Will No One Rid Me of This Sociological Priest?

May 2, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Poor Rev. Conroy. It was the sociology that got him fired.

Since 2011 and up until two weeks ago, he had been the chaplain for the House of Representatives. Then House speaker Paul Ryan fired him.

By most accounts, what triggered Ryan was the prayer Rev. Conroy offered during deliberations on the tax bill.

As legislation on taxes continues to be debated this week and next, may all Members be mindful that the institutions and structures of our great Nation guarantee the opportunities that have allowed some to achieve great success, while others continue to struggle. May their efforts these days guarantee that there are not winners and losers under new tax laws, but benefits balanced and shared by all Americans.

Ryan believes in God. He does not believe in social structure, though in some ways they are similar. They are both very hard to see, visible mostly in their effects, so that non-believers can remain unaware of how they alter and influence the paths we take.

Institutions and structures are at the core of sociological thinking and research. If the gap between rich and poor is much greater in the US than in other wealthy countries, there must be something going on beyond mere individual choices. But Conservatives like Ryan don’t buy that idea. For them, whether a person succeeds or struggles is purely a matter of individual virtue. As Margaret Thatcher famously put it, “There's no such thing as society. There are individual men and women and there are families.”

The tax bill that Ryan was trying to pass would increase the wealth of the wealthy. Or as Donald Trump told his rich friends at Mar-a-Lago when the bill passed, “You all just got a lot richer.” Ryan also planned to use the inevitable deficits from the tax cuts to justify reductions in government aid to the poor and elderly.

It’s pretty obvious that the tax code and food stamps change the structure of economic distribution. But when Rev. Conroy spoke of structures and then went on to suggest that maybe the government should not further comfort the comfortable and afflict the afflicted, well, it got Ryan’s Irish up, and he gave the Jesuit the boot. Those fifty words of Rev. Conroy – the micro-est of microaggressions against conservatives – were apparently too much for Snowflake Ryan to bear.

I wonder if leftists have gotten anyone fired – from a university or anywhere else – for a ten-second sermon preaching the Thatcher gospel of purely individual causation.

Freestylin’

April 27, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

These poems
all very recent —
To me at least, I mean
I hear the influence
of, oh I don’t know,
Robert Creeley,
and perhaps
William Carlos Williams.
The style is infectious.

Little Boats

And all they do is scream ‘death to America, death to America.’
And by the way,
they’re not screaming it so much
anymore.
They were screaming it with him.¹
They don’t scream it with me. We haven’t seen
their little boats
circling our ships in the ocean lately,
because they know if they do circle the ships,
they’re not going to be there very longer.

 Businessman

Let me just tell you that Michael² is in business.
He's really a businessman
at fairly big businesses, I understand. And
I don’t know
his business,
but this doesn’t have to do with me. Michael
is a businessman. He’s got a business.
He also practices law.
I would say probably the big thing is
his business,
and they're looking at something having to do with
his business.
I have nothing to do with
his business.
I can tell you
he’s a good guy.

    I’ll Tell You What               

Well, I better not get into that,
because I may get in trouble.
Maybe I didn’t get her³
so much.
I’ll tell you what.
She has done
I got her a beautiful card. You know, I’m very busy
to be running out looking for presents, okay?
But I got her a beautiful card
and some beautiful flowers.
And she did a fantastic job with France.
I’ll tell you what,
the people of France are just
were spellbound by what happened with their great president,
who just left, Emmanuel,
and he is a wonderful guy
and with a wonderful wife.
they are both terrific people.
And, Brigitte
and we had a fantastic time.

1.  Barack Obama

2.  Michael Cohen

3.  Melania

Bob Dorough (1923 - 2018)

April 25, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Phil Woods was a top jazz man, but his best known solo was as the unnamed sax player on Billy Joel’s “Just the Way You Are.” Bud Shank, another jazz reed man, did the anonymous flute solo on The Mamas and the Papas’s huge hit “California Dreamin.’” But the winner in the “widely heard but uncredited performances by jazz musicians” competition goes to Bob Dorough, who died Monday at age 94. He wrote and sang many of the numbers on Schoolhouse Rock – numbers like 8.

This performance is by jazz singer and pianist Blossom Dearie, but Dorough can be heard on other numbers like 3 and the bluesy 9 as well as “Conjunction Junction,” a title I couldn’t help borrowing for my skeptical post on Twersky and Kahneman’s “conjunction fallacy” (here).

His best-known song in the jazz world is “I’m Hip,” probably because of Dave Frishberg’s lyric, which includes the line, “When it was hip to hep I was hep.” Frishberg himself noted how hip the song was – nearly all the main notes in the melody are not in the underlying chord. (You can hear the songwriters performing it here.)

Another unusual but fine Dorough tune is “Nothing Like You,” with lyrics by Fran Landesman. Bassist Esperanza Spalding sings it here, and prefaces it by saying it’s “really fun and really hard.”

Vulture, as a sort of eulogy, has posted this list  of his best  “Schoolhouse Rock” songs, all more melodically conventional than his jazz tunes.

Earth Day — A Non-Environmental Recollection

April 22, 2018
Posted by Jay Livingston

Today is Julian Koenig’s birthday. He would have been 97. It’s also Earth Day.

Earth Day / Birthday. The rhyme is not a coincidence.

Koenig was an ad-man. The word “creative” gets tossed around pretty loosely in the ad world, but Koenig truly was. When environmentalists were planning their first big national event in 1970, Koenig offered to help. Surely he could come up with something better than the name they already had – “Environmental Teach-in.” The day of the event just happened to be his birthday, and the rhyme was a natural.  As the national director recalls,

He offered a bunch of possible names — Earth Day, Ecology Day, Environment Day, E Day — but he made it quite clear that we would be idiots if we didn’t choose Earth Day.

It worked for them. It worked for him.
   
Our paths — Koenig’s and mine —crossed a few years later, in the early seventies. How that happened is a story I told in brief in this blog years ago (here).    

Then, in 2013, the American Sociological Association gave its Excellence in the Reporting of Social Issues Award to Ira Glass and the staff of “This American Life.”  The awards ceremony was a panel discussion. Ira was there with three producers from the show. One of them was Sarah Koenig, Julian’s daughter. David Newman, one of the sociologists on the panel, said that what he liked best about the show was that he could use it to give his students the larger picture of social issues.

But Ira Glass, when it was his turn to speak, said that what the show thrived on was not issues but people. “Don’t pitch us a story about some issue; you have to have a character – a character who has an interesting story . . . and who comes across on tape.” (Not an exact quote, but that was the idea.)

After the panel ended and people were still milling about, I went up to Sarah Koenig, still sitting on the podium. “I have a character,” I said. “It’s an advertising guy I met when we worked together on this project in Florida. He had retired but he was just getting back into the business.” I looked at her to see if she was catching on. I couldn’t tell.

“We discovered that we both liked the track. But he really liked it. He’d buy the Racing Form every day, even days he didn’t go to the track.” I thought I detected a hint of interest in her expression.

“And he didn’t throw them out,” I continued.  “He had the back issues stacked up in the closets of his house.”

“I think I know this man,” she said smiling.

She said she’d ask her father if he’d remember me. She was sure he would. I was sure he wouldn’t. In any case, I never heard from her. But then, I never pitched any stories, and she got busy with other projects, like “Serial.”