Police, Protests, Police Protests, and Legitimacy

January 2, 2015
Posted by Jay Livingston

Steve Anderson, the police chief of Nashville deserves some kind of an award.

The city of Nashville had protests about the shootings in Ferguson and elsewhere. The police department respected the rights of the demonstrators. The department even blocked of part of the Interstate for them and provided them with hot chocolate. No violence or destruction of property resulted.

Not everyone in Nashville was happy with the policy. You really have to read the letter he wrote explaining his policy to a disgruntled citizen.  Actually, he explains a lot more. The Nashville.gov page (here) starts with Chief Anderson’s message to his police officers (nice, but not required reading), followed by the citizen’s letter (very civil in tone). (MNDP is probably Metropolitan Nashville Police Department, THP Tennessee Highway Patrol).

The Chief’s answer is a gem. Matching the civility of the citizen, he nevertheless points out the empirical and logical flaws. He writes in plain English, slightly formal but with no academic terms. Still, I would guess that he has some background in political theory, cognitive psychology, and sociology.

I did not find much that seemed directly relevant to the recent police actions and inactions here in New York. But there is this: Anderson starts by quoting the citizen.

“I have a son who I have raised to respect police officers and other authority figures, but if he comes to me today and asks "Why are the police allowing this?" I wouldn't have a good answer.” [The Chief responds:] It is somewhat perplexing when children are injected into the conversation as an attempt to bolster a position or as an attempt to thwart the position of another.  While this is not the type of conversation I ordinarily engage in, here are some thoughts you may find useful as you talk with your son. First, it is laudable that you are teaching your son respect for the police and other authority figures.  However, a better lesson might be that it is the government the police serve that should be respected.  The police are merely a representative of a government formed by the people for the people—for all people.  Being respectful of the government would mean being respectful of all persons, no matter what their views.

You have to admire the Chief for nailing the citizen’s rhetorical strategy (“I have a son . . .”).  More important is the chief’s understanding of the relation between the police and the government.  Adding in the NYC conflict,I would go further. The police have a unique power – the general right to use force and violence. But that power is legitimate only if the police serve the government – a duly and democratically elected government. If the police use that power to oppose the government, to engage in partisan politics, to give vent to their petulance, or to further their self-interest (the police union is still in negotiations with the city over their contract), they risk losing their legitimacy. 

It would also be interesting to see how the opinioneers on the right and the left are framing these issues. As Peter Moskos* (here) and perhaps others have pointed out, it’s complicated. The tangle of ideology includes strands labeled Government, Police, Race, Unions, and now Crime and Broken Windows. But perhaps the underlying or ultimate issue, one not explicitly spoken of, is legitimacy.

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HT: Peter is also my source for the Nashville letters.

Horton Hears a Whom?

December 31, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

In discussions of  language and grammar the word correct should usually be in quotes.  Either that or it should be amended to “currently correct.” That goes for pronunciation and spelling too. The trouble is that language prescriptivists seem to think that what is currently correct has always been so and always will be. They’re wrong.

NPR recently asked listeners for their language gripes – “the most misused word or phrase.” Topping the list was “I and “me.”  (The full list is here.)

Strictly speaking, “the gift is for you and I” is wrong. We have objective pronouns (me) and subjective pronouns (I). Putting a couple of words between the preposition (for) and the pronoun doesn’t change that. If you wouldn’t say, “The gift is for I,” then don’t say, “The gift is for you and I.”*

Strictly speaking, it should be “between you and me.”  But we don’t speak strictly. Language changes. Yesterday’s solecism becomes today’s standard usage. I don’t like “between you and I,” but wishing people would stop using it is like wishing they’d stop texting. (Need I point out that text as a verb did not exist until very, very recently?)

At #9 on the prescriptivists list is

Saying someone “graduated college” instead of “graduated from college.”

They don’t have too much to worry about. Their preferred form is ten times more common, at least in books if not in speech.

But not too long ago, “he graduated from college” was itself a grammatical error. NPR, in the very next sentence, says,

A college graduates a student, not the other way around. The “from” makes a big difference.

But while NPR sees why this makes “he graduated college” incorrect, it fails to note that by this same logic, “he graduated from college” is also wrong.  If it’s the college that graduates the students, we should say “he was graduated from college.” And in fact, we did say it that way.

Imagine a newspaper in 1900 asking the NPR “most misused word or phrase” question. High on the readers’ list of grammar gripes: “Even our best educated are now saying, ‘I graduated from Harvard,’rather than the correct, ‘I was graduated from Harvard.’”

