Poverty, Income (and Virtue?)

September 11, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here’s a brief follow-up to the previous post about changes in income and poverty. First the news.

U.S. poverty at 11-year high as household income tumbles :: CHICAGO SUN-TIMES :: Nationkwout via

And then the longer view.

(Click on the graph to see it larger.

It makes no sense to talk about these economic facts in terms of “virtue” as David Brooks likes to do. Virtue is nice. I’m all for it. But it has nothing to do with what’s going on in the economy. Those 2,600,000 people who fell into poverty in 2008 (and the data for 2009 will be still more grim) are no less virtuous than they were in 2007.

(HT: I got the Census Bureau graphs from Brad DeLong.)

David Brooks Doesn’t Get It

September 9, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

David Brooks’s persona, the character he plays in print and on TV, is the reasonable conservative – fair-minded, with ideas based in fact rather than ideology. He also likes to play the sociologist, offering broad pronouncements on society and culture. Especially culture.

Look at yesterday’s column, a puff piece for a new magazine, National Affairs, which he sees as the successor to The Public Interest. Brooks briefly summarizes the articles in the current issue.

Op-Ed Columnist - The Bloody Crossroads - NYTimes.com via kwout

Brooks loves virtue, which he usually subsumes under “culture” – the ideas people live by. But he ignores structure. He also forgets the basic insight of Sociology 101, week one – Durkheim: explanations of individual facts (like who gets ahead and who doesn’t) often aren’t much help in explaining social facts (like the overall degree of inequality and poverty in a society).

In explaining suicide at the individual level, sadness is a pretty useful concept. People who commit suicide are, no doubt, sadder than those who don’t. The surest way not to commit suicide is to be happy, not sad. But does knowing about these individual differences help us understand why the US has a rate of suicide nearly triple that of Greece? Are Americans three times as sad as Greeks? And within the US, are whites twice as sad as blacks?

Levels of income and degrees of inequality have as much to do with “virtue” as rates of suicide have to do with sadness.

From 2000 to 2007, median family income in the US fell by 5%. (Don’t look for the data on 2008 and 2009, when it comes out, to reverse this trend.) Can we conclude that Americans became more self-indulgent and irresponsible? That they threw away their degrees, broke up their families, and quit their jobs?

Since January 2008, over six million people in this country have lost their jobs. I guess the Bush administration wasn’t very good (and Obama, so far, no better) at “promoting virtuous behavior.”

Someone should suggest to David Brooks, that maybe, just maybe, when we consider income and inequality and unemployment at the national level, those individual–based explanations don’t help. It’s not a matter of culture or virtue. It’s the economy. Stupid.

Lone Star Litter . . . and Values

September 6, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Claude the brand consultant was consulting with me – i.e., he was picking up the cappuccino tab at Starbuck’s. He was about to start teaching a course called something like “Communications and Public Affairs,” and not being an academic (though he’s a really good teacher), he wanted some advice on the syllabus.

We finally got around to the idea that Messages about Issues had to be tailored for specific Audiences or Publics, particularly their Interests and Values. (Those capitalized words were possible major headings in the syllabus.)

I immediately thought of the example of Texas and litter. How could you convince Texans to be more respectful of public places and not toss all that crap out onto the roads they drove on? The Ladybird Johnson approach – “Highway Beautification”? Wrong audience. The people who were littering obviously didn’t care about highway beauty.

The guy you were trying to reach was Bubba, the classic red stater – fiercely individualistic, anti-government, macho. Bubba was also a slob, and probably proud of it. You couldn’t appeal to self-interest since it’s in Bubba’s self-interest to chuck his garbage out the window. Even hefty fines (and they are hefty) would work only if you could catch litterers often enough – unlikely on the Texas highways.

The best way in was Values. But how? “Don’t be a Litterbug, Keep Your Community Clean” would be too nice, too feminine or babyish, and, like “Pitch In” too collectivist. Instead, Roy Spence and Tim McClure at the Austin ad agency GSD&M had the Texas DOT go with chauvinism – Texas chauvinism. Spence and McClure were the ones who had distilled the target audience down to the Bubba stereotype, and the idea they played on to reach Bubba was not that littering was ugly or wrong or costly, but that it hurt Texas. And thus in 1985 was born one of the most famous and effective campaigns in the history of advertising.


With its double meaning of “mess,” it captured Bubba’s patriotism and pugnacity. The bumper stickers were soon everywhere. The TV ads featured famous proud Texans. One of the early ones (so early, I can’t find it on YouTube) featured Too-Tall Jones and Randy White, two of the toughest dudes on the Cowboys defense, picking up roadside trash.

