A blog by Jay Livingston -- what I've been thinking, reading, seeing, or doing. Although I am a member of the Montclair State University department of sociology, this blog has no official connection to Montclair State University. “Montclair State University does not endorse the views or opinions expressed therein. The content provided is that of the author and does not express the view of Montclair State University.”
Negative statements are harder to evaluate than are positive statements, though the difference may be only a microsecond of thought.
1. True or False: Barack Obama is not president. 2. True or False: Barack Obama is president.
Which question could you answer more quickly?
When multiple negatives keep switching the sign from positive to negative and back, a reader sinks into the mud and struggles to find the meaning of the sentence.
In previous posts (here, for example) I’ve made up my own examples (“The Supreme Court today failed to overturn a lower-court ruling that denied a request to reverse . . .”).
I thought I was exaggerating. But try this.
“Bad acts should not long remain without an insufficient tax.”
Three negatives – should not, without, insufficient. Four if you count bad, the negative of good. Five if you count tax as the negative of reward.
I am not making this up. It’s a variant on something from Robin Hanson’s blog, Overcoming Bias . Here is the verbatim quote
“good acts shouldn’t long remain with an insufficient subsidy. Or bad acts without an insufficient tax.”
An author shouldn’t refuse to leave unedited a sentence with so many negatives. Or do I mean the opposite?
I played my drum for him Pa rum pum pum pum I played my best for him Pa rum pum pum pum
If you’ve seen “Whiplash,” you’ll get the irony. If not, watch the trailer.
Like most trailers, it pretty much tells you the whole story, though it inflates the boy-girl theme, which in the actual movie is an afterthought, a bit of romantic relief in lieu of comic relief (the movie has zero laughs). After all, we can’t have 105 minutes of non-stop sadism, intimidation, and humiliation. And blood. A lot of blood. Much more than you’d expect in a movie about jazz drumming. But then, this movie is not really about jazz.
Getting back to the Christmas carol, Fletcher (J.K. Simmons – the music teacher as drill sergeant) is no Baby Jesus, but he is a charismatic figure albeit a negative one. He leads the band via charismatic authority. Andrew (Miles Teller) and the other students are in his thrall. They want only to please him and avoid his cruelty. It is for him that they practice, it is for him that they play (“Shall I play for you, pa rum pum pum pum, on my drum?”).
“Whiplash” is shot mostly in dim music rooms, and the lighting gives the movie a film noir feel. But the link to gangster films is more than visual. The constellation of conflicts and characters too reaches back to film noir. . .
. . . a night-time dream world . . . where the hero is involved in a conflict of crime and punishment with the older man, his boss, often the lord of the underworld
That’s from a book published in 1950, Movies, a Psychological Study, by Martha Wolfenstein and Nathan Leites. They sort out the dominant themes in American, Brtish, and French films of the late 1940s. Watching “Whiplash” you get the sense that little has changed. In the “night-time world . . . the hero grapples with a dangerous older man and wards off entanglement with a desirable and yearning woman.” Even from the trailer, you can see that this is a good description of the place of romance in “Whiplash.” The character of Andrew’s father (Paul Reiser) is also foretold by Wolfenstein and Leites. “The hero’s father is usually a sympathetic character, and almost always ineffectual.”
As in film noir, the conflicts are largely external. The hero need not admit the possibility of his own dark impulses. That goes for the audience as well. These are all projected onto the bad guy.
It is the hero’s boss who attacks him and who commits numerous crimes for which he frequently tries to inculpate the hero. The violent impulses [of the hero],* acknowledged in much [other] Western tragedy, find a reverse expression here. The [hero] is in the clear because the older man attacks him first. Everything he does is in self-defense. Any bad actions of which the heroes of other dramas may accuse themselves appear as a frame-up against which the hero must fight. He would be amply justified in killing the unfairly attacking older man.
Andrew’s motives are pure mostly. He starts off nearly as innocent as the little drummer boy, though with more ambition. He wants to work hard and become a good drummer, maybe the best. But then Fletcher insinuates himself into the boy’s dreams to distort those motives into a self-destructive obsession. It feels like a case of demonic possession, and Fletcher is the demon.
