Patriotism Goes to the Movies

November 7, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Patriotism,” says Paul Krugman. “is about making sacrifices for the national good, not serving your personal motives or interests.”  Krugman (in his blog, here ) was citing Michael Lind’s Slate article about “The Patriot,” the 2000 film starring Mel Gibson.  Lind complains that the Patriot of the title, “sits out the American Revolution, until a sadistic . . . British commander kills one of his sons. whereupon he spends the next two days – oops, I mean two hours – avenging himself.”

That’s not patriotism, harrumphs Lind, it’s “amoral familism”*

It appears that today's audiences can't imagine any cause that could justify political violence other than injury to a child or wife.
This movie is deeply subversive of patriotism. Indeed, patriotism is a concept that neither the screenwriter . .  nor the director . . . seems to understand.

Maybe so.  But the writer and director do understand something that Lind apparently does not:  movies are not real life.  If they are, then  “Singin’ in the Rain” is deeply subversive of rational reactions to meteorological events. 

Patriotism may be the last refuge of a scoundrel, but it’s no refuge at all for a filmmaker. Real-life Americans are patriotic, sometimes to an extent others find offensive. But that kind of patriotism doesn’t make for good movies.  In the American movies that I know, good guys never do their good deeds out of abstract idealism. Their motives are always personal. (Even better than a non-ideoogical hero is the character who has an ideology but abandons it in order to kill bad guys – e.g., Grace Kelly in “High Noon”).  

America movie-heroes often take up arms against bad guys, but we would mistrust a hero whose actions are purely ideological and not rooted in personal revenge. Our heroes, even when they are fighting for Good, have the decency to deny any ideological motive. Here’s one familiar (I hope) example:

I’m afraid Michael Lind would be disappointed in Rick, and in Grace Kelly shooting the bad guy to protect her husband.  “[In] the Zeitgeist in the United States in A.D. 2000 . . . American national patriotism is giving way . . .to the perennial rival of patriotism at all levels: amoral familism.”

If that’s the Zeitgeist, it’s a Geist that goes back a long Zeit.  “Casablanca” was made in 1942, “High Noon” in 1952.  Or take another classic from the early 1950s, “On the Waterfront.”  Marlon Brando winds up doing the right thing in ratting out the racketeer union boss (the right thing according to the film’s construction of morality).  But it’s not until he has a personal reason – the union boss has his brother Charley killed – that he takes action.  

You gave it to Joey, you gave it to Dugan, and you gave it to Charley who was one of your own.. . and I’m glad what I done to you!

The film’s attempts to make stevedores spout lofty motives ring embarrassingly false, as when one of the longshoremen urges Brando to defy the boss in order to

give us back our union, so we can run it on the up and up.

(I still cringe when I hear that line.)

Is this bias towards the personal and against the political an aspect of American culture?  Or is it the medium?  Maybe political ideals – socialist realism, capitalist realism, patriot realism, etc. – don’t make for compelling movies.  Movies are first about characters, not ideas. The medium washes out the message.  

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* The term comes from Edward Banfield’s 1958 book The Moral Basis of a Backward Society.  Amoral familism, according to Banfield, was that basis.

Lying With Statistics, and Really Lying With Statistics

November 4, 2011

Posted by Jay Livingston

“The #1 way to lie with statistics is . . . to just lie!” says Andrew Gelman, who a) knows much about statistics and b) is very good at spotting statistical dishonesty.

But maybe there’s a difference between lying with statistics and just plain making stuff up.

I’ve commented before about social psychologists’ affinity for Candid-Camera deception, but this Dutch practitioner goes way beyond that.  [The Telegraph has the story .] 

The committee set up to investigate Prof Stapel said after its preliminary investigation it had found "several dozen publications in which use was made of fictitious data" . . .

[Stapel’s] paper that linked thoughts of eating meat eating with anti-social behaviour was met with scorn and disbelief when it was publicised in August, it took several doctoral candidates Stapel was mentoring to unmask him. . . .

the three graduate students grew suspicious of the data Prof Stapel had supplied them without allowing them to participate in the actual research. When they ran statistical tests on it themselves they found it too perfect to be true and went to the university's dean with their suspicions.

What’s truly unsettling is to think that maybe he’s not the only one.

