Don Draper must have smelled like a ferret. All those heavy suits, the booze sweat, the old smoke. That’s not a new observation – though I don’t think it’s been addressed on the show. I’m just thinking about it because on this week’s “Brooklyn Nine Nine” there was a joke where a young detective wants to be like a seventies cop so he drinks a lot and pours an ashtray on him. (“Brooklyn Nine Nine” is a very funny show by the way.)
Maybe somebody should write a book on how alcoholism has secretly been the main motor of history in the 20th century. There is the famous story of Adenauer and the Russian delegation but you don’t even have to go back that far. I’ve heard semi-coherent arguments that Boehner’s behaviour during the shutdown had something to do with drinking.
Secret motors of history are always fun. I guess that’s why Jon Ronson’s “The Psychopath Test” is such a fascinating book. (Well, that and him being just a really great writer.) There is this theory, he explains, that psychopathy is what really keeps the world going – which is why among CEOs and executives the rate is disproportionately high.
So the eponymous test consists of basically 40 questions or, and if you answer like 30 of them the right/wrong way you’re screwed. Psychopath for life. The questions mostly have to do with the subject’s eagerness to exert power over others, inflict pain, and having an aggrandized view of themselves and seeing others only as pawns. Ronson talks about how learning about the test and the criteria for psychopathy made him look at everybody around him through the lens of psychopathy – so he turned into a psychopath, basically.
My mother doesn’t work in the medical field anymore, but she still reads the journals. (Do I read them too, sometimes, on the train so people think I’m a doctor? Maybe.) She recently told me about Fetal Alcohol Syndrome: when the mother drinks a lot during the pregnancy the baby might have a thin upper lip, short eye lids and no philtrum. So she’s been paying extra attention to those things now. And I have too, of course. I haven’t spotted one yet. If I did I wouldn’t know what to say.