JONES: You see the guy who threw this out the window, you tell him I got a message for him.

WHITE: (picks up a beer can): I got a message for him too.

OFF-CAMERA VOICE: What’s that?

WHITE: (Crushes the beer can with one fist). Well, I kinda need to see him to deliver it.

JONES: Don’t mess with Texas.

Litter in Texas has been reduced by 72%, the campaign is still going strong a quarter-century later, and McLure and Spence have a book about it. My source was Made to Stick by the Heath Brothers (no, jazzers, not those Heath brothers), Chip and Dan.

Torture and Masculinity - Anxiety on the Right

September 3, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

What’s with conservatives and their junk (junk in the current sense of male genitals)?

The Attorney General is looking into whether government employees – specifically CIA agents who tortured people – broke the law. Conservatives are outraged. It’s not just that conservatives think that torture is O.K. (not all torture, of course, just torture when we do it). It’s the imagery that bubbles up from their psyches.

“Emasculating US Intelligence.” (Headline on a blog at Commentary)

“Castrate the CIA, and Americans will die.” Ralph Peters in the the New York Post.

Fred Barnes, Executive Editor of the Weekly Standard on Fox TV fears that there won’t be a CIA agent left who’s able to pass his DNA to the next generation:

“They are emasculating the entire CIA.”

And of course, Charles Krauthammer:

“Panetta [head of the CIA] had his agency emasculated . . .”

These are just a few from the mainstream. If you searched blogosphere, you’d find lots more of them, anxiously lined up like soccer defenders on the free kick wall, their opposition to the attorney general being just one more example of their cojones-centered approach to legal interpretation and government policy.

I blogged about this a year ago (in what I thought was one of my better posts – here), after watching the Republican convention.

The Republicans seemed to view torture not just as a regrettable but necessary tactic. Torture became a romanticized test of toughness, the ultimate chapter in the Real Men Don’t Eat Quiche version of masculinity.

Their reactions further convince me that running just under the surface of the rational justifications for torture is the conservatives’ fear that if they reject torture, they will be less virile, less manly. They seem to have the fantasy that torturing and being tortured is a fraternity initiation – it tests a man and ultimately makes him a better person. They hold up John McCain as their exemplar.

It’s similar to the Dirty Harry fantasy about killing people. The reality of torture, as with killing, is far different from the movie and TV version. In many cases, for the victim, torture is permanently devastating. For the torturer, unless he has a bit of the psychopath in his character, it is permanently troubling.

(It’s tempting, when you actually see Fred Barnes and Krauthammer and the boys from Commentary, to make a psychoanalytic interpretation. I mean, they remind me of the wimpy brainiacs in high school who became the “manager” on the football team, tagging along and carrying the equipment for the muscular jocks they literally looked up to. Tempting, as I say, but I just don’t have enough information.)

Cop Killers – The UCR vs.The Wire

September 1, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Is it OK for social scientists to use statistics in a misleading way when they write for the general public?

Peter Moskos is a professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice. His Cop in the Hood is based partly on his work as a police officer in Baltimore. Here’s the lede from a piece he wrote in the Washington Post with Neill Franklin, also a former Baltimore cop.

Peter Moskos and Stanford "Neill" Franklin - Time to Legalize Drugs - washingtonpost.com via kwout

They follow this with:

In many ways, Dante Arthur was lucky. He lived. Nationwide, a police officer dies on duty nearly every other day. [emphasis added]

Let’s see – 365 days a year. That makes nearly 180 such deaths each year.

I’ve been out of the crim biz for a while, but that number sounded high to me. So I went to the UCR. Sure enough, in 2007, 140 police officers died in the line of duty. As Moskos and Franklin say, nearly one every other day.

But 83 of those officers died in accidents, only 57 were homicide victims – one every 6 days. Still a lot. But how many of those were drug-related? The UCR has the answer:

One.

Nor was 2007 unusual. In the decade ending 2007, 1300 police officers died on the job. About 550 of these were in felonies, not accidents. And of these, 27 were drug-related. Three a year is still too many, but it’s a far cry from one every other day.


Maybe I should have looked at a DVD of The Wire instead of the UCR.

