August 4, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Long ago, some comedy sketch team did a parody of Tennessee Williams style Southern drama. At one point, the young woman asks what she’s doing that has turned people against her. The Big Daddy-ish character tells her: “Drinkin’, lyin’, and puttin’ on airs.”
The joke is that in American culture, all sorts of sins can be overlooked. Lying, cheating, drinking, robbery, drug dealing, murder and other forms of violence – none of these necessarily disqualifies a character from being an admirable person or what we used to call a hero. Puttin’ on airs is another matter.
The line popped into my head as I was watching “Blue Jasmine,” Woody Allen’s retelling of the “Streetcar Named Desire” scenario. A pretentious and slightly delusional woman suddenly falls from her life of great wealth and has to move in with her working-class sister Ginger in San Francisco. Hilarity does not ensue. (Come to think of it, “Streetcar” doesn’t have too many laughs either.) We cringe at each scene where Jasmine disdains the tastes of the people in her sister’s working-class world. We egalitarian Americans are put off by the character who takes pride in his or her educated, sophisticated tastes. That character is heading either for a bad end or perhaps a redeeming turnaround complete with a slice of pizza and a lite beer.
“Streetcar” was a fish-out-of-water story – delicate Blanche in the home and world of the coarse Stanley Kowalski. “Blue Jasmine,” with flashbacks that contrast Jasmine’s former life of opulence in New York with her sister’s working-class world, is more of a morality tale about social class. And that tale is none too subtle. The elite – especially as represented by Jasmine’s husband Hal (Alec Baldwin) – are greedy, dishonest, selfish, and narcissistic. Hal is a Bernie Madoff type but with a string of sexual infidelities added to his financial frauds. Jasmine, like Blanche du Bois, manages to keep herself from seeing the obvious. (Blanche and Jasmine share a similar neurotic style, though Jasmine nourishes hers with seemingly unlimited quantities of vodka and Xanax).
Worse, the elite (Hal and Jasmine) destroy the hopes and dreams of the working class Ginger and her then-husband Augie. When they win $200,000 in the lottery, they consult Hal, the successful businessman, about how Augie might use the money to start his own business. Instead, Jasmine and Hal persuade him to invest the money in one of Hal’s ventures with a promised 20% return. The working-class couple lose everything, and their marriage dissolves.
This negative portrayal of the wealthy (seemingly a requirement in American films) is mirrored in the purity of virtue shown by the film’s working class. It was not always thus. In “Streetcar,” Stanley is not only coarse-mannered and insensitive to Blanche’s mental fragility. He beats his wife Stella, and in the scene that the play has been building to, he deals with his conflict with Blanche by raping her.
Stanley’s “Blue Jasmine” counterparts are Augie, Ginger’s first husband, and Chili, her current almost-fiancé, an auto mechanic.* These characters are less conflicted, less nuanced. They are basically saints wearing wifebeaters. When Chili gets justifiably angry – Ginger has slept with another man – he breaks a lamp, but he doesn’t hit anyone, and later, he cries.
Wealthy bad, working-class good. It’s just about as simple as that.** Of course, you don’t go to “Blue Jasmine” for a realistic and complex depiction of class relations in the US. Movies must simplify some elements for the sake of others. You go to “Blue Jasmine” to see a tour de force performance by Cate Blanchett in a well-told tale.
[As with most films today, the trailer provides a fairly complete plot summary.]
-----------------------------
* The movie follows one other Hollywood convention: to signal working class status, a character must speak with a New York working-class accent. It matters not whether the film is set in Pittsburgh, Chicago, or San Francisco. Working-class characters have to speak as though it’s Brooklyn.
** The two middle-class men in the film are not evil but are seriously flawed, principally because of the way they act on their libidinal impulses.
James Baldwin (dredged from the SocioBlog archives)
August 3, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Reading that yesterday, August 2, was the birthday of James Baldwin, sent me back to a post I did six years ago. The point I was trying to make in that post was that Baldwin was a better sociologist than he was a novelist. Baldwin, Black and gay, had left the US for Europe in 1948, returning periodically to the US. I excerpted a quote from Baldwin commenting on the differences in social structure and mobility between Europe and the US and how these affect the task of a novelist.
I added that where Baldwin uses the word writer, we could easily substitute sociologist.