Because the conflicts are externalized, because the film dumps all negative impulses into the character of Fletcher, there can be only one resolution. The trailer doesn’t give away the ending, but you can guess. There’s going to be a showdown between Andrew and Fletcher. Why? Because, as I’ve remarked several times in this blog (here for example), American films often hinge on the assumption that all problems can be solved by a climactic confrontation. The problems might be external – politics, crime, etc. – and the good guy and bad guy slug it out to see whose vision of the society will prevail. But even when the conflicts are internal – the hero’s moral and psychological state – they are resolved by a contest, often athletic. Rocky and The Karate Kid find their true inner virtue in the ring. But the arena might just as easily be a chess tournament, a pool hall, a dance floor. Or a band performance.
In reality, transposing the film noir set-up to a jazz band is a bit of a stretch. In these movies, the question is who’s going to run this show – the good guy or the bad guy (as in “On the Waterfront,” “High Noon,” and surely many others). But in the real world, jazz students in band class aren’t learning to stand out as leaders. Just the opposite – they’re learning to play as part of a band. Horn players learn to blend with their section. Rhythm section players have more latitude; where horn parts are carefully written note for note, the score for piano, bass, guitar, and drums will have sections that are less specific – chord symbols or general rhythmic indications. But rhythm players too, including drummers, must learn to meld with the ensemble.**
Unfortunately, a hero learning to be an integral part of a whole would not make for much of a movie, at least not an American movie. But to repeat, this movie is not about jazz, learning it or playing it. It’s about the conflict between the young hero and the lord of the underworld.
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* Wolfenstein and Leities, writing in 1950 and much influenced by Freud, put this in Oedipal terms: “the violent impulses of sons toward their fathers.” ** There are one or two exemplary musical moments in “Whiplash” where you hear a well-rehearsed band doing some great ensemble playing. That said, there are real-life drummers who do lead the band, loudly, and let the audience make no mistake as to who is the star of the show. Most notably there was Buddy Rich, who seems to be an inspiration for the characters in “Whiplash” and perhaps for the filmmaker as well. Buddy had more than a touch of Fletcher, as you can hear in some of his rants on the bus, tearing into his young musicians, rants that were surreptitiously taped by the band’s pianist Lee Musiker. Listen here.
“We need to get rid of Obamacare,” says Ed Gillispie in a NYT op-ed yesterday (here). The reason: Obamacare’s “gravitational pull toward a single-payer system that would essentially supplant private insurance with a government program.”
Gillespie, who lays out his credentials at the start of the article – he ran for Senate in Virginia and lost – notes that Obamacare is unpopular. But he omits all mention of a government-run single-payer system that happens to be very popular – Medicare. No Republican dare run on a platform of doing away with it. Gillespie himself accused Obamacare of cutting Medicare, a statement that Politifact found “Mostly False.”
So how are seniors doing? Compared to their pre-Medicare counterparts, they are probably healthier, and they’re probably shelling out less for health care. But compared to seniors in other countries, not so well. A Commonwealth Fund survey in eleven countries finds that seniors (age 65 and older) in the US are the least healthy – the most likely to suffer from chronic illnesses.*
Over half the the US seniors say that they are taking four or more prescription drugs. (All the other countries were below 50%.)
And despite Medicare, money was a problem. Nearly one in five said that in the past year they “did not visit a doctor, skipped a medical test or treatment that a doctor recommended, or did not fill a prescription or skipped doses because of cost.” A slightly higher percent had been hit with $2000 or more in out-of-pocket expenses.
In those other countries, with their more socialistic health care systems, seniors seem to be doing better, physically and financially. One reason that American seniors are less healthy is that our universal, socialized medical care doesn’t kick in until age 65. Americans’ health problems may have started long before that. People in those other countries have affordable health care starting in the womb.
Critics of more socialized systems claim that patients must wait longer to see a doctor. The survey found some support for that. Does it take more than four weeks to get to see a specialist? US seniors had the highest percentage of those who waited less than that. But when it came to getting an ordinary doctor’s appointment, the US lagged behind seven of the other ten countries.
There was one bright spot for US seniors. They were the most likely to have developed a treatment plan that they could carry out in daily life. And their doctors “discussed their main goals and gave instructions on symptoms to watch for” and talked with them about diet and exercise.
Gillespie and many other Republicans want to scrap Obamacare and substitute something else. That’s progress I suppose. Not too long ago, they were quite happy with the pre-Obamacare status quo, even though the US healthcare spending was double that of other countries with little difference in health outcomes. That didn’t stop George Bush from insisting throughout his years in the White House that “America has the best health care system in the world.” But at least now, the Republicans want to do something different. Unfortunately, their Republican ideology precludes them from learning from other countries. As Marco Rubio put it, we must avoid “ideas that threaten to make America more like the rest of the world, instead of helping the world become more like America.”
