“The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” seems to propel this question, as it strikes me as both an anomalous and representative Mad Men episode, especially in regard to how it engages with the history of race relations and cultural difference in the 1960s. The Roger/Honda storyline marks the first time I can recall that racial prejudice is condemned within the program’s diegesis. Over the course of the episode, Roger is roundly attacked and castigated for his anti-Japanese racism. In contrast, Roger’s blackface performance in season three shocked and appalled viewers, though, with the exception of Don and Pete, his derby party audience smiled on in approval; anti-Semitic slurs were common in season one when Sterling Cooper attempted to land both the Menken’s and Israeli tourism accounts. In this week’s episode, no one is amused by Roger’s anti-Japanese vitriol, no one sympathetic to the war service that informed it, no one tolerant or indulgent of his feelings. His jabs read not as cute, but embarrassing and inappropriate, indicative of how Roger himself—along with his prejudices—are by 1965 anachronisms for which no one else has much patience. And they’re bad for business.

In addition, Don’s ability to best nemesis Ted Shaw and win back Honda’s interest requires him to learn something deeper about Japanese culture than a visit to Benihana’s affords. His ruse, formed after reading Ruth Benedict’s The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, is premised on the cultural differences between American and Japanese businessmen, distinctions that he will honor and manipulate knowing that competitor Shaw will not. In other words, it is a plan that requires not only the kind of hijinks that are becoming the signature of SCDP, but also the willingness to try to see things through a different cultural lens and the humility to recognize the cultural specificity of one’s own interpretations. It’s a theme that is at the center of Benedict’s book and is repeated over the course of the episode, the gang at SCDP needing Bert to function as a cultural interpreter as much as the Honda execs require Akira to be a linguistic one.

On the other hand, the episode’s treatment of the civil rights movement is consistent with how the series has approached the topic up to this point. By and large, Mad Men doesn’t deal with the movement as much as mention it. This week’s episode prefaces the introduction of the Honda account and Roger’s anti-Japanese outburst with a brief discussion of Selma, though it relies on audience familiarity with what “Selma” signifies: the vicious police brutality against civil rights activists as they crossed the Edmund Pettus Bridge on a march from Selma to Montgomery. Gesturing to a newspaper headline, Roger asks Bert whether he still believes there is no need for a civil rights law, to which Bert responds “they got what they wanted, what else do they want?” Don arrives, Pete raises the possibility of a Honda account, to which Roger evokes his war service, derides Honda execs as Pete’s “little yellow buddies,” and sets in motion a principle dramatic tension of the episode. Once the scene ends, the camera cuts to Don’s apartment where Sally and Bobby watch the news unsupervised, as the anchor discusses what I believe is the funeral of James Reeb, a white Unitarian minister who had traveled to Selma to support civil rights activists and who subsequently had been beaten to death by local white supremacists.

Though there are rare exceptions—Medgar Evers appearing in Betty’s birth hallucinations, Kinsey traveling to Mississippi to register voters—the iconic events of civil rights in Mad Men are dropped in via newspaper headlines and brief glimpses of newscasts, sometimes briefly discussed by our characters until the more pressing concerns of office politics or interpersonal dramas grab their attention, or via quick conversational references, as in the season premiere when Bethany mentions the three civil rights workers murdered in the summer of 1964. Mad Men typically does not provide much more than these signposts, and rewards viewers who recognize the events they reference. It’s as though the series is reminding us that these things are going on but, by how quickly these references come and go in the narrative, that they aren’t having much of an impact on our characters, save tepid condemnations of southern violence or quick assessments of civil rights legislation. To underline how little has changed up in NY, the only African American people we see in “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” are a black waiter who passes by as Don waits to meet with the guys from Honda, and Carla who accompanies Sally to her appointment with Dr. Edna.

Because of the temporal juxtapositions, it seems reasonable that the episode invites a comparison between these different forms of racial intolerance, between Roger’s aggressive anti-Japanese tirades and Bert’s dismissal of the legitimacy of civil rights at home, Don paging through Benedict’s book but ignoring entirely the news report of Reeb’s murder. And it is perhaps this take on racism and cultural difference, that it mattered to many white Americans only when profitable, that instantiates one of the show’s most cynical takes on the 1960s and, accordingly, on the progressive and celebratory history of racial equality that we continue to narrate in the present.