And here is my concluding sentence in that blog post of May 2007:
Posted by Jay Livingston
Reading that yesterday, August 2, was the birthday of James Baldwin, sent me back to a post I did six years ago. The point I was trying to make in that post was that Baldwin was a better sociologist than he was a novelist. Baldwin, Black and gay, had left the US for Europe in 1948, returning periodically to the US. I excerpted a quote from Baldwin commenting on the differences in social structure and mobility between Europe and the US and how these affect the task of a novelist.
I added that where Baldwin uses the word writer, we could easily substitute sociologist.
American writers do not have a fixed society to describe. The only society they know is one in which nothing is fixed and in which the individual must fight for his identity. . .That last paragraph sounds like it might have been written by C. Wright Mills.
The time has come, God knows, for us to examine ourselves, but we can only do this if we are willing to free ourselves of the myth of America and try to find out what is really happening here.
Every society is really governed by hidden laws, by unspoken but profound assumptions on the part of the people, and ours is no exception. It is up to the American writer to find out what these laws and assumptions are.
And here is my concluding sentence in that blog post of May 2007:
Being an outsider, doubly so, does not guarantee that you’ll be a great novelist [or sociologist], but it does make you aware of the “laws and assumptions” that others take for granted and often do not notice.
Kicking Ass (aka Stop and Frisk) – Deterrence or Labeling?
August 2, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
Critics of stop-and-frisk claim that the policy, when used on a large scale, is counter-productive. Being stopped and frisked is not a pleasant experience, and the vast majority of people searched are not carrying illegal weapons or drugs.* To them, it just looks as though the police are “throwing their weight around.”
The critics argue further that these aggressive police tactics reduce the cops’ effectiveness in doing what cops are supposed to do – catch criminals and prevent crime. For that, the police and the city need the help of ordinary people. If the community is largely alienated from the police and the government they represent, people will be less likely to help the police.
The counter argument is that stopping a large number of people in the pool of potential criminals – i.e., young males – will reduce crime not only among the tiny fraction that are arrested but among the others as well. Police weight-throwing will act as a general deterrent. As the cop says (the one approvingly quoted by Wilson and Kelling, in their classic “Broken Windows” essay), “We kick ass.”
Does kicking ass deter, or does it alienate? It would be nice to have evidence rather than assertions. A recent study by Stephanie Wiley and Finn-Age Esbensen speaks to this very question. It tracked children and teens in seven cities, interviewing them at three intervals ranging from six months to a year.
The study lends support to wishy-washy, liberal criminological ideas like labeling and “neutralization” (if you took the basic crim course, you recognized this old friend in the above paragraph). This does not mean that deterrence doesn’t work. It just means that stopping kids on a massive scale is not an effective deterrent.
The article itself in Crime and Delinquency is here, gated for $25. The summary is free at Research Digest
--------------------
*Of the 533,00 police stops in New York last year, 729 turned up firearms. Whether a hit ratio of 0.14% is high or low is of course a judgment call. (The police also scored 4,700 knives – lucky for me and the Swiss army that I wasn’t stopped. Including those raises the batting average to 1 in 100.)
Posted by Jay Livingston
Critics of stop-and-frisk claim that the policy, when used on a large scale, is counter-productive. Being stopped and frisked is not a pleasant experience, and the vast majority of people searched are not carrying illegal weapons or drugs.* To them, it just looks as though the police are “throwing their weight around.”
The critics argue further that these aggressive police tactics reduce the cops’ effectiveness in doing what cops are supposed to do – catch criminals and prevent crime. For that, the police and the city need the help of ordinary people. If the community is largely alienated from the police and the government they represent, people will be less likely to help the police.
The counter argument is that stopping a large number of people in the pool of potential criminals – i.e., young males – will reduce crime not only among the tiny fraction that are arrested but among the others as well. Police weight-throwing will act as a general deterrent. As the cop says (the one approvingly quoted by Wilson and Kelling, in their classic “Broken Windows” essay), “We kick ass.”
Does kicking ass deter, or does it alienate? It would be nice to have evidence rather than assertions. A recent study by Stephanie Wiley and Finn-Age Esbensen speaks to this very question. It tracked children and teens in seven cities, interviewing them at three intervals ranging from six months to a year.