But maybe Republicans might learn from their own country by taking a second look at Medicare, a program many of them publicly support. They’ll just have to avoid letting anyone know that for nearly a half-century it has done what Gillespie says should not be done: “supplant private insurance with a government program.”
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* Includes hypertension or high blood pressure, heart disease, diabetes, lung problems, mental health problems, cancer, and joint pain/arthritis.
Much of Hanna Rosin’s recent Atlantic article “Why Kids Sext” plays on the generational divide. Parents get understandably upset about something that kids see as just another part of social life. Cops and prosecutors have an even more difficult time since a high schooler’s sexy cellphone selfie is a felony in most states.
The media too aren’t sure how to play it. “Massive teen sexting ring,” gasped the headline in a local paper in Louisa County, Virginia. A couple of high school kids had created an Instagram page with about 100 photos of girls from the local high school and middle school. They hadn’t taken the pictures; they had merely consolidated the photos that were already circulating on kids’ phones. When Rosin asked kids in the local high school how many people they knew who had sexted, the “ring” turned out to be “everyone.” (The kids overestimated. I think that surveys find that about a third of kids have sexted.)
Rosin’s article reveals differences not just of age but of gender, for despite the newest iPhone and Instagram technology, the ideas and attitudes, especially those of the boys, seem like something out of the 1950s. The “maddening, ancient, crude double standard” is, unfortunately, alive and well. So is the idea of sex as conquest. Boys describe how they would sweetly cajole girls to sext. When the photo arrived, the boys felt a kind of egotistical pride (“I’m the man”) – not much different from high school boys of sixty or seventy years ago bragging about “getting to second base” or farther. (I guess a sext is somewhere between second and third – a sort of .jpeg shortstop.) On college campuses, as Lisa Wade has said, the order of the bases has changed. Maybe that’s true in high school too, but the game mentality – with all its attendant attitudes and assumptions – remains the same.
If a girl refused, the boys dismissed her as “stuck up” or a “prude.” And if she did send the photo . . .
How do you feel about the girl after she sends it?, I asked.
“Super thots.” [THOT - “that ho over there”]
“You can't love those thots!”
“That's right, you can't love those hos.”
Whichever the girl does – sext or refuse – the boys find a reason to be contemptuous.
For the boys, the pictures were not about sex or stimulation; they were purely for narcissistic satisfaction and social status.
They gloat inwardly or brag to friends; they store them in special apps or count them. . . . “Guys would pile them up,” one girl who had graduated a year earlier told me, referring to sexts they’d gotten. “It was more of a baseball-card, showing-off kind of thing.” Olivia described it as “like when they were little boys, playing with Pokémon cards.”
The boys saw the sexts as a universalistic and utilitarian currency – something they could trade and use for other goals. That’s why the boys’ promises not to show the picture to anyone else can evaporate so quickly. The picture has use value only if others see it. It has meaning as an object; that meaning is not connected with the particular person in the picture. She could just as easily be Charmander or Snorlax.
The girls, by contrast, were more particularistic. A picture was important for what it said about the relationship between her and a particular boy. Girls have the relationship in mind also in those rarer instances when they ask a boy for a picture
It is kind of a marker that you have reached a certain point in a relationship or you are about to reach a certain point in a relationship. So it can be foreplay. It can be a kind of intimacy.[Rosin in a Fresh Air interview here.]
That “marker” comment suggests that the girls too had a “base” system in mind, but if so, the bases were the stages in the relationship, the level of intimacy with another person. They did not share the boys’ view of the sext as a bit of capital added to their individual holdings and separate from the person in the photo.
II.
Sex – universal commodity or special relationship? Many years ago, long before cell phones and sexts, I thought I might demonstrate this difference by asking students to imagine a dream date. I was a genii, I said, and I will grant your wish. You can have a date with any person you choose. You can spend an evening doing whatever you want, and if you like, the evening can extend till morning.
But you must choose one of two conditions.
A. You actually have the date, but nobody will ever know about.
B. You don’t have the date, but everybody thinks you did.
I had them mark their ballots anonymously but asked them to indicate their gender. Then, as an afterthought – mostly because I wanted to keep up with popular culture – I also asked them to write down who they were thinking of.