“Was graduated from” was never the most popular way of saying it, but it held its own up until about 1950. Since then “I graduated from” became the clear winner and is now, at least among the NPR complainers, the “correct” form.

Coming in at #5 on the list is

Ongoing confusion over “who” vs. “whom.”

The confusion is easily cleared up: get rid of whom. Reserve it for a few special occasions.  In fact, that’s what’s been happening.

The graph from Google Ngrams shows the frequency in books, i.e. formal writing. The misuse of whom can escape copy editors even at the Times :

The defenders of the interrogation program say little about two men whom are portrayed especially harshly by the Senate report

Surely whom is fading even faster in everyday speech. I’m surprised that NPR could find even a few dozen people who mourn its passing. I am certainly not among them. (Or should I say that I am not amongst them?)

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* The root of the “I/me” problem is that English lacks a disjunctive pronoun. The French, thanks to  moi, toi, etc., never make these mistakes.

Freaks and Civilization

December 30, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Whatever happened to freaks?

I saw the musical “Sideshow” on Saturday. It’s based on the story of the Hilton sisters, Violet and Daisy, conjoined twins.  When the musical opens, they are in Texas with a traveling sideshow of freaks – the bearded lady, the dog boy, the half-man/half-woman, a midget couple, a three-legged man, and others. The storyline of the show traces the girls’ escape from the exploitative sideshow operator, who in effect owns them, and their relation with two men who teach them to sing and dance and who eventually develop their them into vaudeville stars of the 1920s.

Vaudeville is long gone, and so is the freak show.  We still have the staples of vaudeville – singers and dancers and comedians.  And you can still find, in clubs or circuses or late night TV, magicians and ventriloquists, jugglers and fire-eaters, contortionists and animal acts. But no freaks. 

I don’t mean the performers – the glass eater, the sword swallower, the human pin cushion, the geek. [Language note: Until very recently, the term geek referred to the sideshow guy who bit the heads off live chickens, and I am curious as to how geek came to mean something much less specific and much less deviant. The word freak too lost its bite starting in the 1960s with speed-freaks and acid-freaks. As unconventionality became more stylish, freak might mean nothing more than enthusiast. 

(Frequency of freak in books, as per Google nGrams.)

The term allowed an utterly ordinary person the fantasy of metamorphosis into someone offbeat and interesting.  Freakonomics – need I say more? The characters on the 2000s TV series “Freaks and Geeks” were neither, at least not according to the definitions of only a few decades earlier. They would not have qualified for the sideshow. On the other hand, many people walk around in the conventional world today so extensively tattooed that they would have easily been sideshow material a century ago.]

The performers who had developed unusual skills were examples of what we sociologists might call “achieved” deviance. The freaks I wonder about are those who one of the characters in “Sideshow” calls “nature’s mistakes.”  They seem to have disappeared from sight. My friends who grew up in New York used to go to Hubert’s Dime Museum on 42nd St., a sideshow collection of freaks and acts that ran through the mid-1960s.  The closest that the today’s Disneyfied Times Square comes is Madame Tussaud’s Wax Museum is just a few doors down the street. But Hubert’s and the like have not reopened anywhere. No doubt there are places on the Internet showing all sorts of physical anomalies, but I the audience for these sites is probably smaller and more secretive than was the freak show audience.

The freak show has fallen victim to a normative shift that has taken two forms. First, freaks are less abnormal.  We have become more accepting of people who are different. They are no longer the objects of fascination and horror that they once were. Our normative circle has expanded, spreading now to include many of the “differently abled” who might previously have been excluded. As the boundary has broadened, even those who are really different are no longer so distant. Consequently, they are not so deviant.  We have defined their deviance down. 

Second, as norms have become more accepting of physical difference, they have also become less tolerant of those who haven’t gotten the message, the unenlightened rabble who would belittle, tease, laugh, or gawk. We must teach them restraint and kindness.  It’s not nice to point and stare and others’ deformity.

This sounds a bit like Norbert Elias’s Civilizing Process, which traces how Europeans came to throw the heavy cloak of manners over bodily functions, violence, dining, and speech.  Elias was writing about a transition that began with the medieval aristocracy and filtered through bourgeoisie of later centuries. By the time book was published (the mid-20th century), the civilizing process seemed like something that had reached its peak in the 19th century.  The strictures of Victorian norms were loosening. We were less uptight about bodies, and that was groovy. 

