The Monolith - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin

Seeing as how we’ve been spending a lot of time quoting our wise and fearless founder, Keith Roulston, lately, allow me to go back to an old staple that has shown up in this space a lot over the years: Mad Men.

 

Season seven of the show, also its last, takes place in 1969, as the world stands on the precipice of change. In an episode early on in the season, the advertising firm central to the story buys its first computer in an episode that very directly references the great 2001: A Space Odyssey, which had premiered less than a year earlier in April of 1968. The episode is called “The Monolith” echoing the ubiquitous, alien monuments from the film and it shows the creative staff, writers and artists, grappling with the arrival and installation of the massive machine, which needs an entire room to house it - a far cry from the smartphones we all now carry at all times; talk about ubiquitous. 

 

The computer displaces the creatives and takes over their creative lounge, where writers and artists alike would get together, eat food, smoke pot (hey, it was the late 1960s), bounce ideas off of one another and work together to solve the problems of this project or that. Our hero Don Draper and others on the creative side bemoan this development, questioning the need for and relevance of the computer and fearing that, perhaps, it was thought that the computer could replace them. “It’s not symbolic,” says Draper’s computer-pushing colleague Harry Crane, to which Draper replies, “No, it’s quite literal.”

 

Back in 2016, when things were a lot less dystopian than they are now, a burgeoning politician by the name of Donald Trump, then not even elected president for the first time, was in Nevada to celebrate winning that state’s endorsement of him as the next Republican candidate. He defeated fellow ghouls Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz, so there wasn’t a lot of variety on offer there, but still. (Boy, what a trio there. You can’t help but wish them the best 2023 submersible voyage, am I right?)

 

Anyway, you may know Trump’s victory speech from that night, even if you don’t know that you do. As he runs down the list of voters with whom he had found support, he names the “poorly educated” among them. “I love the poorly educated,” he said to a chorus of, you know, cheers. A good side note here is that he is flanked by his Beavis and Butthead sons, who smirk at one another as it happens. 

 

This clip, out of context (not that there really is context), is often shared by Trump opponents who see it as, very early on, the curtain being lifted behind this movement: get uneducated people angry and they’ll vote with just about their most base instincts and fears.

 

Much has been written about the educational gap between Republicans and Democrats in the United States, so I won’t belabor the point. But, of all the moves being made by Trump and Elon Musk to undermine democracy and save money, allegedly, Trump’s executive order to dismantle the Department of Education feels like the most literal of the moves, showing exactly what he prioritizes.

 

And while Americans may not see it this way, the rest of the world is watching the U.S. spiral into a future of anti-science, anti-education, anti-tolerance and anti-progression. Former wrestling lady Linda McMahon will have her hands full as the government works to wind down the work of the Department of Education, but the juice will surely be worth the squeeze as Trump’s move will create a whole new generation of poorly educated people who, before long, will be able to vote, even if they may need help drawing that X.