I thought that more boys would choose B – the date as utilitarian currency. I was wrong. Everybody wanted the actual date. But gender did make a difference on the second question. Most of the boys chose women from the media (as I recall, Heather Locklear got several votes – I told you this was a long time ago). The girls’ choices were more along the lines of “this guy I knew in high school” or “this guy I went out with last year but we broke up.”
The boys did not want the date as a tradeable commodity. Instead it was an abstracted ideal, a fantasy. They had no idea what it would actually be like to spend a few hours with Heather Locklear the real person. What the girls wanted was a real relationship with a real person.
Ever since I read Andrew Gelman’s list of words to avoid, I’ve been more conscious of the simple “of course.” I still use it, but more sparingly and cautiously. (Gelman’s list, here, includes obviously, clearly, interestingly, note that, and their variants like “it is interesting to note that.”)
But then there’s the ironic “of course,” the one that points to some gem that is far from obvious. Done correctly, the casually tossed in “of course” makes us admire the author for spotting this sparkling insight. Maybe it makes us feel a bit inadequate for not seeing it ourselves, especially since the author is saying, “Aw shucks, anybody would have seen that.”
Adam Gopnik’s essay on Bob Hope in a recent New Yorker shows you how it’s done:
The real parallel to Hope—the great American comedian whose career most closely resembles his—is, of course, Bugs Bunny.
Of course.
Even if you’re old enough to remember the “Road” movies with Bing Crosby and the Oscars, the USO tours and the decades of TV appearances, you would not have come up with the Bugs-Bob parallel. Gopnik goes on to explain.
Like Hope, he arrived in Hollywood in the late thirties and became a huge star with the war. Like Hope, he was usually paired with a more inward character who loves to sing (Daffy Duck is Bugs’s Bing [Crosby], though blustery rather than cool), and, like Hope, his appeal rises entirely from the limitless brashness and self-confidence with which he approaches even the most threatening circumstances. Together, they are the highest expression of the smart-aleck sensibility in American laughter. Their fame in wartime may have something to do with the way that, as A. J. Liebling documents, the American Army itself was essentially an urban creature dispatched to deserts and jungles: Bugs, with his Bronx-Brooklyn accent, has somehow been sent out there in the countryside, among the hunters, as Hope ends up in the sands of Morocco with no weapon but street-corner sass.
Once Gopnik clears away the rough, we see the previously unnoticed diamond. Hope, Bugs – of course.
But I wanna tell ya’, the entire essay is worth reading, both for Gopnik’s aperçus and Hope’s funnier lines.
Last weekend we honored our colleague Peter Freund, who died in June. Peter and George Martin were the co-founders, in the 1970s, of our New York Walk – an unofficial, informal, and very loosely planned event for faculty, students, friends, anyone who wanted to join us. It started as a one-off in the 1970s but became a semi-annual event. Our route usually took us to places like Grand Central Station (Peter loved showing students the whispering gallery there) and downtown sites (Lower East Side, Chinatown). But for Saturday’s reunion, we walked the High Line. George Martin and Laura Kramer, both retired, were there.
Faye Allard, our colleague till last year, came in from Philadelphia. Here she is with Sangeeta Parashar.
On Sunday, there was a memorial service. More former Montclair colleagues came – Gil Klajman, Barbara Chasin – and spoke.
Anecdotes, admiration, and appreciation were offered also by Peter’s wife Miriam, his sisters and nephews, and several friends and colleagues who collaborated with him on his research and activism, all with the goal of reducing the dominance of automobiles, especially in our cities. (Peter was a founding member of Auto-Free New York, and he never learned to drive a car – a decision that was both ideological and prudent.)
Food and beer, travel and cities, generosity and humor – these were the recurrent themes in people’s reminiscences. That plus a deliberate unconventionality, often as a gambit to get others to question their usually unquestioned assumptions. Like tearing up a dollar bill or two on the first day of class, and when students got upset, asking them why. Peter had a wonderful golden retriever. He had named her Igor. He said it was in tribute to Dr. Frankenstein’s assistant, but I think it was also so he could delight in the reactions of those who insisted that this male name was just wrong for a female pup or, better yet, that the dog would wind up with a confused gender-identity. In a way I cannot quite articulate, this fits with something else Peter loved – British entertainments like The Goon Show, Monty Python, and Gilbert and Sullivan. A female dog named Igor – Peter’s own Python sketch.
National character has been sliding out of fashion for a long time. Here is the Google nGrams chart for the appearance of that phrase in books since 1800.