Officer Arthur will not appear in this table of the UCR. It counts only deaths. So I looked at data on assaults on police officers. There were 59,000 non-fatal assaults on police officers, nearly a third of them in “disturbances,” i.e., fights (at home, in bars, etc.). Curiously, the UCR does not have a separate category for drugs in these tables. In the Arrest category, it has Robbery, Burglary, and Other, which must include drugs. In that Other category, 174 assaults were with guns.

Total Assaults	59,201
Disturbance	18,789
Other Arrest	8,935
Firearm	174

Using the drugs/other ratio from the table on deaths (about 1/3), we get about 60 non-fatal shootings (like that of Officer Arthur) in 2007 – one tenth of one percent of all assaults on police officers.

Moskos and Franklin argue that federal laws should allow states to make the manufacture and distribution of drugs legal and regulated rather than criminal. The authors make several good arguments against current drug laws, which have created many problems that legalization might ameliorate. But I’m skeptical as to whether legalization would make much of a difference in police safety.

Cause and Responsibility

August 30, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Causation is a tricky problem, especially when any degree of distance separates a causal factor from the actual behavior we are trying to prove, and especially when that causal factor is social – a structure, a culture – rather than individual. Moral responsibility is a different matter, less subject to the rigors of scientific proof.

When Dr. Tiller, who did late term abortions, was assassinated, Operation Rescue disclaimed any moral responsibility for the crime although they had long been calling for the doctor to be “brought to justice.” At the time (in this blog post) , I was reminded of the assassination of Thomas Becket by Henry II’s knights. I should have added that King Henry, at least, later took responsibility for the crime.

Now we have a pastor in Arizona who, shortly before Obama made a local appearance, preached a sermon with prayers for the death of Obama.

Tempe pastor prays for president's death via kwout

One of Anderson’s parishioners was Chris Broughton, who showed up at demonstration in Phoenix outside where Obama was speaking. Broughton was carrying an AR-15 assault rifle.
Broughton didn’t shoot. But somebody else might. Rick Sanchez on CNN says

A CNN source with very close to the U.S. Secret Service confirmed to me today that threats on the life of the president of the United States have now risen by as much as 400 percent since his inauguration, 400 percent death threats against Barack Obama — quote — “in this environment” go far beyond anything the Secret Service has seen with any other president.

An “environment” is not legally responsible for any specific act. It would also be difficult, if not impossible, to show which individuals created the environment. That’s the wonderful thing about thinking only in terms of individuals and ignoring social forces. It allows you to disclaim all responsibility.

Red Jock, Blue Jock

August 29, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The US Open starts today. Not the real stuff, but the qualifying rounds for unknowns hoping for a spot in the draw. You can walk into the Tennis Center, no charge, and see some good matches. Who knows, you might see Federer or Venus working out on a practice court.

And after a long day swatting a little yellow ball back and forth, there’s nothing pro tennis players like better than to give money to the Democrats, even more than Nascar drivers give to Republicans (in absolute dollars, not in Red/Blue percentages).

Newsmeat has the data on presidential contributions from the sports world since 1978, and Andrew Gelman converted it into this nifty chart.

The numbers are slightly misleading. The big contributions come from the owners and executives, not the athletes (are Nascar drivers athletes?). Steinbrenner, Modell, Wilpon, et. al., have ponied up hundreds of thousands of dollars, and in a couple of cases, millions. The contributions of most of the players we see on the screen rarely spill out of four figures.

Andre Agassi gave $189,500, 95% to Democrats.

Good for Agassi. And his colleagues. I always did like tennis.

If you want to find me at the Open, check the men’s doubles matches. Why? See this (ungated, at least for the moment).

Status Politics Again – Looking Back From the Future

August 26, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The news photos of health care reform protestors – invariably described as “angry” – remind me of the photos and footage of the angry protestors in Little Rock over a half century ago.

The boy in the picture on the right must be in his sixties today. When he sees this photo now, what does he think of himself, or of his parents or whoever it was that got him to carry the sign? And all those other protesters – how many years did it take, I wonder, for their anger to turn to embarrassment or even shame? Or are they still proud of their efforts to keep black children from going to school with white children?

And now we have people angrily protesting an attempt to ensure that all Americans have health care. How will these protesters feel in ten or twenty years when they look back? What will their children or grandchildren think when they see these pictures 50 years from now?


These protests are status politics (an earlier post on this is here). They are about the symbolic meaning of a policy rather than its actual consequences. Whatever fantasies about “race mixing” may have haunted the white protesters in Little Rock, in their more rational moments, they could not really have believed that desegregating schools would have some real effect on their kids’ education or lives. Instead, desegregation was a statement that they and their ideas had lost their status in US society.

