December 26, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston
Christmas in the Northeast was a warm one. Brad Wright describes the sartorial adjustments his six-year-old made at Christmas eve services (baring midriff, rolling up pantlegs and shirtsleeves). Dress codes were apparently not enforced.
Sunday evening here in New York, at a local Catholic church’s Christmas eve family mass, the father of one of the little girls in the children’s choir sat in the front pew wearing jeans and a mustard-colored sweatshirt. A few men wore neckties; most didn't. Some women were in their holiday outfits, but some others wore sneakers. I was reminded of a couple I know who exemplify the American success story, raised in a Catholic working class home but now quite successful. Somewhere along the way, she changed the family’s affiliation to the Episcopal church because the people at the Catholic churches just didn’t seem to care what they wore.
It’s anecdotal evidence of course, but it may be representative. Thirty years ago in Americans Together, a study of a Midwestern town (“Appleton”), French anthropologist Hervé Varenne noted the differences in how people dressed for church. The Protestants dressed up. The Catholics offered a much greater variety, from Sunday best to very casual. As I recall, Varenne traced the differences back to the theology of the Reformation, especially (Weber noted this too) insecurity about one's state of salvation. The more individualist Protestant doctrine results in a pressure on members to show outwardly the signs of grace (not that any of the congregants in Appleton nearly a half-millenium after the fact would have put it that way). In Catholicism, your place in the community and in heaven is more secure; you need only to come to church, confess, take communion, etc.
(I highly recommend Varenne’s book to anyone interested in American culture. Several chapters, though not the one on Protestants and Catholics, are available online at his website.)
The Sexual Contradictions of Capitalism
December 22, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston
Why is it news when sex objects behave sexually? And why do people feign shock and horror?
I have not been following the Miss USA flap closely. It hardly seems important enough, though anything that makes Donald Trump a matter of mockery can’t be all bad even if it does serve his never-ending quest for publicity.
Trump owns the Miss USA beauty contest and a couple of others. Recently, the alert media reported that this year’s winner, Miss Kentucky, having won her title in the usual way — i.e., parading around skimpily clad in front of a lot of people—had behaved immorally. She had been drinking to bars, testing positive for cocaine, and even kissing Miss Teen USA, who presumably won her title in a similar way. What else could Trump do but threaten to take the title away? He could let the story play out for a couple of days, that’s what, and then continue to keep the story in the news by then saying that she could keep her title. The stock plotline Trump selected was that Miss KY was a basically good small-town girl corrupted by the wicked ways of New York and that she deserves a second chance.
Today, the news is that Miss Nevada is being cashiered for, of all things, being sexual. (Nevada, if I remember correctly, is the only state in the country that has legalized brothels.) Some photos of her kissing and flashing at some party have surfaced (you can find the uncensored version on the Internet, but far be it from a wholesome blog like this one to provide you the URL).
Is all this peculiarly American? I suspect that the beauty pageant is an American invention, and there may be something especially American about it — the display of sexuality amid the continual declaration of high-mindedness, the denial of both the obvious lechery and the only slightly less obvious profit motive.
Posted by Jay Livingston
Why is it news when sex objects behave sexually? And why do people feign shock and horror?
I have not been following the Miss USA flap closely. It hardly seems important enough, though anything that makes Donald Trump a matter of mockery can’t be all bad even if it does serve his never-ending quest for publicity.
Trump owns the Miss USA beauty contest and a couple of others. Recently, the alert media reported that this year’s winner, Miss Kentucky, having won her title in the usual way — i.e., parading around skimpily clad in front of a lot of people—had behaved immorally. She had been drinking to bars, testing positive for cocaine, and even kissing Miss Teen USA, who presumably won her title in a similar way. What else could Trump do but threaten to take the title away? He could let the story play out for a couple of days, that’s what, and then continue to keep the story in the news by then saying that she could keep her title. The stock plotline Trump selected was that Miss KY was a basically good small-town girl corrupted by the wicked ways of New York and that she deserves a second chance.
Today, the news is that Miss Nevada is being cashiered for, of all things, being sexual. (Nevada, if I remember correctly, is the only state in the country that has legalized brothels.) Some photos of her kissing and flashing at some party have surfaced (you can find the uncensored version on the Internet, but far be it from a wholesome blog like this one to provide you the URL).
