Men’s Work, Men’s Votes

January 7, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

The sexual dimporphism in Disney films that Philip Cohen keeps pointing out (here, for example) is nothing compared to gender differences in the recent presidential election. Trump was the man’s candidate, as the 538’s pre-election maps clearly showed.

(Click on an image for a larger view.)

Maps based on the actual vote would, I suspect, be just as different.

But why? At Sociological Images, Alisha Kirchoff (here) suggests that Trump took his inspiration from Putin. Trump could not imitate Putin stunt for stunt – let’s try not to imagine a shirtless Trump on horseback, and the hair thing pretty much precludes emerging from the seas in scuba gear – but he projected a liking for toughness, even violence, and a generally combative view of the world.

His performances of masculinity – his so-called “locker room talk,” discussion of genitalia size, and conduct towards pageant contestants — could go from publicity stunt to public support to actual policy measures. His bombastic language about defeating ISIS and the need for more American “strength” at home and abroad, for example, could easily translate into foreign policy.

No doubt Trump’s attitudes and actions towards women were odious. Some people saw them as profoundly anti-woman. But even for those who saw them as normal masculinity expressed more frankly, this part of the Trump persona was probably not sufficient reason to vote for Trump.

True, his views of foreign policy evoked the image of a Mark Burnett game show, a world of winners and losers where one side beats the other by being stronger, more clever, and perhaps more ruthless.  But foreign policy is rarely decisive in elections.

The Trump persona may have had some appeal.  Men might have envied or identified with the wealth winner, the man who says what he thinks uninhibited by norms of decency, the guy who gets gorgeous girls. Besides, he was going to crush the forces of political correctness that were repressing men in the same way that he would crush foreign countries that did not fully do what we tell them to.

But the Trump promise was not just that he would be men’s champion, doing what they could not themselves do. More important was the promise that with Trump in office they could restore their masculine identity through the most important element of that identity – manly work.The Trump campaign was a Viagra ad transposed to the labor market.

“I ain’t gonna be a nurse; I don’t have the tolerance for people. I don’t want it to sound bad, but I’ve always seen a woman in the position of a nurse or some kind of health care worker. I see it as more of a woman’s touch.” Health aides earn a median wage of $10.50 an hour. Mr. Dawson used to earn $18 an hour making railroad traction motors. “I was a welder — that’s all I know how to do.”

That’s from a recent New York Times article (here) about the disappearance of traditionally male jobs. (Note the welder’s nod to politically correct views about gender: “I don’t want it to sound bad, but . . .”). The projections from the Bureau of Labor Statistics show that the trend will continue. Of the fifteen jobs expected to have the greatest growth in coming years, all but five currently employ more women than men.

Trump is telling the Mr. Dawsons of America to ignore the data and even to ignore the evidence of their own experience. He is saying in effect, “I, Donald Trump, will bring manly jobs back to America.” It’s not “I will be manly for you.” It’s “I will change the economic world so that you can be a man again.” Unfortunately, it’s very unlikely that Trump can restore the world of thirty years ago.

Those manufacturing jobs are not coming back. Saving 800 jobs at a Carrier plant is a symbolic gesture, and while symbols are important and may temporarily change perceptions of reality, they do not change the reality itself.

It’s as though on the subject of climate change Trump were saying, “Ignore what the scientists say; ignore the evidence from you own experience – the heat waves, the droughts. I Donald Trump will bring back the temperatures of thirty years ago.” And then, in a symbolic gesture to prove his point, he holds aloft a snowball.

Some of My Best Friends

January 4, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

When I was a child, I remember, I heard my parents say dismissively of someone, probably a politician, “Yeah, some of his best friends are Jewish.” I didn’t understand. How could my parents resent someone who had Jewish friends and said so publicly? When I was a bit older, I understood – anti-Semitism is not merely a matter of personal friendships or public sentiments.

What reminded me of this incident was today’s Washington Post story on the letter signed by over 1100 law professors opposing the nomination of Jeff Sessions to be Attorney General. The Post leans toward framing the issue as one of personal bigotry. It excerpts this sentence from the letter:  “Nothing in Senator Sessions’s public life since 1986 has convinced us that he is a different man than the 39-year-old attorney who was deemed too racially insensitive to be a federal district court judge.”

The opposing statement comes from William Smith, an African American who has been Sessions’s chief counsel. “In the last 30 years, they probably haven’t spent 10 hours with him. I spent 10 years working with him . . . as his top legal adviser. There are no statements that he made that are inappropriate.”

Is Jeff Sessions a racist? Is he, as the law profs say, “racially insensitive”? These questions are irrelevant, barring a history of blatantly racist statements or membership in the Klan. But also irrelevant is the question of whether some of his best friends or advisors are Black.

That “1986” in the law professors’ letter refers to a case Sessions, as US Attorney, brought against three African American civil rights leaders who helped elderly Blacks – some housebound, some illiterate – complete their ballots. The case was so flimsy that the judge dismissed more than half the charges for lack of evidence. On the charges that did go forward, the jury quickly found the defendants not guilty.