In the same way, I find it hard to believe that the people screaming about Hitler, socialism, death panels, and the rest really want to keep 40+ million Americans uninsured and to keep US health care the least cost-effective in the world. Their protests, like those of the segregationists, are about “the government.” The government, in this sense, is the symbolic representation of the country. The message they heard in desegregation and hear now in “Obamacare” is that their position in the country is no longer the dominant one.

Good Terrorists

August 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“A little rebellion, now and then, is a good thing, and as necessary in the political world as storms are in the physical.” When psychologist Solomon Asch, in 1946, told American students that the quote was from Lenin, they rejected the idea. Told that Jefferson was the author (and he was), they tended to agree with it. After all, the Fourth of July is a celebration of revolution, i.e., rebellion.

Fast forward to the present, and let’s talk about terrorism. I thought the word terrorist was an automatic red flag. Remember Sarah Palin’s “pals around with terrorists” slur on Obama because he had served in a couple of education and anti-poverty organizations that Bill Ayres was also part of?

Suppose a Congressman holds a public meeting at which a member of the audience says, “I’m a terrorist.” How would any US politician respond? Would he denounce the man, or would he call him “a great American”?

Think again.

Wally Herger is a Congressman from Northern California, and last week he held a town hall meeting on health care.

Web extra: Congressman Herger calls Obama plan 'threat to democracy' - Mount Shasta, CA - Mount Shasta Herald via kwout

I guess a little terrorism now and again is a good thing, so long as it’s right-wing terrorism. To what extent will the far right wingers convert their admiration for terrorism from words into actions? The record of terrorist attacks on abortion clinics and abortionists gives us some cause for concern.

Update, August 27. The video of the exchange between the self-proclaimed terrorist and Rep. Herger shows that the man uses the phrase right-wing terrorist almost in quotation marks, as if to preface his proclamation by something like, “Supporters of Obama have called us ‘right-wing terrorists.’ In that case, I am a proud right-wing terrorist.”

But as far as I know, nobody has called these tea-baggers and other assorted wingnuts terrorists unless they have in fact committed terrorist acts. Google the phrase and all you will find are references to this guy at the town hall meeting and to the Homeland Security report on real right-wing terrorists.

(HT: Mark Kleiman)

Was He Fat? I Didn’t Even Notice

August 24, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

At least two or three times a semester, I’ll tell my class that people don’t really know why they do what they do. Nobody believes me, so I rephrase the idea: We are often unaware of many things that affect our behavior.

Sometimes, we pay a price for that ignorance.

In an experiment reported this year, Eugene Caruso and colleagues told volunteers that they would be competing in a sort of trivia contest, and they could choose their teammates. They were shown pictures of the potential teammates and given information on three variables, each with three categories)

• Education (High School, B.A., M.A.)
• IQ (23, 93, 104)
• Experience (never played the game before, played 3 times, plays every week)

Oh, and one more thing. The person in the picture could be either thin or fat.

Researchers asked the subjects, 101 college students,* why they made the choices they did – that is, which criteria were most important in their decisions. Weight, which has nothing to do with winning trivia contests, was the big loser. On a 9-point scale, the students rated it 2.5 in importance; the other factors were rated 4.9, 6.4, and 5.2, respectively.

But the data on actual choices told a different story. Weight accounted for more of the variance than did any other variable, about 25%. “Participants gave up about 11 IQ points to have a thin rather than overweight teammate.”

Three points here.

• First, the students discriminated against fat people.
• Second, they were unaware of how their own prejudices involved.
• And third, when you ask people why they did something, what you get is not an accurate assessment of factors that actually affected their behavior. Instead, people mention those factors that should rationally be at work.**

*For reasons not explained in the paper, these were Bulgarian students. The title of the paper is, “101 Bulgarians – Using Conjoint Analysis to Detect Discrimination Revealing Covert Preferences from Overt Choices.” Just kidding about the part before the dash. Bulgaria is not all that far from Dalmatia, but Cruella DeVil is not even in the footnotes.

** The classic statement of this idea is Nisbett and Wilson’s “Telling More Than We Can Know: Verbal Reports on Mental Processes,” Psychological Review 84 (May 1977), pp. 231-259.

The Food’s Not Bad Either

August 21, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

For those of us who have never lived in a country with socialized medicine, it’s always useful to get the truth from ground level about the horrors of these inferior systems. J.A. Getzlaff is an American journalist who lives, for the moment, in Paris. Here are some excerpts about French medical coverage from her blog, Foreign Parts.

