All Happy Family Christmas Letters Are Alike

December 9, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

A Facebook friend asked about the origins of the Christmas letter – you know, those cheerful year-end summaries that seem to have been written by some omniscient third person telling you about everyone in the family.  Her question made me wonder about other aspects of this custom, not just when it arose.  Where did it start (socially more than geographically)?  What  has been the pattern of diffusion?  What are the demographics? 

I imagine that soon Hallmark will be selling a convenient standard-form version where all you have to do is fill in a few blanks, sort of like Mad Libs. 

In case you are unfamiliar with the genre, here is one I got recently.

It seems like only yesterday that we were mailing out last year’s Christmas letter, but here we are a year later, once again sharing with our friends what the Loman family has been up to.

Willy had the car fixed, and it’s running just fine. Truth be told, Linda would prefer him to work closer to home, but you can’t keep a salesman off the road. We’re glad to be all together at home for the holidays, even if Christmas here in Brooklyn is different from what it is where most of you are. I long to hear those traditional carols. Hap jokes that the song he hears most in the yule season here is “We’re doing our Christmas shopping at Robert Hall this year.” Hap and Biff – they do bring such joy to our world. 

We’re looking forward to the new year to bring us some new developments. America is the land of opportunity, and the Loman men are looking to make the most of it. Willy, ever the dreamer, has some really promising ideas, and his boss Howard is taking a keen interest. Willy might even give Bernard (our neighbor Charley’s boy) a break and bring him in to take care of some of the legal details. 

Biff has big plans too, and he has the patience to wait for the right person to open the door. Modest Biff doesn’t want us to say so, but being a star athlete and good-looking doesn’t hurt either when you’re trying to lure the venture capitalists. 

We also stop and remember those who are no longer with us to celebrate the holiday. We can never forget Willy’s brother, Uncle Ben, who walked into the jungle at seventeen, and when he walked out, by God he had rice. (We still quote Uncle Ben’s words of wisdom – with great rice comes great responsibility. )

But we also remember the good times. I think I heard the boys chuckling again about the time Biff went to Boston as a surprise to Willy who was there on a sales trip and had no idea Biff was coming. Oh, those pranksters. They’re just irrepressible. 

We hope all is well with our friends in this special season. We’re glad that the Christmas holiday gives us a moment away from the everyday busy-ness and allows us to think about the important areas of life where attention must be paid.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year

The Lomans

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Coming Soon

• Season’s Greetings from Jason, Medea, and the Boys
• The Portnoy Family Holiday Letter
• The Gambino Family Christmas Offering (You Can’t Refuse)
• and others

Explaining the Election

December 6, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

In the view of many conservative journalists and bloggers, Obama won the election because his campaign was strategically canny – clever, even deceptive, and focused so as to maximize his electoral count. Some Republicans, maybe half of them, have another explanation: ACORN stole the election for Obama. That one seems less persuasive since ACORN hasn’t existed for a couple of years. (The HufPo story on that poll is here.)

But how about this wild guess: Obama won because his policies were favored by a majority of the people.

Sixty-five percent of voters back increased taxes for Americans making more than $250,000 a year, while 31 percent oppose, according to a Quinnipiac University poll . . .

Voters overwhelmingly oppose cutting Medicaid spending, 70-25 percent. Voters surveyed also oppose gradually raising the Medicare eligibility age, 51-44 percent, and don’t support cuts to military spending by a margin of 55-41 percent. Those surveyed also said a “no-taxes” pledge isn’t a good idea, 85-10 percent.  [From Politico.]

SNAP Judgment

December 5, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Mayor Booker’s decision to go on the SNAP diet has gotten a lot of coverage in the press.  His hometown paper, the Star-Ledger, had him on the front page.

If this is really what the mayor bought with his food stamps, there’s one stereotype he’s not putting to rest – the Coastal elitist.  Yes, he’s got the Goya garbanzos and frijoles, and he’s got the yams.

But organic extra virgin olive oil?  Really, Cory. 

Accentuating the Negative

December 5, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston
Cross-posted in slightly edited form at Sociological Images

Try not to think about an Oldsmobile. 

I’ve been thinking about Oldsmobile.  I mentioned it in passing in the previous post, and since then I’ve been wondering about “Not Your Father’s Oldsmobile” – the brand’s swan song.  Matthew Yglesias at Slate thinks that the campaign alienated the regular customers, the ones who bought a new Olds every few years, saying to them in effect, “You’re a geezer, an Oldster, and have been for a while – sans youth, sans sex, sans taste, sans everything except your crummy car.” 

The tag that completed the famous set-up line was, “The new generation of Olds.”

The word “generation” was key. If you recall, each commercial featured a celebrity and one of his or her offspring. This is why the campaign is so damn silly.

That’s from the ad man who claims to have created that tag.  He also has some war stories from the shoots, including one about William Shatner’s daughter’s nipples (here).  But I digress.

The target of the campaign was to attract young car buyers, but it missed badly.  Why?  My guess is the futility of negation.  Saying what something is not doesn’t give people a clear picture of what that something actually is.  But that’s not the problem here.  The message was clear, especially with that tag about generations.

The problem is that direct negation can reinforce the idea you are trying to deny – as in the paradoxical command to not think about an elephant. “I am not a crook,” said Richard Nixon in his televised address about Watergate.  It’s his most remembered line, and when he spoke it, the TV screen might as well have had an overlay flashing the words “Game Over.”

If the denial contradicts general perceptions (i.e., the brand), people might not hear it at all, or worse, they might hear the opposite.  Ever since fact-checking went public in a big way a few years ago, we’ve seen corrections to the lies that politicians have told about one another.  But as
Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler have shown (here), corrections can boomerang, especially when they clash with ideas the reader already has.

Can these false or unsubstantiated beliefs about politics be corrected? . . . Results indicate that corrections frequently fail to reduce misperceptions among the targeted ideological group. We also document several instances of a “backfire effect” in which corrections actually increase misperceptions among the group in question.

So what’s a struggling car company to do about its doddering demographics?  They can’t go back to 1905 and “Come away with me Lucille.”* 

Unfortunately, the hip hop dudes were walking to their Escalades, Beamers, and Lambos.  Not a Cutlass to be seen.

 Maybe putting the idea into the youth idiom of the day (the late 1980s) would have worked:

Your father’s Oldsmobile . . . . NOT!

(Now you know why I never went into advertising.)

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* Times change, cars change, language changes.  This pretty waltz from 1905 concludes with lines that by mid-century would have seemed amusingly suggestive:

You can go as far as you like with me
 In my merry Oldsmobile.

You can hear that line in the opening of this video (after the 15-second intro). To sing along karaoke style, fast forward to about 3:25.