Earth Day Birthday — a Repost

April 22, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston


Today is Julian Koenig’s birthday. It’s also Earth Day, which is now fifty. Koenig would have been 99.

Earth Day / Birthday. The rhyme is not a coincidence.

[What follows is what I posted two years ago. I’m posting it again because this is the 50th anniversary of Earth Day. If only Koenig had been born a year earlier to make it an even 100.]

Julian Koenig was an ad-man. The word “creative” gets tossed around pretty loosely in the ad world, but Koenig truly was. When environmentalists were planning their first big  national event in 1970, Koenig offered to help. Surely he could come up with something better than the name they already had – “Environmental Teach-in.” The day of the event just happened to be his birthday, and the rhyme was a natural.  As the national director recalls,

He offered a bunch of possible names — Earth Day, Ecology Day, Environment Day, E Day — but he made it quite clear that we would be idiots if we didn’t choose Earth Day.

It worked for them. It worked for him.
   
Our paths — Koenig’s and mine — crossed a few years later, in the early seventies. How that happened is a story I told in brief in this blog years ago (here).    

Then, in 2013, the American Sociological Association gave its Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues Award to Ira Glass and the staff of “This American Life.”  The awards ceremony was a panel discussion. Ira was the with three producers from the show. One of them was Sarah Koenig, Julian’s daughter. David Newman, one of the sociologists on the panel, said that what he liked best about the show was that he could use it to give his students the larger picture of social issues.

But Ira Glass, when it was his turn to speak, said that what the show thrived on was not issues but people. “Don’t pitch us a story about some issue; you have to have a character – a character who has an interesting story . . . and who comes across on tape.” (Not an exact quote, but that was the idea.)

After the panel ended and people were milling about, I went up to Sarah Koenig, still sitting on the podium. “I have a character,” I said. “It’s an advertising guy I met when we worked together on this project in Florida. He had retired but he was just getting back into the business.” I looked at her to see if she was catching on. I couldn’t tell.

“We discovered that we both liked the track. But he really liked it. He’d buy the Racing Form every day, even days he didn’t go to the track.” I thought I detected a hint of interest in her expression.

“And he didn’t throw them out,” I continued.  “He had the back issues stacked up in the closets of his house.”

“I think I know this man,” she said smiling.

She said she’d ask her father if he’d remember me. She was sure he would. I was sure he wouldn’t. In any case, I never heard from her. But then, I never pitched any stories, and she got busy with other projects, like “Serial.”

I Really Do Not Like Thee, Dr. Phil

April 20, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

My post of January 4 (here) had the title “I Do Not Like Thee Doctor Phil,” a variant on a nursery rhyme that’s not as well known here as in Britain. It begins,

I do not like thee Dr. Fell.
The reason why I cannot tell.

I have almost never watched Dr. Phil, so I really did not know the reason why I didn’t like him. Now I do. He is dangerously stupid, at least when it comes to public health.

Last week, he was on TV pushing the idea that businesses should re-open soon despite the pandemic.
If the businesses remain closed, he said, “There’s a point at which lockdown will create more destruction and more death than the actual virus will.”

He said this on Fox News, of course, on Laura Ingraham’s show. He continued,

People are dying from the coronavirus. I get that. But look, the fact of the matter is we have people dying, 45,000 people a year die from automobile accidents, 480,000 from cigarettes, 360,000 a year from swimming pools,* but we don’t shut the country down for that.

As several people pointed out, the swimming pool figure is more than one hundred times the actual number. All drownings, not just swimming pools, account for less than 4000 deaths.

Dr. Phil’s logic is just as wrong as his statistics. Swimming pools, traffic accidents, and cigarettes are not contagious. As John Oliver said last night, “If swimming pools were killing 360,000 people a year, and you could contract a swimming pool on a trip to the grocery store, we might want to think about shutting them down until we worked out what the fuck was going on.”

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* Right wingers love swimming-pool deaths, especially when the victim is a child. Ditto for traffic deaths.  Tea Party types frequently use these mortality statistics in arguing for the removal of all restrictions on guns. The logic there is just as shoddy as it is in regards to Covid-19. (See this 2016 post “A Gun Is Not a Swimming Pool.”)

The Creative Destruction of Situations

April 9, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

The previous post used a disastrous performance of Peter Pan as an instance wher the “definition of the situation” breaks down irreparably. That kind of total breakdown is rare. Any social situation can go wrong, but it’s a usually a matter of embarrassment, not a complete fiasco, and the encounter can continue though perhaps not as smoothly as before.

As Goffman says in his classic essay “Embarrassment and Social Organization”*

The elements of a social encounter, then, consist of effectively projected claims to an acceptable self and the confirmation of like claims on the part of the others. The contributions of all are oriented to these and built up on the basis of them. When an event throws doubt upon or discredits these claims, then the encounter finds itself lodged in assumptions which no longer hold. The responses the parties have made ready are now out of place and must be choked back, and the interaction must be reconstructed.

The Peter Pan that went wrong as described on This American Life wasn’t “restructured.” Instead, at least for the audience, it became something else entirely — a sequence of hilarious sight gags for them to laugh at. 

These breakdowns don’t always end badly, though they usually do. Sometimes the moment of embarrassment can lead to the “creative destruction” of a definition of the situation that was not working and its replacement with something better.