Obviously, she’s biased and selective in her reporting. For example, she completely omits any mention of les panels de mort.

Foreign Parts: À AIMER: Getting Sick, Part One via kwout

A euro is about $1.42. To make it simple, just multiply by 1.5. So as an American in Paris, she pays about $85 a month for her health insurance.

The hospital room costs her $24 (€16) a night, more if she wants a . . .

Foreign Parts: À AIMER: Getting Sick, Part One via kwout

Foreign Parts: À AIMER: Getting Sick, Part One via kwout

No Heroes

August 20, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The “more guns, less crime” crowd have a romantic fantasy of bravely defending themselves and their property (and of course their wives and children) against potential predators (see my earlier post here) . It’s the adolescent boy’s super-hero fantasy, only the boys are older, and instead of imagined super-powers, they have actual super-weapons.

The reality of shooting bad guys in self-defense is far more complicated. The people who have done it don’t feel like heroes.

I tried to make this point in an overly long post a few days ago about Charles Augusto, the Harlem store owner. Kareem Farim, reporting in today’s The New York Times, does it better. He mentions Augusto’s sympathy for the families of the robbers. Then,

His emotions echoed those of Peter Giron, the co-owner of a South Bronx dry cleaning establishment who shot and killed a 17-year-old gunman in 1978. Mr. Giron collapsed and had to be sedated after the 17-year-old’s father visited his store and politely asked about the shooting.

A few owners said the shootings in their pasts, even those from decades ago, were still too painful to talk about. One, who would speak only anonymously, said, “I’ve been trying to forget about this since it happened.”

Ivan Blume, who wrestled a gun away from a robber and killed both him and his accomplice at his store, Quality Canines, in Brooklyn, in 2003, would say only, “It’s a chapter in my life I’d rather close.”

Healthcare, Lies, and Videotape, and More Lies

August 20, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

You can’t fool all of the people all of the time, said Honest Abe. Maybe so, but Lincoln missed the point. You only have to fool about half of the people every couple of years. And dishonesty seems to be a pretty effective way to do it.

Some of the assertions about health care reform –broadcast in the media and sent around the Internet – are just plain lies. Here are four of them. The assessments are from either PolitiFact or FactCheck.org

(For a larger, legible view, click on the image.)

Do these lies have any impact? A recent NBC/WSJ poll asked people how likely some of these outcomes were.

• Will give health insurance coverage to illegal immigrants
• Will lead to a government takeover of the health care system
• Will use taxpayer dollars to pay for women to have abortions
• Will allow the government to make decisions about when to stop providing medical care to the elderly

Does lying work? At least for the moment, it certainly looks as though it’s not doing the liars any harm.


One more thing. Of the people who had seen coverage of the town hall meetings, most (62%) said that these made no difference in their views. The rest were about evenly split – 16% said they’d become more favorable to the Obama plan, 19% less favorable, because of the protests.

(Hat tip: Ezra Klein)

Kind of Blue

August 20, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Kind of Blue. The LP was released fifty years ago this week. It’s the best-selling album in the history of jazz, and year in year out, it continues to sell. Has anyone in the sociology of culture tried to explain this kind of durability?




It’s easy to explain how and why Kind of Blue was different and influential – its use of modes rather than chord changes as the basis for solos (though the first track on the album Milestones, recorded a year earlier, was also modal in concept). But that’s probably not much of a consideration for most people who buy and listen to the album. Its initial success owed something to the tastes of the time. It came out when jazz was at its most popular. But does that account for its continued popularity?

Are there other albums in other genres that still sell decades after they first came out. The Wall? Sgt. Pepper? The Glenn Gould Goldberg Variations?

Inside the Insurance Industry

August 19, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Is just the threat of a public option changing the way insurance companies do business? I had to call my insurer yesterday to find out if an MRI at the place designated by my doctor would be covered. The MRI lab is in New York, my coverage is in New Jersey, so it wasn’t clear and simple. The guy I talked to was incredibly polite and helpful, checking every way he could, explaining the problem, asking if it was all right to put me on hold while he checked. He might as well have been saying, “We really, really want to keep your business.”

