The Institutionalization of Hysteria

September 28, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

At the Republican debate Thursday Ron Paul called for an end to the war on drugs. OK, Ron Paul isn’t a very prominent candidate. The leading Republican candidates didn’t show up – after all, the debate was to focus on racial issues, and the audience was predominantly black. Still, Paul’s statement is noteworthy.

Back in the late 1980s I was visiting in Washington, DC. I don’t remember the circumstances, but some people I didn’t know were giving me a ride, and somehow the topic of drugs came up. These people, husband and wife, were lawyers – maybe they worked for the government – and one of them started to say something about the current atmosphere surrounding the topic. He stopped in mid-sentence, searching for the right word, as though a misstatement might be very costly.

“Hysteria?” I offered.

Well, they wouldn’t put it quite like that, they said. But two things were clear to me. One, they agreed that policy and public opinion on drugs had gone way past being rational. And two, they were afraid to let others know their views. It would have been like someone in Salem in 1692 saying that maybe we’ve gone a little overboard on this witch thing.

Here we are two decades later, and at least in the public mind, drugs have been replaced by other fears, notably terrorism. It’s hard to keep two moral panics going simultaneously. (See last December’s entry “The War on Drugs.” )

But we are still living with the consequences of that hysteria. Emotions come and go. Institutions and laws are much more durable. And the fears and moral panic of decades past has become institutionalized. The sentences written into law are the most egregious consequence. Judicial precedents and rulings are usually less glaring, but they are part of the same process.

A couple of days before Ron Paul made that statement, an appeals court upheld the strip search of a 13-year-old Arizona schoolgirl. School authorities suspected her of carrying drugs – prescription-strength ibuprofen. Basically, a double dose of Advil. The strip search was perfectly legal, said two of three judges interpreting the law.

Once the hysteria gets written into law, the original emotion becomes irrelevant. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito is about the least emotional person you could imagine. Yet when he was an appeals court judge, he wrote a strictly legal and technical opinion that would have allowed the strip search of a 10-year-old girl.

For what it’s worth, in neither strip search did the authorities find drugs.

The Greatest Drummer in the World

September 26, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Students are so young now. I remember when they were only a few years younger than I was, and we knew the same movies and music. We could talk.

That was then.

Now on the first day of class, I pass out index cards for students to put their vital information – names, e-mail, phone numbers. I ask them to put down the name of their favorite movie, book, and album.

I’m hoping that knowing a bit about such preferences might help me learn their names more quickly. But it’s also my desperate attempt to keep up in some small way with pop culture, which slips further and further away from me each year. Especially music. It’s not just that I don’t know the songs or what these singers sound like; I often don’t even recognize the names of the performers. I’ve made my peace with it; I’m resigned to the fate of never again being cool.

But this semester provided an opening I couldn’t resist. As I went through the cards calling names, talking briefly with each student, I came upon one that listed “Journey.”

“The group?” I asked.
“Yes,” she said, “anything by them.”

Now in one of those strange accidents of proximity that can happen when you live in New York, I recently got to know the guy who played drums with Journey back in the day. So I asked, “Do you happen to know who the drummer with Journey was?”

No, she said, she just liked their music.

I was standing there debating whether to play my trump card right then – maybe it would appear too desperate – when another student called out, “It’s Steve Smith.” Then he added definitively, “the greatest drummer in the world.” After a pause he elaborated further, “Not so much his rock drumming, but the later stuff.”

“You mean the jazz fusion stuff with Vital Information?” I asked, not so much looking for agreement as just displaying this one slender wisp of cool.


By the Numbers

September 23, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Does Montclair Socioblog have a reader at CBS TV?

Two weeks ago, I blogged about all those numbers on the covers of women’s magazines.
Today, CBS Sunday Morning led off with a piece about the same thing.

It turns out I wasn’t quite right. The numbers are everywhere, not just on women’s magazines. Twelve steps, seven habits, a thousand places to see before you die. And that’s not counting all those ten-best list. Men’s magazines too find numbers irresistible. The CBS piece showed the guys at Men’s Health kicking around ideas. “'Ten or 15 signs she's cheating' is always a great one.” And the editor tells CBS, “When we put lists or numbers on the cover, our newsstand sales go up.”

Sure enough, at the Men’s Health website today you can find
  • 5 ways to get her into your bed
  • 10 foods you should eat every day
  • 10 muscles she wants to see
The lists and numbers appeal to two strong themes in American culture: self-improvement and rationalization. Self-improvement is a theme in American magazines date back at least to the late nineteenth century. It’s an idea that expands rapidly in a culture of optimism and an ideology of individualism and social mobility.