Is all this peculiarly American? I suspect that the beauty pageant is an American invention, and there may be something especially American about it — the display of sexuality amid the continual declaration of high-mindedness, the denial of both the obvious lechery and the only slightly less obvious profit motive.
Rolling Alone
December 21, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston
The news today is that Pittsburgh, my old hometown, is going to get a gambling casino. All slot machines.
Up until about 25 years ago, the action in casinos was at the tables. People crowded around a crap table generate excitement, almost a team spirit since most are betting with the shooter rather than with the house. And everyone gets a chance to be the shooter, as the 
dice pass from player to player around the table. Roulette and blackjack are calmer, the players seated, and the house, rather than one of the players, spinning the wheel or dealing the cards, but the players are still there together, aware of each other’s bets.
The tables were where the casinos made their money. They courted the high rollers, comping them rooms, food, and even air fare. The slot machines were small-time stuff, a way to keep wives from getting bored.
Then the balance began to shift until now slot machines account for most casino revenue, typically 75%, even higher in some places. So why not just get rid of the tables altogether and have nothing but machines? From the casino’s point of view, there are lots of reasons to get rid of the tables, mostly things like labor costs, health benefits, and other potential difficulties that arise when your employees are human beings.
But what is the attraction for players? Is that they too feel more comfortable alone with a machine than among other humans?
There may be other reasons as well. You don’t have to worry about how much to tip if you win; you don’t have to tip at all. Also, the machines are far more complicated than the old three-wheel one-armed bandits. They resemble video games, with different levels you can move through and different choices you can make. The generation raised on video games may feel more comfortable with these machines and may find a simple pair of dice or deck of cards incredibly one-dimensional.
Even the traditional games are becoming mechanized. You can play poker, craps, or roulette at an electronic console rather than at a table. I guess I’m hopelessly old fashioned. I’d be less likely to trust a programmable computer to give an honest roll of the dice or turn 
of a card than I would a real person holding the actual dice or deck.
The sociological question is the one Putnam raised about bowling. Does this transformation of gambling yet one more way that social life is becoming more fragmented and individualized? What makes public social life interesting is the possibility of new experience, something we never expected. The more individual control we have over our environment, the more we remove the possibility of these unplanned encounters.
In the fully mechanized casino, people minimize the chance of a random social encounter while at the same time they cede complete control over their money to a flashy random-number generator.
Smile, You're On Camera
December 20, 2006
Posted by Jay Livingston
Surveillance cameras. London has a half million of them. In New York, in Greenwich Village and Soho, there are about 4,200 — a drop in the London bucket, but five times more than in 1998. That’s according to a survey out last week by the New York Civil Liberties Union. The majority of the cameras were installed and operated by private businesses and buildings.
The cameras are supposedly for our protection, but the NYCLU and others claim that the cameras do not reduce crime, though they may help catch perpetrators after the crime has been committed. But perhaps that’s only because the criminals don’t know about them. Or if criminals do know, the cameras are so unobtrusive that the criminals forget they are there. As anyone who has done participant observation knows, after a while, people will tune out even human observers who are standing right there and go on about their business, even when that business is of questionable legality. “I don’t see how my men could have done that with those observers right there in the car,” said one police officer when shown an observational report about police brutality. That was forty years ago. Now the cops are on videotape. Has possibility of a video turning up all over the news on TV has had any affect on the way police do their work?
The NYCLU worries about the erosion of privacy, especially by police cameras. The camera proponents argue that the cameras are trained on the streets or the interiors of stores. They see nothing more than what a person in the same situation might see, though usually from a higher angle. The NYCLU points to cases where people thought they were alone, in fact were alone in the sense that no other people were around, but were secretly taped.
The NYCLU even found a classic example: police using the night-vision capacity of a helicopter camera switched the focus from a bicycle protest to the terrace of an apartment building, where a couple who thought they were alone in the dark were making love.
Still, there’s a difference between being out in public, casually noticed by strangers, and being watched. One afternoon in ancient times, back when I was in grad school, I was walking around town after lunch one day. (It may even have been one of those days when I lunched with a group that included the current director of the NYCLU, not that that’s relevant.) It was a warm day, and because my hands sweat, and because I didn’t want the paperback book I was carrying to get damaged, I folded it into the protection of my newspaper. At some point as I was walking down the street, a man in a suit tapped me on the shoulder. “Do you mind if I see that book you’ve got inside that paper?” he said.