Abstract Preferences and Real Choices

November 3, 2011
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted at Sociological Images

We’ve known for a long time that surveys are often very bad at predicting behavior.  To take the example that  Malcom Gladwell uses, if you ask Americans what kind of coffee they want,  most will say “a dark, rich, hearty roast.”  But what they actually prefer to drink is “milky, weak coffee.”

Something that sounds good in the abstract turns out to be different from the stuff you actually have to drink. 

Election polls usually have better luck since indicating your choice to a voting machine isn’t all that different from speaking that choice to a pollster.  But political preference polls as well can run into that abstract-vs.-actual problem.

Real Clear Politics recently printed some poll results that were anything but real clear.  RCP looked at polls matching Obama against the various Republican candidates.  In every case, if you use the average results of the different polls, Obama comes out on top. But in polls that matched Obama against “a Republican,” the Republican wins.

 The graph shows only the average of the polls.  RCP also provides the results
of the various polls (CNN, Rasmussen, ABCl, etc.) 

Apparently, the best strategy for the GOP is nominate a candidate but not tell anyone who it is.

The Distribution of the Wealthy

November 2, 2011

Posted by Jay Livingston

After reading David Brooks’s column in the Times yesterday, I was catching up on podcasts of KCRW’s “The Business.”  The installment from three weeks ago included a short clip from the “30 Rock” pilot:

DONAGHY:  Sure. I gotcha. New York, third wave feminist. College educated. Single and pretending to be happy about it. Over scheduled, under sexed. You buy any magazine that says ‘healthy body image’ on the cover. And... Every two years you take up knitting for... a week.

Like Jack Donaghy, David Brooks gets a lot of mileage out of cultural stereotypes. That’s because there’s some truth to them. Yesterday, the day after Halloween, he went back to the closet and pulled out his favorite costumes – two Blue, two Red.

The two costumes in each color reveal a basic inequality.  In the Blue

• the urban elites, concocting complex financial deals and buying expensive merch
• the unwealthy liberal liberal-arts majors in Zucotti Park.

In the Red

• the solid middle-class, unpretentious and hard-working
• dropouts struggling to find work and keep their families together – struggling but too often failing.

The Red inequality, says Brooks, is more important yet less noticed.

The Blue inequality is confined to “New York City, Los Angeles, Boston, San Francisco, Seattle, Dallas, Houston and the District of Columbia.” The Red inequality is “everywhere else.”

These costumes are colorful; they capture our attention. But they can mask other realities.* As Brad de Long points out, the economic and social gulf between the educated and the uneducated – Brooks’s Red inequality – is just as wide, perhaps wider, in New York as in Fresno. Brad also unfairly goes to Forbes magazine and waves the page showing the geography of the very wealthiest. It looks like there’s a bit of Bluish inequality in the heartland too.

“I count 6 of the top 10 living in regions where Brooks claims people like them don't live,” Brad says. But three of those six are Waltons (John-boy didn’t make the list this year), and ten is hardly all of the top 1%.

Howard Wial at the Atlantic  uses IRS data to give a more complete picture. He uses $200,000 household income as his cutoff point – the top 3% rather than the 1%. But while the lives at the 99th percentile may be different from those only at th 97th, the maps are probably similar.

Here’s where the wealthy are.

The twenty MSAs shown in shades of green (nice choice) account for slightly more than half of all such households. Which means that nearly half of the top 3% live everywhere else. The New York area is home to 11.5% of the wealthy. But then, it’s home to more people of every income. So Wial looks at the ratio of wealthy to nonwealthy. A handful of rich folks can make a difference in a small population like Washoe County, NV and Natrona County, WY, which go from gray to green (who’s rich in Casper?). But in Phoenix, the population is so large that the although many wealthy people live there (2% of all wealthy people in the US), they are under-represented.

It’s not surprising that the Occupy movement started in New York, nor that it has spread to other places highlighted in these maps. But as Wial says, Occupy protests have also sprung up in “such seemingly unlikely locales as Anderson, Indiana, and Texarkana, Texas.”

If you’re looking for only red and blue, you’ll miss a lot of interesting purple shades, from magenta and mauve to puce and plum.


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* Brooks has done this before, notably in Bobos in Paradise. See Sasha Issenberg’s article http://www.phillymag.com/articles/booboos_in_paradise/ in PhillyMag for notes on Brooks’s blindness to inconvenient realities and his just plain making stuff up.