Hasta La Creative!

When Michael Ginsberg was introduced in season five as the agency’s first Jew, we were set up for the show to grapple a bit with Madison Avenue’s — and by extension American culture’s — history of anti-Semitism. We never really got there, even though Ginsberg, born in a concentration camp, made for a vibrant supporting character. This season, though, the quirky writer has slid into mental illness only accelerated by the installation of a mainframe computer in Sterling Cooper & Partners.

Last night’s episode marked what we can only assume is the end of the character. Michael Ginsberg, sounding a bit like Allen Ginsberg, spouts paranoid delusions, talking about the “pressure in my head, like a hydrogen bomb that’s gonna go off.” He warns the machine will “turn us all homos.” He makes a pass at Peggy, who handles it all well, right up until he slices his nipple off and gifts it to her.

Last week, we examined how the technophobia expressed by Don wasn’t really technophobia at all. In much the same way, you have to look beyond Ginsberg’s ravings about the agency’s brand-new IBM 360. Sure, there’s the surface-level paranoia, but there’s also some foggy historical subtext, including IBM’s alleged role in the Holocaust, about which little was known until 2002, when investigative journalist Edwin Black reported that IBM’s German subsidiary helped facilitate genocide by helping the Nazis by creating punch cards based on census data. (IBM has questioned the writer’s methodology.)

Continue reading at AdAge.com