Holiday Entrepreneurs?

April 22, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

A writer for a local newspaper sent me an e-mail asking about the mainstreaming of Cinco de Mayo. She seems to think that it has become an American holiday.

I had no information for her, but I’m curious about how holidays get assimilated into the dominant culture and how they are transformed in the process. Christmas is making its way into Japan, at least the non-religious aspects of the holiday like lights and decorations. Valentine's Day is now big in Turkey.

My first thought was that the acceptance of a holiday depends on its attractiveness to the culture. But on second thought, I began to wonder about the role of “holiday entrepreneurs” (something akin to Becker’s moral entrepreneurs). Who are they? Ethnic leaders, probably. Promoting the holiday Especially in the current climate of concern, fear, or resentment about Mexican immigration, might be politically helpful.

One hundred fifty years ago in this country, the Irish supposedly needed not apply, and even in the 1880s they were the target of the Lou Dobbs types of the time campaigning against “rum, Romanism, and rebellion.” (Maybe there were Harvard scholars, the counterparts of Samuel P. Huntington, warning that the growing Irish presence was undermining the true and good American culture and identity.) Today there are St. Patrick’s Day parades in most US cities, and everyone wears green. But the assimilation of the Irish and the parade didn’t “just happen.” It took work, it took entrepreneurship.

Who knows, maybe the folks at Hallmark are already at work on a line of cards.

I know I’m just a gringo
In Shaker Heights, Ohio
But best wishes, mi amigo,
For a great Cinco de Mayo

Flatbush?

April 19, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Brooklyn. The name evokes images of working-class New York. When Hollywood wants a no-nonsense, urban guy, they give us a cab driver with a “Brooklyn accent.” (Oddly, this is true even of movies set in Chicago or Los Angeles.) Brooklyn is the Dodgers, dem Bums.

Why then are people naming their daughters Brooklyn?

In Utah of all places, it has become one of the top ten names for girls, passing Ashley and Alyssa, and separated from Madison by only 17 little Utahennes. Nationwide Brooklyn was last seen in 67th place. That’s far behind Emily, of course, but until 1990 Brooklyn wasn’t even in the top 1000.

I have no explanation. Did some celebrities name their kid Brooklyn while I was out of the room? Well, yes, it turns out – a footballer and a Spice Girl. But that was in 1999, when the name had already climbed into the top 200.

Was Brooklyn a character in a movie? (The best explanation for the Madison boom is Splash. The movie came out in 1984; the name started taking off in the early 90s, when girls who had seen it as teenagers started having babies.)

There certainly seems to be something geographic going on. The places where Brooklyn has become popular – states like Utah and Idaho – are far from New York. As for parents in Canarsie, or Flatbush, or even within a few hours drive of the real Brooklyn, naming their kid Brooklyn, well, as the sign says . . . .

Science and Power

April 17, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

Statistician Miron Straf on the difference between statisticians who work in academia and those who work in Washington for the government.

Academic statisticians convince others of their conclusions by proof. Government statisticians convince others by power. That is one reason meetings are so different to them. Academic statisticians don’t need meetings to develop proofs. . . . Government statisticians need meetings so they can control the agenda or write up the report of conclusions.

“Mr. Statistician Schleps to Washington,” Chance, vol. 20, no. 4, 2007 ( no online version, at least none that I could find)

Government scientists relying on power rather than evidence – I wonder if this tendency holds not just in the social sciences but even in the hard sciences. And I wonder if it has become even more true during the Bush years. I suspect, of course, that the answer to both questions is Yes.

Hat tip to my brother Skip for sending me this article.

Who You Callin' Sophisticated?

April 15, 2008
Posted by Jay Livingston

“We are all ashamed,” he said, about the president’s lack of interest in culture . . . . “Look, we need a president who is cultivated.”

Obviously, the speaker is not American. He’s French, a writer, and he wistfully “recalled the sophistication of earlier presidents.” (The story is here in today’s New York Times.)

Sophistication doesn’t play well in American politics and culture. Consider Obama’s recent gaffe in saying that some Pennsylvanians were “bitter.” The attacks by critics who most wanted to score points claimed not that Obama was incorrect (which he may have been) but that he was “elitist.”

Here, being sophisticated, cultured, or intellectual translates to negative qualities – snobbishness and phoniness. “Puttin’ on airs,” as a distant generation might have said. In America we have to think that all tastes are equal, that none is superior to another. Since everything is equal, the person who pretends otherwise, the person who prefers Chateau Margaux to Bud Light, is being a phony and doing so only for purposes of making himself seem superior. And that’s just un-American.

Here in the land where more is better, it’s O.K. to have more money, a lot more money. It’s O.K. to have bigger and more expensive stuff (cars, houses), a lot bigger, a lot more expensive. It’s even O.K. to have a lot more power. But it’s not O.K. to suggest that what you have might be inherently better, at least not if that implies sophistication. If you argue that Timbaland is better than Celine Dion, that’s cool. But if you prefer Brahms to Celine Dion, you’re a pretentious snob, an elitist.

I was reminded of this anti-elitism last week in class when I asked students to bring in artifacts of American culture for show and tell. One girl brought the DVD of “The Nanny Diaries.” She clicked on the scene where we see Annie (the nanny) in the kitchen struggling to prepare the complicated French recipe that her haughty employer has demanded. It’s the Cinderella scenario basically, but in the US version what makes the wicked stepmother figure really wicked is that she affects sophisticated tastes.

Annie also has to take care of the woman’s son, an insufferable brat (what else could he be with a mother who has such pretentious tastes?). Yet, in the span of this three-minute scene, Annie manages to transform the brat into a good , plucky American kid. How? She has him eat peanut butter. None of this fancy French food, and no plate or bread either – just peanut butter directly out of the jar. The moral is clear (though it’s spelled out again later in the film in case you didn’t get it): simple American kid-food, good; sophisticated French adult-food, bad.

Of course, things change – cultures are not monolithic, nor are they static – and there may some gradual movement towards convergence on both sides of the Atlantic. In France, they elected Sarko l’Americain, President Bling-Bling, who, shortly after taking office, married Carla Bruni, a pop singer with a relaxed-fit relationship to pitch. More recently, he visited the Vatican in company with “an exceptionally crude French stand-up comic.” For our part in the US, we now have Starbuck’s just about everywhere selling expensive coffees with names that we once might have rejected as too foreign sounding. “Latte” is becoming as American as pizza.