Postal Wisdom

July 18, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Some people are unhappy about the Happy Valley statue of Joe Paterno.  They want it removed, torn down. 

Ta-Nehisi Coates in the Times says let it stand.  Coates, who is African American, also wants to preserve a Columbia, SC statue of Senator Ben Tillman, “who helped found Clemson University and, in his spare time, defended lynching from his august national offices.”

For both statues, Coates applies the same reasoning:  We need to be reminded of our past sins – ours, not just those of the racist or the child-abuse enabler.

Arguing for the [Paterno] statue’s removal, the legendary coach Bobby Bowden said he wouldn’t want Sandusky’s crimes “brought up every time I walked out on the field.” That’s the point. Sandusky’s crimes should never be forgotten . . . .  It is shameful to deify men who put nationalist ritual before children. But it is more shameful to pretend that this elevation was achieved by Joe Paterno’s singular hand.

I’ll pass for the moment on questions about the function of heroes and whether we really need them and what it says about our society that we apparently do need them and who are the people we choose to make our heroes.  But the simple point is that the statue should never have been built.  And if the Happy Valleyans had known then what they know now, it would not have been built. 

What was the hurry? 

The Post Office comes in for a lot of criticism, but on this one they got it right: no commemoratives  until the person has been dead for ten years.* 

That seems like a wise policy other institutions should follow.

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* I was watching Jay Leno one night back when there were sightings of Elvis in supermarkets and other venues.  Leno mentioned the Elvis commemorative stamp and added, “The Post Office rule is that you have to be dead for ten years . . . and stay dead.” 

The London Games

July 17, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

The Olympics begin in London in less than a fortnight.  Just across the channel, Eurostar, the Paris-London rail link, has an ad campaign encouraging Parisians to make the trip to see how the British do the classical Greek games.  These posters have been springing up around Paris.

(Click on the image for a larger view.)

I’m sure there’s cultural lesson here, aside from the obvious one about levels of prudery – something about cultural differences going back to the Hundred Years War.  There’s no written copy on the posters, but the unwritten copy is all about cultural superiority.  “We French are the keepers of the classical culture of ancient Greece.  Measured against those standards and forms, you Brits look foolish with their silly games and corpulent bodies.”  Or to paraphrase the French soldier in the film says, “I fart in your general direction, but I’m going to take the Eurostar to do so."

Or maybe it’s just about darts and snooker on the one side and babyfoot (i.e, foosball)  on the other.

HT: Rue Rude

Jerry Starr

July 16, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Jerry Starr died on Friday.  He was a good sociologist, a public sociologist.  In the 1960s he worked with Peace Corps volunteers.  In the 1980s he put together a curriculum on the Vietnam War for use in high schools, a curriculum that treated the issues with depth and honesty.  More recently he worked to keep public television in Pittsburgh public and relevant. 

I met Jerry at Brandeis.  He was a grad student, I was an undergrad, but the sociology department did its best to minimize that division, at least for upper-level undergrads who were interested.  We discovered shared interests.  We both liked jazz, and we both had been known to spend an afternoon with the horses (“track trash” was the phrase Jerry used), we knew a lot of the same jokes.  More than that, I appreciated his perspective on the world.  But while his intellectual style was a sort of bemused ironic detachment, but he combined that with a real-world political engagement.

He taught at Penn, then at West Virginia University, and teaching was one of te things we would talk about.  In my classes, I still often use an example I got from him. I think Jerry used this in his Sociology of Youth course, probably as in lead-in to the section on the school as an institution.

He would turn class discussion to the topic of dreams.  What could be more individual, personal, and psychological?  Then he would ask if any of them had ever had a dream where the setting is a school.  Most had.  What were the dreams like, he would ask.  I was two days late to class.  I couldn’t find my classroom.  I was in the wrong building.  I was naked in class.  You get the idea – anxiety dreams. 

Maybe, he would say, maybe these seemingly personal things, dreams, tell us something about the nature of an institution.   The example is about schools.   But it also epitomizes the sociological enterprise – going beyond the personal and individual to see the impact of social institutions.

Four years ago, Jerry was diagnosed with cancer.  He sent a letter to friends saying,

in fairness to the truth, we now know more than enough to know that I am inoperable, incurable and have months to live. As the doctors told me, it is just "bad luck" when a perfectly healthy person with no symptoms is discovered (by accident) to have cancer so advanced that nothing can be done.

He did try chemo and survived both the treatment and the disease.  Those four years are something of a bonus for us.  But this time, he rejected the idea of treatment, preferring, as he said four years ago “to see death as part of life.”


The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette had an obit on Saturday. 
 

Brides of Quietness

July 15, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Lisa Wade at Sociological Images  says she can’t wait to see “The Mechanical Bride,” a documentary about artificial females created mostly for sex.*  The fantasy – a man creating the ideal female – is as old as Pygmalion, but over the millennia, the technology has improved.

In 1951, Marshal McCluhan put this fantasy into the general context of advertising – its messages and images – in his first book, The Mechanical Bride. 

 I wonder if the creators of the film make any mention of McCluhan.  I’m far away from the copy of the McLuhan book on my office bookshelf, so I’ll rely on this excerpt from an essay by Geert Lovink

 According to McLuhan, it is the dominant pattern of visual coverage in the popular press, comprising a fusion of sex and technology: Explore and enlarge the domain of sex by mechanical technique and possess machines in a sexually gratifying way. Long, slender ladies' legs are an expression of our 'replaceable parts' cultural dynamics. The industrial mode of production mechanized sex too. In ads the human body is depicted behavioristically as a sort of love machine capable merely of specific thrill, a view which reduces sex experience to a problem in mechanics and hygiene.   

I wonder if the filmmaker, Allison deFren, makes any explicit reference to McCluhan and his ideas.

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* The 2007 movie  “Lars and the Real Girl” features one of these females – she had a title role but no Oscar nominations.  That movie was not so much about sex as about the social construction of reality.