In the final story of the episode of This American Life, the encounter that goes wrong involves a journalist Margy Rochlin in 1982 interviewing Moon Unit Zappa, whose “Valley Girls” was climbing the charts. Moon was 14. The interview took place in her living. Her mother was also present.

The interview was not going well. As Rochlin, tells it, “I’m sort of that rock bottom level that everyone can get at in an interview, where you’re just saying, like, what's your favorite color?” The cup of coffee that Moon’s mother has given Rochlin has gotten cold. And then. . .

And so what happened was Moon told me a joke. And I didn’t see the joke coming. And right before she told me the joke, I had taken a big swig of the coffee, which was now cold. And when she told me the joke, I burst out laughing. And I started to choke. And so I pressed my lips together, so I didn't spit it out. I didn't want to do a spit-take. And the coffee came shooting out my nose. . . . I was really embarrassed, but simultaneously, I couldn't breathe. At the same time, I was choking. And I jumped up. And I sort of started running around the room, knocking things over.

   

It gets worse. The mother chases Rochlin around the room trying to give her the Heimlich manoeuvre. (you can hear Rochlin’s full account here).

Ira Glass: Now, what happened after that?  Margy Rochlin: It was sort of like we’d all been in an earthquake together. And all of nervousness left the room. And suddenly we were three gals, just chatting. And I remember that I sort of hugged them both when I left. They were now my friends.  Ira Glass: It’s interesting, because one of our criteria for a fiasco is that all social order, the normal social structure breaks down. And literally, that’s what happens here. The normal interview stops. And the social structure of the moment completely changes. The mom gives you the Heimlich maneuver. And then, suddenly, it stops feeling like an interview.

Ira Glass calls it “the social structure of the moment.” Sociology instructors call it the “definition of the situation.”

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*American Journal of Sociology, Volume 62, Issue 3 (Nov., 1956), 264-271.

When Definitions of the Situation Fail

April 7, 2020
Posted by Jay Livingston

This weekend’s episode of This American Life (here) was called “Fiasco.” The title for Soc 101 would have been “Definition of the Situation.”

Most of the time, we don’t realize that we have such a definition. We know what something is – a play in a theater, police responding to a minor call for assistance, a journalst doing a celebrity interview. Nor do we realize that all the participants must do their part to sustain that definition. It’s only when something goes wrong that we begin to see these requirements.

These stories all involved things going wrong, very wrong. At first, people tried to maintain the definition they had come with. They tried to ignore or explain away the events that don’t fit. But eventually, they had to abandon the defintion.

The first story, recounted by journalist Jack Hitt,  was about a production of Peter Pan, the play where Peter and the Darling children fly. But the stagehand operating flying mechanisms don’t know what they’re doing, and the actors are swung about randomly or just left hanging in air.

 [The transcriptions below do not include all of what is in the audio clips.]

Ira Glass: Wait, wait. And the audience reaction to this point is just — are they laughing? Jack Hitt: No one is laughing. One of the great things about audiences, especially in a live theater production, is that they’re very forgiving. They want the show to work. And so everyone is sort of gripping their chair a little tightly. We feel for them. They’re up there — they're embarrassing themselves for us. Ira Glass: We identify with them. We become them. Jack Hitt: And so the audience, I think, was very forgiving and very understanding of this moment.

“We identify with them [the actors],” says Ira, “We become them.” But it would be more accurate to say that we identify with the entire situation. The actors may be “embarrassing themselves,” but as Erving Goffman says, embarrassment affects the entire situation and the people who are part of it.
Even when the little boy playing the youngest child is being jerked up and then suddenly plummeted almost to the floor, “No one said a word. We just all sat there sort of holding our breath. And there’s that weird tension of being in the audience thinking, oh, oh my goodness. They have gotten off to a very bad start. Oh, this is not good. And we feel for them.”

To put it another way, our definition is still that this is Peter Pan. It’s just a Peter Pan where things aren’t going well.That definition starts to crumble as the younger people, teenagers, in the audience start laughing. The adults though held on to the old definition for a bit longer.

Jack Hitt: There was a split in the audience. Sort of the younger people who were the least forgiving, they started to go first, OK? So the high school students, couple of college students maybe, they started to laugh out loud. . . . But then whatever restraint that the audience had, it just evaporated at this point because there were a number of things that happened in quick succession that just made it impossible to hold any sense of decorum.

The audience was arriving at a new defintion. This is not Peter Pan, where we think about the schemes of Captain Hook and the responses of Peter and the children. It’s a fiasco, where we wait for the next sight gag.

Jack Hitt: There are just belly laughs rolling up to the stage from the audience. People are howling with laughter at every mistake. And now any small mistake just takes on these-- any instigation for laughter is just enough of for this audience. And now the old people have given it up. Everyone has quit being nice. Now there's just this kind of frightening roar that comes from the audience every time there’s a mistake.

Once the audience has this new definition, they sustain it in the same way that they had tried to sustain the old one, ignoring or rejecting information that doesn’t fit.

Ira Glass: At some point the audience turned and realized, oh wait. I realize what’s going on here. This is a fiasco. Jack Hitt: Yeah. This is a fiasco. And what’s really interesting about a fiasco is that once it starts to tumble down, the audience wants to push it further along. Ira Glass: Oh, they get hungry for more fiasco. Jack Hitt: Oh, yeah. Ira Glass: If the play proceeded perfectly, they would be disappointed.