Sadly, there are no new pig metaphors in Fox Television Stations, Inc. v. FCC, the July 13 appellate court decision that ruled the FCC’s indecency policy to be unconstitutional, though the Pacifica case looms large in the decision.  The latest in a series of decisions over the Commission’s indecency enforcement, the Fox court argued that the FCC’s indecency policy was “impermissibly vague,” had a dangerous chilling effect on speech, and violated the First Amendment. According to the court, the current policy had produced too much uncertainty as to what was or was not indecent and thus encouraged broadcasters to adopt overly cautious practices of self-censorship to avoid Commission penalties.

Though the court acknowledged it lacked the authority to overturn the Pacifica precedent, it indicated that the “uniquely pervasive” rationale at its center seemed like something of a relic, an anachronism in an era of online video, the expansion of cable television, social networking sites, or of technologies like the v-chip that allow parents to block the very content the indecency rules were designed to shield from children. Though this was not the meat of the court’s decision, it has been the part of the Fox case that has received a good deal of praise and attention. Commentators ranging from the New York Times editorial board to former FCC chair Michael Powell have suggested that Fox reinforces a marketplace approach to media regulation, one that interprets all content restrictions as outdated, unconstitutional, and unnecessary in a world of media plenty. With so many potential pigs in the parlor, to treat broadcasting as uniquely pervasive no longer seemed tenable.

Yet to me this is the wrong takeaway from Fox.  The appellate court did not only gesture to how the majority decision in Pacifica may no longer be salient, but also importantly implied that the view offered in Brennan’s dissent was perhaps right after all.  The crux of the Fox decision hinged on the vagueness of the Commission’s indecency rules, which had lead to contradictory and discriminatory outcomes.  How does it make sense, the court wondered, that the Commission deemed the word “bullshit” patently offensive, but not “dickhead”?  Perhaps more importantly, why were expletives permissible when uttered by the fictional characters in Saving Private Ryan, understood as necessary to the verisimilitude of the film, but not when spoken by actual musicians interviewed for the documentary The Blues?  Such inconsistencies, the court surmised, potentially reflect the biases of the commissioners themselves and “it is not hard to speculate that the FCC was simply more comfortable with the themes in ‘Saving Private Ryan,’ a mainstream movie with a familiar cultural milieu, than it was with ‘The Blues,’ which largely profiled an outsider genre of musical experience.”

The vagueness of the rules, in other words, not only made it very difficult for broadcasters to anticipate when and whether the use of terms like  “douchebag” (my example, not the court’s) would be ruled indecent, but provided latitude for the Commission to privilege its own mores and values in determining what should be permissible in the public sphere. It is a view that echoed Justice Brennan’s dissent in Pacifica, in which he warned that that the majority decision would sanction the “dominant culture’s efforts to force those groups who do not share its mores to conform to its way of thinking, acting, and speaking,” and in which he accused his colleagues of an “ethnocentric myopia,” the Pacifica decision itself an imposition of the justices’ own “fragile sensibilities” on a culturally pluralistic society.

Brennan’s concern was not that the Commission’s and the Court’s indecency policy was imprecise, but that its intent seemed all too transparent, as a way to silence speech that offended their sense of decorum, expose taboos they’d prefer to remain hidden, articulate political and social values they find unpalatable.  Not only were they burning the house to roast the pig, but the distinctions they were to draw between pearls and swine would sanction their own presumptions about aesthetics, ethics, and respectability.

And this I think is Fox’s important referendum on Pacifica and the indecency policy it had sanctioned: not that the media marketplace is now a panacea of free speech, but that broadcasting policy too often can operate as a cudgel to privilege the sensibilities and perspectives of particular sectors of the community over others in the guise of seemingly neutral regulations.  It’s not, in other words, that our contemporary parlors are overrun with pigs, but that to many of us those pigs in the parlor may never have been pigs after all.