The Glee of Fielding

May 18, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Wednesday night I had just finished The Art of Fielding.  I closed the book, thought about it for a few moments, and then for some reason I decided to watch “Glee.”  I’ve seen the show only a few times; when I do watch, it’s to see and hear which songs are being covered.  

In one of the first posts in this blog, I watched “Friday Night Lights” and wondered why so many American fictions culminate in some kind of contest or competition that magically resolves or dissolves all problems.  Internal personal troubles, moral dilemmas, social problems, interpersonal conflicts, romantic uncertainties – it all comes down to the big game. And once that’s over, win or lose, everything falls into place. 

Fielding and “Glee” both draw on this theme, though Fielding, a 500-page novel, has much more going on than does a 44-minute TV episode.  They also  trot out the same cliche of the underdog.   McKinley is always going up against a much more affluent, successful, and perhaps talented glee club that looks down their noses at our heroes.  In the championship game in Fielding, the struggling college baseball team meet the well-heeled Amherst, who arrive complete with mean-girl cheerleaders.

“Glee” and Fielding reprise another theme common in American fictions.  It combines “It’s Your Decision”  with “Taking One for the Team.”  A character’s conflict with another member of the team, or perhaps his struggle with his own internal demons, is jeopardizing the team’s chances for success against some powerful and nasty opponent.   Others drop hints, but nobody tells our hero what to do – this is America, after all, and individualism means that each person decides for himself.  But in the end, he or she sacrifices self-based motives and helps the team win (or if they lose, to do so admirably and with nobility). 

The more powerful opponent can be a sports team, a glee club, a gang, a political organization, or even, as in Casablanca, Hitler and the Axis powers.  In the end, Bogart (Rick) sacrifices his love for Ingrid Bergman (Ilsa) in favor of the war effort.  He takes one for the team.  As he explains to  Ilsa at the end on the tarmac,

It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world. Someday you'll understand that.*

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* As Michael Wood  has pointed out, Bogart here is repeating precisely the idea that Bergman has been trying to convince him of since she arrived in Casablanca

The Mirror of Privilege

May 16, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

Privilege is invisible . . . to the privileged, though often not to others.  In the past (here for example ), I’ve used the analogy of “default setting.”   White, Christian, males assume that this is the default setting.  It’s  natural – it’s the way Nature thinks things ought to be. 

John Scalzi does a much better job with the default analogy.  He’s trying to get White males to look in the mirror without their invisibility cloaks and see their own privilege. 

Dudes. Imagine life here in the US . . . is a massive role playing game, like World of Warcraft except appallingly mundane, where most quests involve the acquisition of money, cell phones and donuts, although not always at the same time. Let’s call it The Real World. . . . Got it?

Okay: In the role playing game known as The Real World, “Straight White Male” is the lowest difficulty setting there is.

The default barriers for completions of quests are lower. Your leveling-up thresholds come more quickly. You automatically gain entry to some parts of the map that others have to work for. The game is easier to play, automatically, and when you need help, by default it’s easier to get.

(Read Scalzi’s entire post here.)

I don’t know if his strategy will work.  The privileged man stands in front of one of those distorting carnival mirrors.  He sees his legs and feet of privilege, but they are tiny.  The shoulders and head of his own accomplishment are gigantic.

I keep thinking of Molly Ivins’s line about George W. Bush – that “he was born on third base and thinks he hit a triple.”*

A more recent example comes from the Romney clan.  Mitt himself was born to privilege and then made a ton of money. But he probably does not realize how being the son of a wealthy father, one who had been governor of Michigan and who could send him to fancy schools, had anything to do with his success.

And now the next generation.

Shortly after Mitt Romney's failed 2008 campaign for the Republican nomination his son Tagg set up a private equity fund with the campaign’s top fundraiser. One of the first donors was his mum, Anne. Next came several of his dad's financial backers. Tagg had no experience in the world of finance, but after two years in the middle of a deep recession the company had netted $244m from just 64 investors.

Tagg insists that neither his name nor the fact that his father had made it clear he would run for the presidency again had anything to do with his success. “The reason people invested in us is that they liked our strategies,” he told the New York Times. [emphasis added]

Want a good example of how privilege is invisible to the privileged? – Tagg, you’re it.

The excerpt is from an article in The Guardian  by Gary Younge.  Younge’s real target is not young Tagg but people in the UK who, despite their best efforts, keep having their names crop up in connection with the Murdoch phone hacking scandal. 

Such is the incestuous nature of the British ruling class and the gene puddle from which it draws its stock. Such is their brazen venality, complicity, contempt and mendacity. Eton, Oxford, Bullingdon, Westminster – if you’re looking for a tiny minority who are struggling to integrate, look no further than the cabinet.

This is not to say that class in the US is the same as in the UK.  But in both countries, although personal ties to well-placed people are important, those who use those connections to become wealthy and still more wealthy attribute their success to their own personal virtue. 

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* Ivins has come up with the perfect simile.  If you’re on third, you are very close to scoring – all by yourself.  And of all baseball hits, a triple is the rarest.

France Politics: Pomp and Ceremony. Family – Not So Much

May 15, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

File this under “differences in political culture” (or “The French just don’t know how to do these things.”) 

François Hollande was sworn into office yesterday as President of France. 

Hollande invited just three dozen or so private guests to join the 350 officials at the event. His partner, political journalist Valérie Trierweiler, was present, but their children were not. (From The Guardian)

The halftime shows at French university soccer matches probably aren’t anything to write home about either. Don’t they get the idea of cheerleaders? 

Also note that Mme. Trierweiler is “partner,” not wife.  And by the way, those four absent children Hollande had with Ségolène Royal were all born out of wedlock.  President Hollande has never had a marriage or even a civil union. 

Can we imagine an American politician with similar family values being similarly successful – especially one whose platform included, as did Hollande’s, the “moralization” of politics?*

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* I know, I know – Newt Gingrich, with his multiple wives and adulteries and his request for an “open” marriage.   His loyal supporters were willing to forgive and forget, and they cheered when Newt excoriated the press for asking him about it.  But his campaign for the GOP nomination was hardly a success.

Old Men and “My Old Man”

May 13, 2012
Posted by Jay Livingston

“I could never get away with that with my old man.”

I’ve blogged before (here) about the myth of the authoritarian past – the idea that in some ideal past, back before Hip Hop (now), or before Rock ‘n’ Roll (1960s), or before the automobile (1920s), or . . . kids were more respectful of their elders. 

The nostalgia goes back farther than that.  Kieran Healy  digs out his Latin copy of Livy’s history of Rome, and finds the historian bemoaning the lack of respect for elders.

This is due to the cheapened and diminished authority even of parents over their children in our day.  

Livy, on the cusp of BC/AD, was writing about a war 200 years earlier.  That’s a little while before Paul Lynde in “Bye-Bye Birdie (ca. 1960) was singing “Kids, they are disobedient, disrespectful oafs.”

This nostalgia for a non-existent authoritarian past mistakes personal change for social change.  Livy and Lynde remember the past as more authoritarian – when grown-ups were men of power that you didn’t mess around with – because they are remembering the past from their point-of-view at the time. They were children then, and from their perspective, a father was indeed a powerful figure to be feared and respected. They stood 4' 3" or so; they literally had to look up to their fathers.* 

But as grown-ups, they live in a more complicated world where they cannot control everything – not the choices of the younger men, not even the desires, abilities, and flaws of their own small children. 

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*This post is more appropriate for Father’s Day rather than Mother’s Day.  But the same principle of nostalgia applies to softer sentiments as well – community instead of authority.  (My post on that is here).  But Happy Mother’s Day anyway.