Was Sessions’s racist? Well, if you bring trumped-up charges against three Black people – charges that carry sentences of 100 years – it’s a pretty good guess that you want to scare everyone, maybe especially other Black people, from doing what those people were doing. In this case, what they were doing was helping more Black people to vote. But Sessions’s motives need not have been racist. I suspect they were more political. It wasn’t that the voters being helped were Black; it’s that they were voting for Democrats.

In the US, especially the South, there is such an overlap of race, lack of education, poverty, and political party that laws and legal actions that will suppress Democratic votes need not appear explicitly racist. The new laws in North Carolina and elsewhere that make it harder for people to vote are race neutral in their language. But so were literacy tests and the poll tax. (See my earlier post and joke here.). In prosecuting the Black-vote workers, Sessions was merely invoking the law in its majestic equality.*

Does Sessions have Black friends and advisors? Has he spoken nicely about civil rights? Who cares? The more relevant questions are about the cases he brought when he was a US Attorney. In what ways did these advance the cause of civil rights and racial equality?  In what ways did they stall that advance? (For more on this question see this op-ed from three DoJ civil rights lawyers.)

It’s like the question of whether Steve Bannon – the man Trump has chosen as his chief strategist –  is an anti-Semite. His defenders, of course, say no and point out that he has worked for Jews and hired Jews to work for him. But under his leadership, Breitbart became, in his own words, “a platform for the alt-right,” a category that includes people who really are blatantly anti-Semitic. But hey, some of his best friends are Jewish.

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* “The law, in its majestic equality, forbids both the rich and the poor from sleeping under bridges” — Anatole France.

“La La Land” – Hooray for Hollywood

December 29, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

The second movie I ever blogged about, nearly ten years ago (here), was “Words and Music,” a forgettable romantic comedy with several original songs and two big stars – Hugh Grant and Drew Barrymore. What I saw was a movie that was less about romance and more about career success.  In fact, I wondered if maybe all American movies were about success.* 

Yesterday, I saw “La La Land” and had the same reaction. The trailer, intentionally or not, makes this same point. It starts with the two stars – Emma Stone (Mia) and Ryan Gosling (Sebastian) – being hit with abrupt career setbacks. Mia is rejected at an audition after she speaks one line. Sebastian is fired from his job playing piano in a restaurant because he plays one song of his own in addition to the simplistic Christmas song arrangements on the owner’s playlist.

In that earlier post, I said, “In a comedy about the romantic relationship, the plot throws all sorts of conflicts and obstacles at the couple — rivals, misunderstandings, deceptions, diversions, etc. — obstacles which they eventually overcome.” That’s not where “La La Land” goes.

In “La La Land,” what most concerns the lovers is not their relationship; it’s the other person’s career. Sebastian pushes Mia to pursue her passion to write and star in her own autobiographical play. Mia encourages Sebastian to pursue his passion – creating his own club as a home for mainstream jazz. In their most passionate scene, Mia tries to persuade him to be true to his dream rather than take a lucrative deal to go on the road with a pop-funk group headed by John Legend. Given these well-worn ideas, the dialogue is predictably predictable.

Fortunately, that’s not what the movie is really about. It’s not primarily concerned with telling you about Mia and Sebastian’s careers, or about their relationship. What “La La Land” wants to tell you about is movies – Hollywood musicals of the classical era. “La La Land” is full of the cinematic cliches (maybe tropes is the better term) of that period, and there are deliberate allusions to specific films. That’s what makes “La La Land” so enjoyable. It’s like pulling a school yearbook off the shelf and paging through it, recognizing old friends you haven’t seen in a long while and remembering what they were like. From the  opening scene – a freeway traffic jam that becomes a huge production number – you’re hooked. Sebastian and Mia are not real people; they’re movie characters. So if their motives and feelings are familiar cliches, that’s part of the game.

It’s not just Hollywood musicals that inspire the film. The Jacques Demy musicals of the 1960s – “Les Parapluies de Cherbourg” and “Les Demoiselles de Rochefort” with their bright colors – also get a large wave of the hand. At least one of the songs seemed like a deliberate attempt to emulate Michel Legrand. And the plot at the end strongly resembles that of “Umbrellas of Cherbourg,” though with an added Hollywood-ending variation that may be the best thing in the film.

The wrong note, to my ear, was Sebastian’s piano playing. Big props to Gosling for learning to play the piano – that’s really him playing, they never used a piano double – but when he plays solo, it does not sound at all jazzy. He has a photo of Bill Evans that appears twice for a split second, but there’s no Evans in his sound, nor is there a hint of bebop-tradition pianists from Bud Powell on. The writer-director of the film, Damien Chazelle, has an obvious affinity for jazz. His previous film “Whiplash” centered on a young man trying to become a jazz drummer, and the film had several moments of solid big band jazz. (For more on “Whiplash,” see this post from four years ago.) The combo scenes in “La La Land” do sound like real jazz, and it looked to me as though they used real musicians, not actors pretending to play to the pre-recorded music we hear.

