Don Draper understands Los Angeles.

Beyond the Edenic weather and low-slung subdivisions, Don says -- without irony -- to a would-be client that in California, “Everything is new, and it’s clean. The people are filled with hope.”

If you believe, as I do, in the notion that cities at the epicenter of cultural shifts embody the ethos of their era -- for example, Boston embodied the revolutionary spirit of 1776, Chicago was welded together by the industrial revolution, whereas New York was a city that defined the immigrant experience and Victorian values -- then no other city in the country is more representative of 20th-century modernism than Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is where the oppressive caste...