I was stunned. He was a store detective from the bookstore, where I had been browsing earlier, and he thought I might have shoplifted the book. I showed him the book, which he could see immediately was not stolen. “O.K.,” he said. I had no problem with the bookstore wanting to protect itself from shoplifting. But then it hit me. “You mean you’ve been following me all this time?” I had left the bookstore ten or fifteen minutes earlier. “Yeah. I lost you over on [he named some street or store, which I don’t remember] for a while.”
My reaction was visceral; I could feel it in my gut— uneasiness, almost fear. I immediately thought back over my path since leaving the store. I had been in public the whole time, all my activities visible to strangers. Still, I wondered if I had done anything that I wouldn’t have wanted him to have seen— nothing criminal, just embarrassing or in some way private. I didn’t like the idea that I’d been followed and spied on.
When we’re in public, we take it for granted that others will notice us as one of the crowd. It’s a very different feeling to think that we are having every movement, every twitch and scratch, closely observed and recorded.
I guess I’ll watch Coppola’s film “The Conversation” next time it comes around on television. And maybe I’ll include the Civil Liberties Union among my year-end donations.
Posted by Jay Livingston
Surveillance cameras. London has a half million of them. In New York, in Greenwich Village and Soho, there are about 4,200 — a drop in the London bucket, but five times more than in 1998. That’s according to a survey out last week by the New York Civil Liberties Union. The majority of the cameras were installed and operated by private businesses and buildings.
The cameras are supposedly for our protection, but the NYCLU and others claim that the cameras do not reduce crime, though they may help catch perpetrators after the crime has been committed. But perhaps that’s only because the criminals don’t know about them. Or if criminals do know, the cameras are so unobtrusive that the criminals forget they are there. As anyone who has done participant observation knows, after a while, people will tune out even human observers who are standing right there and go on about their business, even when that business is of questionable legality. “I don’t see how my men could have done that with those observers right there in the car,” said one police officer when shown an observational report about police brutality. That was forty years ago. Now the cops are on videotape. Has possibility of a video turning up all over the news on TV has had any affect on the way police do their work?The NYCLU worries about the erosion of privacy, especially by police cameras. The camera proponents argue that the cameras are trained on the streets or the interiors of stores. They see nothing more than what a person in the same situation might see, though usually from a higher angle. The NYCLU points to cases where people thought they were alone, in fact were alone in the sense that no other people were around, but were secretly taped.
The NYCLU even found a classic example: police using the night-vision capacity of a helicopter camera switched the focus from a bicycle protest to the terrace of an apartment building, where a couple who thought they were alone in the dark were making love.Still, there’s a difference between being out in public, casually noticed by strangers, and being watched. One afternoon in ancient times, back when I was in grad school, I was walking around town after lunch one day. (It may even have been one of those days when I lunched with a group that included the current director of the NYCLU, not that that’s relevant.) It was a warm day, and because my hands sweat, and because I didn’t want the paperback book I was carrying to get damaged, I folded it into the protection of my newspaper. At some point as I was walking down the street, a man in a suit tapped me on the shoulder. “Do you mind if I see that book you’ve got inside that paper?” he said.
I was stunned. He was a store detective from the bookstore, where I had been browsing earlier, and he thought I might have shoplifted the book. I showed him the book, which he could see immediately was not stolen. “O.K.,” he said. I had no problem with the bookstore wanting to protect itself from shoplifting. But then it hit me. “You mean you’ve been following me all this time?” I had left the bookstore ten or fifteen minutes earlier. “Yeah. I lost you over on [he named some street or store, which I don’t remember] for a while.”
My reaction was visceral; I could feel it in my gut— uneasiness, almost fear. I immediately thought back over my path since leaving the store. I had been in public the whole time, all my activities visible to strangers. Still, I wondered if I had done anything that I wouldn’t have wanted him to have seen— nothing criminal, just embarrassing or in some way private. I didn’t like the idea that I’d been followed and spied on.
When we’re in public, we take it for granted that others will notice us as one of the crowd. It’s a very different feeling to think that we are having every movement, every twitch and scratch, closely observed and recorded.
I guess I’ll watch Coppola’s film “The Conversation” next time it comes around on television. And maybe I’ll include the Civil Liberties Union among my year-end donations.
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