As for rationalization, it seems there is nothing so personal and ineffable that we can’t try to reduce it to a prescribed number of steps, Power Point list of bullet points. Like workers on a Taylorized assembly line, we can all follow the same routinized procedure to find success, raise happy children, be physically fit, have mindblowing orgasms, overcome our fears, or find the perfect hair style for this fall.

Kids and Danger - II

September 19, 2007
Posted by Jay Livingston

Matilda’s mother apologizes for calling so late, but she wonders whether Caroline might be free for a playdate?

Like, tomorrow? “Matilda’s had a cancellation,” she says.

Liz searches the kitchen drawer for Caroline’s Week-at-a-Glance.
It’s ten already and she’s had her wine; down the hall the baby nurse, Lorna, is asleep with the twins and Caroline; Ted’s out of town. What the hell is Matilda’s mother’s name, anyway? Faith, Frankie, Fern—

“We could do an hour,” Liz says. “We have piano at four-thirty.”

That’s the opening of “Playdate,” a story by Kate Walbert published in The New Yorker several months ago. It fits with my previous post about parents and children, control and protection.

Is this the way we live now, I wondered as I read these paragraphs – six-year-olds with planner appointment books, mothers scheduling playdates because a child had “a cancellation”? A nurse for the kids even when mom is at home? (The twins, we learn later in the story, were conceived in vitro with another woman’s eggs.)

Sometimes fiction captures the culture and social structure well before the sociologists move in. For freshman English long ago, I had to read J.D. Salinger’s much anthologized story, “Uncle Wiggly in Connecticut.” At the time, I didn’t appreciate its sociological imagination, its showing the connections between private troubles and social structures. Nor did I appreciate how ahead of its time it was in applying this sociological imagination to women. (If you have a copy of the story, take it off the shelf and read it now. It won’t take long.)

The postwar years in the US seemed prosperous and problem-free. The principle criticism of the period at the time was that it was dull, dominated by conformity. But Salinger’s story gave us the underside of middle-class prosperity – the frustrations of the bright, educated woman trapped as a housewife in suburbia. That suburban context makes us understand and sympathize with her cynicism, her drinking, her anger at her husband, and even her anger at her child.

Salinger’s story was published in 1948. Sociologists and psychologists began exploring this territory in the fifties and didn’t begin thinking seriously about women until at least a decade later.

“Playdate” is obviously based on “Uncle Wiggly.” (I suppose there are fine lines between being inspired by, writing in homage to, and just plain ripping off another author.) The New Yorker blurb puts it this way: “Short story about two Manhattan mothers getting drunk and confiding in each other while their daughters are on a playdate.” Which would work for “Uncle Wiggly,” except that there’s only one daughter, and the setting is a Connecticut suburb rather than Manhattan. The rhythm of the events in the stories is the same, some of the images are identical (a woman lying on the floor balancing her drink on her chest), even the flow of the final sentence.

In both stories, the women sense that something is missing from their lives, something they can’t quite identify. In the 2007 story, that sense is symbolized in the pet cat’s “hot spot”: “Their cat . . . recently contracted a hot spot. A hot spot, she tells Liz, is an itch that can’t be scratched.” A problem you literally cannot put your finger on.

But while the mood of Salinger’s postwar story is isolation and anger, the tone of “Playdate” is not as bleak, and its central feelings are anxiety and uncertainty. The mothers have attended a talk at school: “Raising a Calm Child in the Age of Anxiety; or, How to Let Go and Lighten Up!” Walbert is spoofing pop psych here, but the “anxiety journal” the professor tells the parents to keep becomes a significant item in the story.

“We are living in the Age of Anxiety,”says the professor. But several eras in the last century have been the age of anxiety – the phrase itself originates (I think) in a 1948 poem by Auden, and an Internet history guide applies the phrase to the 1920s. What’s different from one era to another are the causes of the anxiety. This is the post-9/11 era. “Helicopters,” the mother lists in her anxiety journal along with Thieves, Crowds, and Playdates. Twice in the story we hear the subway warning announcement: “Protect yourself. If you see a suspicious package or activity . . . .”

There may also be differences in how we react. Salinger’s suburban postwar mother chose sarcasm and alcohol. The Manhattan mothers in 2007 deal with anxiety by trying to schedule uncertainty out of their children’s lives. They hover like helicopters.