(Click on an image for a larger view.)
Except for a brief comeback after World War II (there’s something about the Germans), the direction has been downhill, perhaps because it sounds so much like ethnic or cultural stereotyping. Or maybe it was because valid research on it was difficult and unrewarding. Whatever. Ordinary people, though, have no difficulty in attributing personal characteristics to entire nations. But as is often true among individuals, people do not always see themselves as other see them. And in some cases, they view themselves and others with ambivalence.
Pew recently asked Europeans what they thought of the EU countries. (The report is here.) Things are not going well economically in the EU, and the three traits Pew asked about have little to do with economic policy; instead they tap into people’s feelings about other nations and nationalities.
Germany is doing best economically, so it’ s not surprising that the five countries doing worst see Germany as the most arrogant. (The Germans themselves modestly ranked their country as the least arrogant.) Greece too suffers from discrepant perceptions and self-perception, especially in trustworthiness. All other countries rate Germany as the most trustworthy, but Greeks see Germany as least trustworthy.
Presumably, Europeans have concluded that the profligate public policies of Greece and Italy were, if not a prime cause of the collapse, then at least a drag on recovery. These countries could not be trusted to run their economies with honesty and prudence. The Italians seem willing to concede the point. But Greeks rank themselves as the most trustworthy, though on what basis one can only guess.
In two countries, the survey turned up bi-polar reactions. Poles ranked Germany as both most and least trustworthy. The Economist suspects a generational divide between “older Poles with memories of war and younger ones who admire its reputation for prudence.” Even more puzzling are the French, who give themselves both the highest and lowest ranking on arrogance. Two other countries agree on the former; but nobody else thinks the French are least arrogant.
Finally, while six of the eight countries identified Germany as least compassionate, every country saw itself as the most compassionate. Why Germany? People may see compassion as the opposite of self-interest, with non-Germans thinking that Germany should be willing to do more for other EU countries even at the expense of its own prosperity. At the same time, people in each country, including Germany, are thinking, “We’re being as generous as we can.”
So there is a remarkable similarity of responses here. Ask “Who is the most trustworthy, most arrogant, and least compassionate?” “Germany.”
I confess, I have little memory for books or articles on methods. I may have learned their content, but the specific documents and authors faded rapidly to gray. And then there’s Unobtrusive Measures. It must have been Robert Rosenthal who assigned it. He was, after all, the man who forced social scientists to realize that they were unwittingly affecting the responses of their subjects and respondents, whether those subjects were people or lab rats. The beauty of unobtrusive measures is that they eliminate that possibility.
Now that states have started to legalize marijuana, one of the questions they must deal with is how to tax it. Untaxed, weed would be incredibly cheap. “A legal joint would cost (before tax) about what a tea-bag costs” (Mark Kleiman, here). Presumably, states want to tax weed so that the price is high enough to discourage abuse and raise money but not so high that it creates a black market in untaxed weed.
The same problem already occurs with cigarettes.
The above graph, from a study commissioned by the Tax Foundation, shows that as taxes increase, so does smuggling. (The Tax Foundation does not show the correlation coefficient, but it looks like it might be as high as 0.6, though without that dot in the upper right, surely New York, it might be more like 0.5.)
In a high-tax area like New York City, many of the cigarettes sold are smuggled in from other states. But how much is “many cigarettes,” and how can you find out? Most studies of smuggled and counterfeit cigarettes get their estimates by
comparing sales figures with smoking rates. The trouble with that method
is that rates of smoking come from surveys, and people may not
accurately report how much they smoke.
That’s why I liked this study by Klaus von Lampe and colleagues.* They selected a sample of South Bronx census tracts and walked around, eyes down, scanning the sidewalks for discarded cigarette packs to see whether the pack had the proper tax stamps.
All in all, they picked up 497; of those, 329 still had the cellophane wrapper that the stamp would be on. If there was a tax stamp, they sent it the state to determine if it was counterfeit.
In the end, they estimate that only 20% of the cigarettes were fully legit with state and city taxes paid. About two-fifths had no tax stamp, another 15% had counterfeit stamps, and 18% had out-of-state stamps.
Unobtrusive measures solve one methodological problem, but they are not perfect. The trouble here, and in many other cases, is the limited range. Extending this research to the entire city let alone the fifty states would be a huge and costly undertaking.
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* Hat tip to Peter Moskos, who mentioned it on his Cop in the Hood blog.
