Steeler Nation

September 30, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

It’s nice to have your ideas confirmed in the newspaper of record.

Last November, after the Democratic win in the election, I blogged to the effect that the Steelers had replaced the Cowboys as America’s team. I had thought of doing a follow-up post on the same topic, but I’ve been scooped. On Saturday, the central piece on the New York Times op-ed page was an essay about Steeler Nation.

The author, fashion writer Holly Brubach, writes about finding Steeler fans at bars in Rochester, MN, San Francisco, Toronto, and other cities. “Steeler nation seems to outnumber the fans of every other franchise.”

“Seems.” As a social scientist, I know not “seems,” lady. I was waiting till I found some data. And when I do, I’ll blog the Steelers again.

But I admit what inspired me was something like Brubach’s personal experience. A couple of weeks ago, my son, who has become something of a Steelers fan, was prodding me to find a sports bar where we might watch the game. I Googled local sports bars and called the closest one.

Yes, said the woman who answered the phone, they have football games that the regular channels don’t.

“Will you have the Steelers game?” I asked.

“This is a Steeler bar,” she said, surprised, almost offended, as though I’d asked whether they served beer. She added, however, that all the tables had been reserved long ago, though if I showed up early enough, I might be able to squeeze in at the bar.

On Sunday, we walked past that bar. It was about 15 minutes till gametime, and outside on the sidewalk, where smokers are now exiled in New York City, a woman in a Jerome Bettis jersey was talking with a Mean Joe Greene. Through the large front window I could see that the bar area was packed with people in Steeler regalia.

(On days when the Steelers play the 4:15 game, Steeler Nation waits on the sidewalk for the one-o’clock game fans to clear out of the bar, as in these pictures.)

We went to a less crowded bar three blocks further on. Only two people were in black-and-gold jerseys. But even there, pride of place (i.e., the large projection screen and the audio) was given to the Steelers. They crushed the Bills, 26-3.

The Institutionalization of Hysteria

September 28, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

At the Republican debate Thursday Ron Paul called for an end to the war on drugs. OK, Ron Paul isn’t a very prominent candidate. The leading Republican candidates didn’t show up – after all, the debate was to focus on racial issues, and the audience was predominantly black. Still, Paul’s statement is noteworthy.

Back in the late 1980s I was visiting in Washington, DC. I don’t remember the circumstances, but some people I didn’t know were giving me a ride, and somehow the topic of drugs came up. These people, husband and wife, were lawyers – maybe they worked for the government – and one of them started to say something about the current atmosphere surrounding the topic. He stopped in mid-sentence, searching for the right word, as though a misstatement might be very costly.

“Hysteria?” I offered.

Well, they wouldn’t put it quite like that, they said. But two things were clear to me. One, they agreed that policy and public opinion on drugs had gone way past being rational. And two, they were afraid to let others know their views. It would have been like someone in Salem in 1692 saying that maybe we’ve gone a little overboard on this witch thing.

Here we are two decades later, and at least in the public mind, drugs have been replaced by other fears, notably terrorism. It’s hard to keep two moral panics going simultaneously. (See last December’s entry “The War on Drugs.” )

But we are still living with the consequences of that hysteria. Emotions come and go. Institutions and laws are much more durable. And the fears and moral panic of decades past has become institutionalized. The sentences written into law are the most egregious consequence. Judicial precedents and rulings are usually less glaring, but they are part of the same process.

A couple of days before Ron Paul made that statement, an appeals court upheld the strip search of a 13-year-old Arizona schoolgirl. School authorities suspected her of carrying drugs – prescription-strength ibuprofen. Basically, a double dose of Advil. The strip search was perfectly legal, said two of three judges interpreting the law.

Once the hysteria gets written into law, the original emotion becomes irrelevant. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is about the least emotional person you could imagine. Yet when he was an appeals court judge, he wrote a strictly legal and technical opinion that would have allowed the strip search of a 10-year-old girl.

For what it’s worth, in neither strip search did the authorities find drugs.

The Greatest Drummer in the World

September 26, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Students are so young now. I remember when they were only a few years younger than I was, and we knew the same movies and music. We could talk.

That was then.

Now on the first day of class, I pass out index cards for students to put their vital information – names, e-mail, phone numbers. I ask them to put down the name of their favorite movie, book, and album.

I’m hoping that knowing a bit about such preferences might help me learn their names more quickly. But it’s also my desperate attempt to keep up in some small way with pop culture, which slips further and further away from me each year. Especially music. It’s not just that I don’t know the songs or what these singers sound like; I often don’t even recognize the names of the performers. I’ve made my peace with it; I’m resigned to the fate of never again being cool.

But this semester provided an opening I couldn’t resist. As I went through the cards calling names, talking briefly with each student, I came upon one that listed “Journey.”

“The group?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “anything by them.”

Now in one of those strange accidents of proximity that can happen when you live in New York, I recently got to know the guy who played drums with Journey back in the day. So I asked, “Do you happen to know who the drummer with Journey was?”

No, she said, she just liked their music.

I was standing there debating whether to play my trump card right then – maybe it would appear too desperate – when another student called out, “It’s Steve Smith.” Then he added definitively, “the greatest drummer in the world.” After a pause he elaborated further, “Not so much his rock drumming, but the later stuff.”

“You mean the jazz fusion stuff with Vital Information?” I asked, not so much looking for agreement as just displaying this one slender wisp of cool.

By the Numbers

September 23, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Does Montclair Socioblog have a reader at CBS TV?

Two weeks ago, I blogged about all those numbers on the covers of women’s magazines.
Today, CBS Sunday Morning led off with a piece about the same thing.

It turns out I wasn’t quite right. The numbers are everywhere, not just on women’s magazines. Twelve steps, seven habits, a thousand places to see before you die. And that’s not counting all those ten-best list. Men’s magazines too find numbers irresistible. The CBS piece showed the guys at Men’s Health kicking around ideas. “'Ten or 15 signs she's cheating' is always a great one.” And the editor tells CBS, “When we put lists or numbers on the cover, our newsstand sales go up.”

Sure enough, at the Men’s Health website today you can find

• 5 ways to get her into your bed
• 10 foods you should eat every day
• 10 muscles she wants to see

The lists and numbers appeal to two strong themes in American culture: self-improvement and rationalization. Self-improvement is a theme in American magazines date back at least to the late nineteenth century. It’s an idea that expands rapidly in a culture of optimism and an ideology of individualism and social mobility.

As for rationalization, it seems there is nothing so personal and ineffable that we can’t try to reduce it to a prescribed number of steps, Power Point list of bullet points. Like workers on a Taylorized assembly line, we can all follow the same routinized procedure to find success, raise happy children, be physically fit, have mindblowing orgasms, overcome our fears, or find the perfect hair style for this fall.