But to repeat, the movie is not about playing jazz or opening a club; it’s not about auditioning and acting and writing a play; and it’s not about love. It’s about exactly what the title says – Hollywood.

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* The first movie discussed in this blog (here) was clearly a critique of the American ideology of success – “Little Miss Sunshine.” It too, like “La La Land,” seemed like an homage to a movie of the 1940s – “The Grapes of Wrath.”

You’re Doin’ Fine, Oklahoma

December 27, 2016
Posted by Jay Livingston

How should a liberal think about Oklahoma? It’s just about the most politically conservative state in the Union. Oklahomans voted nearly 2-1 for Trump. Hillary got only 29% of the vote. Oklahoma was just as conservative a half-century ago. They don’t like liberals now, and they didn’t like them back then. In 1968, Hubert Humphrey got 32% to Nixon’s  48%. And 20% of the vote went to George Wallace, an avowed racist. Only five years earlier, Wallace had famously declared, “segregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever.”

Times change. The arc of history, at least American history of the last 50 years, bends towards those liberal policies once hated by conservatives. Even in Oklahoma, nobody is campaigning to bring back Jim Crow. Other attitudes too look a lot like what Sooners opposed a half-century ago.

Claude Fischer makes this point at his excellent Made in America blog (here) by offering a retrospective on an important conservative Oklahoma document of 1969 – “Okie From Muskogee,” the Country-Western hit (with some crossover popularity) by Merle Haggard. It was a culture-war statement, defending traditional ways and attacking the 1960s urban, college-educated liberals, the counterparts of the people who today are the objects of so much resentment among Trump supporters. They resented us then, and they resent us now. But the ideas they resented us for back then they have now come to agree with. 

We don’t smoke marijuana in Muskogee We don’t take our trips on LSD We don’t burn our draft cards down on Main Street We like livin’ right, and bein’ free. We don’t make a party out of lovin’ We like holdin’ hands and pitchin’ woo We don’t let our hair grow long and shaggy Like the hippies out in San Francisco do

Times change. Hairstyles change – “long and shaggy” is now country.

Left: Chris Stapleton with his armful of CMA awards.
Right: Georgia Line, CMA Vocal Duo of the Year, who will
perform in North Carolina despite the LBGT laws.
(Click on the image for a larger view.)

Drugstyles change too. Even in Oklahoma, marijuana is now legal for some medical purposes. Non-medical weed and other illegal drugs, notably oxycontin and opioids, have achieved at least a niche market of country users. As Fischer notes, current C/W hits refer openly to getting stoned and rolling joints.

As for old-timey romance (“holdin’ hands and pitchin’ woo”), the percent of rural and small-town residents who say that premarital sex is “not wrong at all” has doubled since the 1970s and is now the majority opinion.

Perhaps as a consequence of this relatively recent change in attitudes, rates of teen birth, including births to the unwed, are higher among country folk than among city folk. I guess with this premarital sex thing it takes a while to figure out how to do it right.

Maybe in fifty years, Sooners will look back on Trump the way they now might see George Wallace or Nixon and the Vietnam war, which they once supported.  Merle Haggard himself had a change of heart. “I’ve learned the truth since I wrote that song,” he said. He supported Obama, and he supported Hillary.

Meanwhile, I know that I am supposed to realize that the good people of Oklahoma are in fact good people and that we should not deplore their ideas and political choices. The recent books by Arlie Hochschild and Kathy Cramer paint a sympathetic and understanding picture of Trump supporters in Wisconsin and Louisiana, respectively.

A similar book could probably have been written about Oklahomans – now or in 1969 – and liberal readers might have regretted their lack of empathy for the heartland. But they would also have found it hard to separate the political views from the people who held them. Would such a book back then have led liberals to think that these Oklahomans who supported a very wrong war and who opposed civil rights were actually fine people?

I keep thinking of what an old friend, an Oklahoma native, said many years ago. He had grown up in Tulsa and still spoke with that Southwest twang. But he had left the Southwest and wound up going to universities in the great cities of the North (New York, Chicago). He never looked back. He became an educated, urban liberal. One day, there was a front-page story about a natural disaster in Oklahoma, a tornado that had killed people and destroyed homes. I noted that he seemed unconcerned, almost hard-hearted, about it. 

“It’s Tornado Alley,” he said. “That’s where the tornadoes come, and those people keep building and rebuilding their houses there.” I imagine he might be saying the same thing about the Oklahoma earthquakes today. If you keep voting for politicians who give the oil and gas companies free rein, don’t complain to me about the earthquakes their fracking causes.
“Still,” I said, “don’t you have some sympathy for their loss?”
“No,” he said.
“Why not?”
“ ’Cause they’re a bunch of fuckin’ Okies.”