The key finding is that with participants matched for propensity, those who had contact with the police at time two (compared with those who didn’t) said at time three that they’d feel less guilt if they committed various offences from theft to violence; they expressed more agreement with various “neutralisation” scenarios (e.g. it’s OK to lie to keep yourself out of trouble); they were more committed to their deviant peers (e.g. they planned to continue hanging out with friends who’d been arrested); and finally, they said they’d engaged in more offending behaviour, from skipping classes to taking drugs or being violent. This pattern of results differed little whether police contact involved being arrested or merely being stopped. [emphasis added]
The study lends support to wishy-washy, liberal criminological ideas like labeling and “neutralization” (if you took the basic crim course, you recognized this old friend in the above paragraph). This does not mean that deterrence doesn’t work. It just means that stopping kids on a massive scale is not an effective deterrent.
The article itself in Crime and Delinquency is here, gated for $25. The summary is free at Research Digest
--------------------
*Of the 533,00 police stops in New York last year, 729 turned up firearms. Whether a hit ratio of 0.14% is high or low is of course a judgment call. (The police also scored 4,700 knives – lucky for me and the Swiss army that I wasn’t stopped. Including those raises the batting average to 1 in 100.)
G.D.P. - Inclusions and Exclusions
August 1, 2013
Posted by Jay Livingston
What counts as “product” in the Gross Domestic Product?
Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker comment (here) on the new rules for calculating GDP, particularly the change that the money spent to produce “long-lived” entertainments will now be counted as investment. These include TV shows that get syndicated (“Seinfeld” or “Law and Order”) and franchise films (“Star Wars”). Those changes add up. Or as Bernstein and Baker put it
Kennedy was speaking about GNP not GDP. In 1968, GNP** was the most widely used indicator. But Kennedy’s point applies to GDP as well. They are both purely economic, with no evaluative or moral dimension.
The antidote for this non-moral measure came from conservatives – the “values” crowd. In the early 1990s, William Bennett and the Heritage foundation created the “Index of Leading Cultural Indicators,” which did include the strength of our marriages (rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births) as well as things like violent crime and SAT scores. In the next several years, with the national government dominated by Democrats, those indicators generally showed great improvement. So did GDP.
----------------------------
* I cannot find any information on who wrote this speech. I suspect it was Dick Goodwin.
**For more on the differences see Wikipedia.
Posted by Jay Livingston
What counts as “product” in the Gross Domestic Product?
Jared Bernstein and Dean Baker comment (here) on the new rules for calculating GDP, particularly the change that the money spent to produce “long-lived” entertainments will now be counted as investment. These include TV shows that get syndicated (“Seinfeld” or “Law and Order”) and franchise films (“Star Wars”). Those changes add up. Or as Bernstein and Baker put it
the ultimate show about nothing will now add billions to G.D.P.They also note that many entertainments that are widely produced and consumed do not get counted at all in G.D.P. – the time people spend creating and watching YouTube videos, for example (or writing and reading blogs).
What’s really being valued here is entertainment that’s protected by copyright, which in the era of viral videos is actually a declining share of what we watch.Later in their essay, Bernstein and Baker point out the limitations of G.D.P.
perhaps the most arbitrary part of this or any other G.D.P. revision is not the value of what’s put in, but the cost of what’s left out.Costs like degradation to the environment. The value of gas extracted by fracking will be added to the G.D.P. figure. But
there is no subtraction for the polluted groundwater or the greenhouse gas emitted when the gas is burned.Liberals of a certain age reading this will hear echoes of Bobby Kennedy’s 1968 speech,* just three months before he was assassinated.
Gross National Product counts air pollution and cigarette advertising, and ambulances to clear our highways of carnage. . . . It does not include the beauty of our poetry or the strength of our marriages, the intelligence of our public debate or the integrity of our public officials.The entire passage is worth reading or listening to.
Kennedy was speaking about GNP not GDP. In 1968, GNP** was the most widely used indicator. But Kennedy’s point applies to GDP as well. They are both purely economic, with no evaluative or moral dimension.
The antidote for this non-moral measure came from conservatives – the “values” crowd. In the early 1990s, William Bennett and the Heritage foundation created the “Index of Leading Cultural Indicators,” which did include the strength of our marriages (rates of divorce and out-of-wedlock births) as well as things like violent crime and SAT scores. In the next several years, with the national government dominated by Democrats, those indicators generally showed great improvement. So did GDP.
----------------------------
* I cannot find any information on who wrote this speech. I suspect it was Dick Goodwin.
**For more on the differences see Wikipedia.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)