Meanwhile, if you had any doubts that the structural forces of the market affect health care, and not always for the benefit of the patient, check out this long interview with Wendell Potter. Potter is the former Cigna head of “corporate communications” who has been telling tales out of school, revealing what insurance companies actually do – how and why. (The “loss ratio” he refers to is the percent that the insurance company pays out to cover medical expenses. The lower the loss ratio, the higher the company’s profit. See this earlier SocioBlog post. )

As recently as fifteen years ago, the medical-loss ratio in this country was 95 percent. Since then, there’s been great industry consolidation to the point that now there are seven companies that dominate. They’re all for-profit. During the time that this consolidation, this shift to for-profit occurred, the medical-loss ratio has continued to drop. Now it’s around 80 percent. That means twenty cents of every dollar goes to something other than paying medical claims. Just fifteen years ago, ninety-five cents of every dollar went to paying medical claims. This trend is due to pressure from Wall Street. If a company misses Wall Street’s expectations—if the medical-loss ratio starts to inch up—the company will suffer. I’ve seen companies lose 20 percent of their stock value in one day by disappointing Wall Street with their medical-loss ratio.

Sightseers on the sociology tour bus will come across other points of interest in this interview.

• Social movements? The role of corporate PR in the “grassroots” reaction against health care reform. (“They’re skilled at setting up front groups to spread disinformation.” )
  
  
• Ideology? The relation between the insurance industry and Congress (“The industry has contributed so heavily to the Republicans over the years that they are pretty much assured that every single Republican in Congress will vote exactly the way they want.”)
  
  
• Social psychology? How the structure of insurance executives’ lives shapes their perceptions and misperceptions (“you get a very skewed understanding of America.”)

Potter also cites the events that led to his own apostasy (“Sicko,” a free health care expo at a fairgrounds in Virginia (“hundreds of people waiting in the rain while physicians attended to patients in animal stalls . . . ‘Is this the United States?’ ”).

The Roads Go Without Saying, Don’t They?

August 18, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Republican attack on Obama’s health care proposals has worked marvelously. The “public option” is all but dead. Harking back to Ronald Reagan’s line that “government is the problem,” Republicans railed against “government run” health care, stating as fact that the government can’t run anything well. For Republican lawmakers, this apparently includes the legislatures they themselves are part of. But pay no attention to that.

There’s a lot more to pay no attention to, and not just the government-run medical programs that do exist – the VA, Medicare, and Medicaid. Most of the protestors drove to their protests on government-run roads; most send their kids to government-run schools, and honor their government-run police and fire departments. . . .

Here’s Monty Python making the same point thirty years ago. “All right, but apart from the sanitation, medicine, education, wine, public order, irrigation, roads, the fresh water system and public health, what have the Romans ever done for us?”


(Hat tip: Mark Thomson at The League of Ordinary Gentlemen.)

Reality – We Lost It at the Movies

August 17, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston
If the facts don’t fit the theory, change the facts. Whether or not Einstein really said this or really meant it, it might well be the motto of the New York Post.


In New York, last week, four robbers entered a run-down looking restaurant supply store on 125th St. They started to struggle with one of the employees, hitting him with a pistol, paying no attention to the owner, 70-year Charles Augusto. Augusto pulled out a shotgun and fired three times, killing two of the robbers, wounding the other two.

The New York Post carried the headline “Make My Day.” But what happened on 125th was not Dirty Harry (see the relevant clip from “Sudden Impact” here ). Charles Augusto tried to persuade the robbers that there was nothing worth stealing. He tried to get them to leave. Confrontation was the last thing he wanted. Pulling the shotgun was impulsive, not thought out. The gun had been sitting, never fired, for twenty years, so Augusto could have no idea whether it would even work.

The Daily News headline got it right. Shooting the robbers was not something he wanted to do. It brought him no satisfaction, nor does he think it was at all heroic. He was not trying to rid the world of evildoers. He was trying to get some robbers to stop hitting his employee.

Unlike the Post and Dirty Harry, Charles Augusto understands that death – even the death of a violent criminal – is not an isolated fact. Other people are inevitably involved, as Augusto knew from experience. His own son had committed suicide twelve years earlier, and now he has nothing but sympathy for the families of the dead. “I know the pain these people must feel.”

The Post headline reeks of smug self-satisfaction, a reaction far different from Charles Augusto’s reality. “I don’t know what feels worse, now or when my only son died.”

“Funny People” – Making Hard Choices Easy

August 15, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

“We make extremely right-wing movies with extremely filthy dialogue.” Seth Rogen was talking about “Knocked Up,” and by “we” he meant the Judd Apatow repertory company.

