Stanley Milgram - Ghost Writer for the Bush-Cheney Lawyers

April 17, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I showed the Milgram film in class this week. So when I looked at the New York Times this morning, I still had the echoes of the “Experimenter” fresh in my mind.

EXPERIMENTER: Although the shocks may be painful, they’re not dangerous.

There’s another version of this line that was in the script the experimenter used, though it doesn’t appear in the film

EXPERIMENTER: Although they may be painful, there is no permanent tissue damage, so please go on.

The Times published excerpts from the legal memos that justified the torture.



The torturers deprived detainees of sleep for as long as eleven days.

It is clear that depriving someone of sleep does not involve severe physical pain . . . so long as sleep deprivation (as you have informed us is your intent) is used for limited periods, before hallucinations or other profound disruptions of the senses would occur.

Waterboarding has long been recognized as torture, even by the US when other countries used it. [Christopher Hitchens, a journalist who supported the Bush Iraq policies, had himself waterboarded (he's in the right-hand picture), and immediately concluded that it was obviously torture.] Nevertheless, the Bush lawyers wrote,

The waterboard does not inflict physical pain. . . . . .In the absence of prolonged mental harm, no severe mental pain or suffering would have been inflicted, and the use of these procedures would not constitute torture within the meaning of the statute.

Detainees were doused with water as cold as 41 degrees Fahrenheit.

Given that there is no expectation that the technique will cause severe physical pain or suffering . . .

“Stress” positions.

Any pain associated with muscle fatigue is not of the intensity sufficient to amount to ‘severe physical pain or suffering’ under the statute, nor, despite its discomfort, can it be said to be difficult to endure.

What a charade. The people who ordered the torture surely let it be known to their hand-picked lawyers which legal opinion they wanted the lawyers to come back with. And just to make it easier for the lawyers to justify the unjustifiable, they minimized and lied about the suffering they would inflict. The lawyers wrote the desired opinions, and now everyone can use these opinions to avoid being held accountable.

For eight years, the Bushies and the conservatives spoke with great self-righteousness about individual responsibility. All the while, they rigged the system to make sure nobody would be held responsible. They weren’t even as honorable as Milgram’s Nazi-in-a-labcoat.

TEACHER: But he’s hollering. He can’t stand it. What’s going to happen to him? . . . .
Who’s going to take the responsibility if anything happens to that gentleman?
EXPERIMENTER I'm responsible for anything that happens to him. Continue please.
TEACHER: All right. (Consults list of words.) The next one’s “Slow” – walk, truck, dance, music. Answer, please.

Guns and Crime - Elsewhere

April 17, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

I was asked to be a guest blogger at Everyday Sociology Blog, a site run by Norton Publishing and intended for undergrads. I dug up some material on guns and crime. Here's the link.

Bloody Fantastic

April 15, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Susan Boyle had scarcely put down the mike and walked offstage before the video was up on the Internet. Within a few days, her performance of I Dreamed a Dream from Les Miz on Britain’s Got Talent was one of the most watched items on YouTube (currently 8 million views, and counting).


Why was everyone surprised? And why was everyone so pleased?

The standard answer to the first question is “attractiveness bias.” Physical attractiveness comes with a halo effect; we tend to see attractive people as smarter and nicer, as better workers, lovers, parents, etc. (see Lisa’s post at Sociological Images). If attractive is good, then unattractive must be bad. So we expect a very plain-looking woman like Ms. Boyle not to have talent.

There’s some truth in that. But we all know counter-examples – the good-looking singer  with a “relaxed-fit” relation to pitch. And even people who don’t follow opera may know the stereotype “Wagnerian” soprano – a woman who looks as though she’d be more at home in the Vikings’ offensive line but who has a wonderful voice. So we shouldn’t have been all that surprised.

Maybe what fooled us was not that Ms. Boyle wasn’t pretty but that she didn’t look like a performer. Her hair, her make-up, her dress, her walk – they all carried the message that this is someone who does not get up and sing in front of audiences. If she really wanted to be a singing star, she’d dress the part. So when she says she wants to be like Elaine Paige (who starred in all those Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals in London), the judges and the audience chuckle condescendingly. As she starts to sing, they are stunned – this is clearly someone who can sing – and by the second line of the song, they are all cheering wildly for her.

But why? It wasn’t just because she has talent.* My guess is that it was because she provided a new story-line for the show, one that might have been especially pleasing to British audiences, who may still retain some sense of class consciousness.

I’ve never seen Britain’s Got Talent, but I assume it’s the same as American Idol. The usual narrative is the Cinderella story – talent and hard work leading to success. We identify with the contestant and think: I, with just a bit of a break, could become one of them – the glamorous celebrities.

But success creates a conflict. It means I have to leave my world, my friends. (Leaving them behind is not a problem for Cinderella; all she has is some nasty step-relatives.) The American solution is to pretend that you can have it both ways. You can become the glamorous celebrity, and you can keep your unglamorous, ordinary friends. In fact, you can bring them along with you as your Entourage.

The Susan Boyle story* is different. It’s more one of class solidarity. She doesn’t become one of “them.” Instead, she remains one of us. She doesn’t leave her class, she represents it. So her triumph is a triumph for the group. Watching her force Simon Cowell and the others to eat their original snark is satisfying in a way that’s different from watching the usual schnook-to-celebrity scenario. And at the end, when her Scotland friends backstage ask her how she feels, and she says, “Bloody fantastic,” she speaks for all of us.


* I Dreamed a Dream is not an easy song. It changes key a couple of times, and its range of an octave and a half is a few notes wider than that of most pop tunes.

**I have no idea what will really happen or what Ms. Boyle will become. Maybe she’ll dye her hair blonde and wear black evening dresses like Elaine Paige. The story I’m talking about is the one that was played out in that seven minutes of television a few days ago.

After They've Seen Paree

April 14, 2009
Posted by Jay Livingston

Remember “freedom fries”? The phrase was part of the spirit of France-bashing that the Bush administration and its friends in the media whipped up six years ago. France and other European countries were saying that invading Iraq might not be such a nifty idea. They even voted against it in the U.N.

The Bushies sure showed them who was right.

The Republicans still use France and Europe as synonyms for various forms of political wickedness. We Americans, they say, don’t want a “European-style” health care system (i.e., one that delivers health care at a lower price to all its people).

But the Americans-don’t-like-France idea is largely a figment of the right-wing imagination. These Republicans are speaking for a smaller and smaller portion of the US population. The Daily Kos poll recently asked the “favorable/unfavorable” question, and it turns out it’s not just us liberal, urban, coastal elitists who have a soft spot in our hearts for France.

QUESTION: Do you have a favorable or unfavorable
opinion of the country of France?

	FAV	UNFAV	NO OPINION
ALL	61	32	7
DEM	66	29	5
REP	56	37	7
IND	60	32	8
OTH/REF	58	35	7
NORTHEAST	71	21	8
SOUTH	43	51	6
MIDWEST	67	26	7
WEST	69	24	7

France is well-liked everywhere . . . except the South. The pattern was nearly identical when the places in question were not France but, respectively, Europe, New York, and San Francisco.

It looks as though what Sarah Palin referred to as “the real America” is merely one region of America. And if recent voting patterns in Virginia, North Carolina, and Missouri are any indication, that region is shrinking. Tant pis.