This shouldn’t be too surprising.  In spite of their repeated attempts to destroy organized labor, suppress wages, and general success at shifting wealth to the very rich, major corporations paid for this memorial.  Coke, Ford, Target, ExxonMobil, BP, FannieMae, JPMorgan Chase @ Co., NFL, McDonalds, and Lehman Brothers all donated to the Memorial and are listed on the major contributors page.  General Motors donated $10 million.   Wall-Mart gave $1 million. The Foundation proudly proclaims the faith these major donors have in King’s dream.  “By their generous support,” the website proclaims, “they’ve demonstrated something truly remarkable.  They’ve shown the breadth of support that exists for Dr. King’s vision, from the man on the street to boardrooms on the fiftieth floor.”

Those boardrooms, high above the people occupying the street, did not offer large donations in order to memorialize the fact that King was assassinated in 1968 while in Memphis supporting striking sanitation workers; that just days after her husband’s murder Coretta Scott King and 42,000 people peacefully marched through Memphis to demand that the Mayor of Memphis recognize the sanitation worker’s union; that at the time of his assassination King was hard at work on the Poor People’s Campaign.   Neither Walmart nor Target, companies that have dedicated massive financial resources to fighting labor unions, could be expected to memorialize King’s vision for the power of organized labor.  Certainly not Coke, with its history of fighting unions in Guatemala and accusations that the company has used prison labor in China, and its probable complicity in the death of union organizers in Columbia.  These donors, I claim, paid for a Memorial that would help us forget that the revolution, as Gil Scott-Heron sang, "does not go better with Coke."  They got what they paid for; the Memorial does not offer any sense of the stern criticism King would certainly direct toward the labor practices of many of these companies.  The problem is not that they gave money for the Memorial, it’s that the Memorial fails to display the conflict those donations have with King’s labor advocacy. “We call our demonstration a campaign for jobs and income,” King wrote, “because we feel that the economic question is the most crucial that black people, and poor people generally, are confronting.” (A Testament of Hope: The Essential Writings and Speeches of Martin Luther King Jr., Pages 67-69) Simply allowing the Memorial to deliver King’s message concerning the importance of organized labor on a monument paid for by labor busters would offer a better representation of the struggle that King advocated.

Corporations were not the only donors, nor were they the only donors with labor policies in serious conflict with King's struggle.  The Memorial, as many have remarked, was created in China.   The Chinese government, probably the largest single donor to the memorial, gave the foundation $25 million--the U.S. government only gave $10 million in matching funds.  The Foundation naively denies that the Chinese donation influenced their decision to create the memorial in China.  Union representatives in the United States protested the contract with China and eventually received a promise from Johnson that union labor would be used to assemble the monument in the United States.  Then in September of last year, the union discovered that the Foundation had reneged on this written promise and that unpaid workers from China were working on the Memorial.  Harry S. Johnson, president and CEO of the Memorial Foundation, evoked a hypocritical claim to racial harmony to hide the issue of economic exploitation. On September 8, the Foundation asserted:  “While 95% of the work is being done by American workers, we strongly believe that we should not exclude anyone from working on this project simply because of their religious beliefs, social background or country of origin.”

The Foundation consistently gestured toward pluralism and artistic integrity to make the exploitative dimension of their economic choices disappear.  According to Ed Jackson Jr., the Executive Architect on the project: “The granite for King's statue was chosen because when lit at night, it lends a brownish tone to King's likeness. The stone, however, only exists in China.” though, he added, “some wanted it to come from the United States.”  All the white marble on the National Mall, whether from China, Italy or New Hampshire, gets darker when the sun goes down.  Jackson’s ridiculous claim about the color of the statue raises another, more obvious, question:  why not use black granite? Martin Luther King was Black. 

Birmingham, Alabama King Memorial

The Foundation’s decision to represent Dr. King in white granite treats the color of his skin as a peripheral issue, when in fact it made King who he was.  King certainly looked to a time when people no longer made judgments of value based on the color of skin but in the United States white has never been the neutral absence of color. That the Foundation chose white as an abstracted representation of King continues, regrettably, the social positioning of whiteness as neutral, which requires the production of other colors as derivative or deviant.

The assertion, given broad currency in the 1960s, that “black is beautiful”highlights a politics of aesthetic taste. The color and shape of the statue of King appears as a visual and sensual event. The body with its attractions (of color, shape, size, strength, weakness, etc.) functions as a political trigger for desire and emulation.  Plenty of our responses to the appearance of the human body are beyond and before our understanding of actions, arguments, and behaviors. Such responses are an important part of our political life.  Monuments operate in this field.  King’s physical appearance moves us; King deserved a monument that would move us. 

Binghamton, New York King Memorial

To build a colossal statue to King on the Mall is to represent him in many of the terms that have solidified white male privilege (with its connections to national and imperial forms of domination). The representation of emperors, kings, and presidents in sculptural form often presented the leader as transcending the limits of the body.  It is undoubtedly an important moment when the body of the son of a Black preacher, himself the son of a sharecropper, appears as a giant white god. 

It is inescapably necessary to represent King in earlier categories of power and value but the valuable struggle comes in using that positioning to undercut the borrowed hierarchy. Borrow the trappings of power but only to transform the terms of success. Take some money from Coke but spend that money to support the Columbian food workers union, SINALTRAINAL.  This Memorial fails because it never displays the struggle necessary for political life.  King’s life was a life of this struggle.

King's arrest for 'loitering,' 1958

It’s exciting to see Martin Luther King Jr. occupying such select space on the National Mall but we can’t afford to loose his critiques of the forms of value and prestige that the Mall and its Memorials represent.  Lehman Brothers and Coke may have paid for this Memorial but the real monument to King are the activists occupying Wall Street and DC in an attempt to transform notions of privilege and power through conflict and struggle.