Ross Douthat, the New York Times’s new right-wing columnist, included the quote in his op-ed on Apatow’s most recent film “Funny People.” According to Douthat this movie is more “grown-up” and “realistic” in its family values. “Doing the right thing comes harder.”

I saw a movie called “Funny People” last week, but it must not have been the same one Douthat saw. The one I saw twisted itself out of shape to make doing the right thing come easy.

Spoiler alert: I’m going to reveal the plot and ending,

George (Adam Sandler) is a very successful comedian who contracts a potentially deadly disease but then, miraculously, recovers. When he thinks he’s facing death he phones his ex-girlfriend Laura, who left him twelve years earlier because he was cheating on her. She is now a wife and mother. He realizes that he messed up back then and wants to rewind the tape.

She comes to visit, and later, when George is healthy again, he goes to see her in her Marin County home (her husband is, as usual, out of town). Both meetings show that they still love one another and that they still have a certain something. George wants her to break up her marriage and be with him.

The conservative message comes at the end, when Laura is faced with a family-values dilemma: should she leave her husband and get back together with George?


At first, the film tips the scales towards divorce. She and George still have that chemistry, and besides, her husband isn’t much of a husband. He’s macho-obnoxious and frequently out of the country on business. And he cheats on her.

Whichever she chooses, love or family, she will lose something. If she stays with her husband, she will lose George’s love, humor, etc. If she chooses happiness with George, she will lose her family; her children will suffer as well.

It’s a real dilemma, a grown-up problem. True love or family. You can’t have it both ways. But wait.

American movies and television have a long tradition of presenting a real problems and then conjuring up magical solutions. It’s called “the Hollywood ending.” “Funny People” is no exception. At first, Laura decides to split from her husband and go with George. But no sooner does she nod in his direction than he is suddenly transformed, and not for the better. Five minutes ago, he delighted in playing silly games on the floor with her kids and dogs; now he can barely bring himself to stay in the same room with them. Before, he was attentive to every nuance of Laura’s feelings. Now, he ignores her, flipping open his cellphone to read text messages about movie deals and money.

Her husband has a similar transformation though in the opposite direction, renouncing his extramarital affairs (just two), vowing to get a job that will keep him close to his family, and declaring his love and devotion to his wife. Surprise, surprise – she decides to stay with her husband.

See, the decision only appeared to be a hard one. In the end, doing the right thing brings no sacrifice at all.

The real cheating in this film is not men’s infidelity to women; it’s the director Apatow’s infidelity to the story he himself has created.

This is not a perfect film. The “lonely at the top” theme is a bit of a cliche. The movie is long, nearly 2½ hours, because it tries to paste together three different movies: the ex-girlfriend dilemma; George facing death; Ira (Seth Rogen) the virtuous, innocent schnook, hanging around with the super-successful George.

But the movie is often funny, and it’s at its best when it’s about comedy. It makes you appreciate how difficult stand-up is, with its strange relationship between performer and audience. The key to success is not to tell a funny joke but to capture the audience. The same jokes that seem lame when done by an unseasoned, aspiring performer (Rogen) become good material in the hands of a pro like George, partly because of his ability, his craft, but also because the audience is already on his side. The film also shows how much these comedians rely on “dick jokes,” which don’t bring much admiration from colleagues but can get laughs, especially with unsophisticated audiences.

And then there’s James Taylor, whose two spoken lines in the film (he also sings one song) are hilarious – playing completely against his usual persona.

What He Said

August 14, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

After I’d written yesterday’s post – and I actually spent some time trying to make my thoughts coherent – I found out that The Daily Show had made pretty much the same point two days earlier. They now have a recurring segment called “Reform Madness,” an allusion to Reefer Madness. This installment was called “White Minority” and featured Senior Black Correspondent Larry Wilmore.


This is just a screen shot. Go here to see it if you missed it earlier this week. You’ll see what I mean (and maybe what Trrish meant in her comment yesterday.

Status Politics and Anti-HealthCare

August 13, 2009  
Posted by Jay Livingston

The hard core protesters are making it clear that for them, this isn’t really about health care. It’s about something much larger.


Poor Arlen Specter. He may have wanted to talk about health care, but as the New York Times  reported yesterday, many in the crowd didn’t want to discuss coverage.

They got up before dawn in large numbers with angry signs and American flag T-shirts, and many were seething with frustration at issues that went far beyond overhauling health care. . . .
“This is about the dismantling of this country,” Katy Abram, 35, shouted at Mr. Specter, drawing one of the most prolonged rounds of applause. “We don’t want this country to turn into Russia.”