Maybe, but apparently the civilizing beat goes on. If there is a message to “Sideshow,” it is that the freak show – exploiting its cast while egging on its audience, daring them to stare – was a shameful spectacle, one that we like to think we have relegated to the bin of history. 

Uncertainty and Foreboding. Are Things Really Falling Apart?

December 26, 2014
Posted by Jay Livingston

Don’t be fooled by the stories in the headlines or on the evening news, says Steven Pinker in an article for Slate (here).  Those stories are about death and devastation, and they reinforce a popular but incorrect picture of a world in chaos.

I think Robert McNamara was the first government official to use the quote from Yeats that has now become a cliche in this regard:

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
    Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,*

Or as Times columnist Roger Cohen said just two months ago (here),

Many people I talk to . . . have never previously felt so uneasy about the state of the world. . . . The search is on for someone to dispel foreboding and embody, again, the hope of the world.

A few weeks later, in his year-end summary (in verse, no less), Cohen repeated the same idea: “The world has never seemed more fragile.”

Never? Nonsense, says Pinker. As a nation and as a world, we’ve never had it so good.  And unlike the journalists reviewing their headlines and ledes, Pinker backs up his never-better diagnosis with data from the last quarter-century.  Murder, rape, war, mass killing, genocide, dictatorships – all down. Democracy – up. 

As the graphs show, things look pretty good. So why the despair? Pinker, a cognitive scientist, has basically one answer: the availability heuristic:

As long as violence has not vanished from the world, there will always be enough incidents to fill the evening news. And since the human mind estimates probability by the ease with which it can recall examples, newsreaders will always perceive that they live in dangerous times. All the more so when billions of smartphones turn a fifth of the world’s population into crime reporters and war correspondents.

True, but there’s something else, and I’m surprised that Pinker misses it: we are uneasy about the world today because of its uncertainty.  It seems worse than anything that’s gone before because we know how those things in the past turned out. 

The trouble with all the current problems that we can so easily think of – ISIS, climate change, global recession, and the rest – is not just that they’re bad but that they might get worse, and in ways that we can only imagine. (Of course we can only imagine them. They haven’t happened yet.) Hence, Cohen’s “foreboding” and “uneasy” feelings. 

Bad stuff happened in the past – recessions and crime and wars and global threats. But we survived them all, those of us who are still alive. Some things turned out terribly (Rwanda, Cambodia, Chernobyl, etc.), but they are over now, so we need not feel any sense of foreboding. In most cases, we don’t even feel much afterboding.  Even when the underlying problem remains, if we live with it long enough, it becomes familiar. So as long as it doesn’t get much worse, we learn to live with it.

By definition, what is familiar cannot be uncertain, so it causes less anxiety.  Back in the high-crime years of the 1960s and 70s, surveys found that people felt safer in their own neighborhoods than in unfamiliar neighborhoods – even when their own neighborhoods had a much higher crime rate. I remember phoning a guy for directions to his party in some NYC neighborhood I didn’t know. “Is it safe?” I asked. “Of course it’s safe,” he said indignantly.  When people asked the same question about my neighborhood, I’d give the same answer. “Of course, it’s safe.” I lived across from Needle Park, and I would sometimes see junkies on the nod, standing in stupor on the sidewalk. There were murders in Riverside Park two blocks away. But I had not been personally victimized, and the junkies became part of the taken-for-granted landscape.

My cognitions were adapting locally, but globally we do the same thing. The 1964 movie “Dr. Strangelove” is about a nuclear confrontation between the US and the Russia. People worried about that back then.  Today, both those countries still have more than enough nuclear warheads to blow up the world, and there have been some Strangelovian close calls. But the uneasiness, fear, and uncertainty of the 1960s have passed. Or as the full title of the movie says, “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb.” It’s not that we love the bomb, but we have stopped worrying. 

When Roger Cohen and other handwringers look back at 2014 from the distance of a decade or probably less, they won’t see it with unease. Today’s problems won’t seem so threatening. They will instead be something that we lived through. And maybe, just maybe, they will also look at the data on long-term trends.

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* I recall some journalist reporting that he overheard McNamara use this quote during a dinner party conversation. McNamara, Secretary of Defense for both JFK and LBJ, was one of the most important among the folks who brought us Vietnam. So I doubt that his quoting of Yeats extended to the next line of the poem, the one about “The blood-dimmed tide.”  My memory of this whole thing could be faulty. I’ve searched using Google and the Times index but can find no reference to it.