For Obama and the Democrats, it’s about getting it right and getting it passed. For several other interested parties (insurance companies, Big Pharma, and the rest), it’s about economic self-interest. But for the protesters – the people shouting down discussion at town meetings, carrying signs about “socialism,” ranting about rationing and “death panels” – the issue has taken on symbolic qualities that have nothing to do with health care and much to do with status politics.

Harold Lasswell famously said, “Politics is who gets what, when, and how.” But status politics has little to do with tangible interests. Status politics is flying the Confederate flag on the state capitol. It has nothing to do with policy and everything to do with status. Campaigns to make English the “official language” have this same quality. The question is not who gets what. Instead the question is: whose country is this?

My thinking in all this is inspired by Joseph Gusfield’s Symbolic Crusade, about the temperance movement, which grew in the late 19th century and achieved its greatest victory in the passage of the Eighteenth Amendment.

As Gusfield puts it,

Since governmental actions symbolize the position of groups in the status structure, seemingly ceremonial or ritual acts of government are often of great importance to many social groups.

Gusfield argues that while anti-alcohol laws may have been about the evils of drink, they also reaffirmed the cultural and political dominance of those who had been running the country but now felt their position threatened. Beginning in the latter part of the nineteenth century, these groups – Protestant, rural or small-town, middle class, and agrarian – saw new groups rising to challenge the position of dominance that they had long taken for granted. These arrivistes were largely urban rather than rural, industrial rather than agrarian, Catholic rather than protest, lower class or upper class rather than middle, cosmopolitan rather than local, modern rather than traditional. And they drank. They did not share the old order’s value on abstinence as a sign of virtue, nor did they deem it a necessity for respectability.

By passing laws, especially a national law, the old order could reassure themselves that America was still their country. Then, in 1929, it became clear that what they had been doing with their country hadn’t turned out so well, and in 1932 the “Roosevelt coalition” – urban, ethnic, industrial (plus the anti-Republican South) – swept them out. Notably, one of the first things on the agenda was Repeal.

With health care, the status-politics issue is less clear because private and public insurance are not important aspects of any group’s identity. But these protesters bear a strong resemblance to the temperance constituency – white, non-urban, middle class, local, largely Protestant, anti-immigrant. They are Palin’s peeps.

Ever since Obama took office, they have been looking for a battleground issue where they could show that they were still in control. The financial bailout might have been the Big Issue, but since the economy tanked when Bush had been in control for eight years, it was hard to blame the crisis on Obama or the Democrats. And Bush himself had been the one to start tossing huge sums to Wall Street. The Teabaggers didn’t really have an issue; they could never clarify what they were against let alone what they were for. Foreign policy? Most Americans would prefer to forget about Iraq. They feel that any foreign policy would be better than what Bush got us into.

So health care is where the old order makes its stand. Early on, their spokesman Rush Limbaugh said flat out that he was rooting for Obama to fail. So they protest “Obama care.” But the issue is not really health care, and not even the president. Obama – urban, non-white, cosmopolitan, with ties to both the lower class (community organizing on Chicago’s South Side) and the upper class (Harvard Law) – has become the symbol of their loss of dominance.

The protesters remind me of a spoiled child used to having his way. “Seething with frustration,” is how the Times reporter put it – frustration at losing their position of dominance. They feel that despite Obama’s getting a majority of the votes, his Presidency is still an illegitimate usurpation. The “birthers” make this claim explicitly. But the health care protesters seem to share this idea that their power has been illegitimately taken from them. “I demand my voice,” said one of the signs at the Specter meeting, implying that even if that voice was in the minority and had lost the election, it still should carry the day.

But the protesters, the followers of Fox News and Limbaugh, still can’t grasp that they were outvoted last November. They still think that the US is their country. In the Nixon, Reagan, and Bush years, they knew it was their country. Democrats were allowed to live in it as long as they accepted that dominance. If they dissented, they were accused of treason. “America – love it or leave it.”

Yet even though they are now in the minority, they still think that they are “the Real America” and that the US still belongs to them. But the Real America is coming face to face with reality.
The change has been coming for a while. – the 2006 elections were a sign of this political and cultural shift as I suggested at the time (here) . But the election of Obama and now the possibility that he will enact a real change confronts them with the reality of their loss of dominance. That’s why they see health care in such apocalyptic terms. That’s why I also fear that their tantrums may turn even uglier.