Entries Tagged 'sociology' ↓

On Salon, Walter Shapiro convincingly explains the appeal of Huckabee in They Heart Huckabeeland^TM—aka Red America, and especially that portion of it found in Iowa:

The unified field theory of Huckabee also stresses the candidate’s moderate record and rhetoric about education, poverty and, until recently, immigration. Viewed from some angles, Huckabee is either a closet Democrat who opposes abortion (the Mitt Romney interpretation) or the true “compassionate conservative,” rather than the ersatz George W. Bush version.

But these explanations miss something potentially important. The miracle birth of the Republican candidate with the four-word name — Mike Huckabee Iowa Front-runner — has as much to do with social class as religion. There is nothing subtle about Huckabee’s celebration of his humble roots: He gleefully told 150 supporters (some more accurately described as acolytes) in Marshalltown Thursday morning that a “Republican muckety-muck” had recently declared that Huckabee was unelectable because he had a “hick last name.”

This makes sense to me: Huckabee is a very gifted in his delivery of plainspokenness, but he also vigorously and aggressively promotes down-home values that everyday folk can understand and identify with:

For example, as the CBS blog On the Road reports, Huckabee visited Guantanamo and found something there for down-home Americans (his demographic, and the people with whom he identifies)—to resent:

Asked about Guantanamo, Mike Huckabee said he had visited the facility and said it was “disappointing” that military personnel were eating meals that averaged $1.60 while the detainees were eating Halal meals that cost over $4 each.

“The inmates there were getting a whole lot better treatment than my prisoners in Arkansas. In fact, we left saying, ‘I hope our guys don’t see this. They’ll all want to be transferred to Guanatanmo. If anything, it’s too nice.”

So, bottom line: he’s connecting with jes’ folks—people for whom it is jes’ plain courteous to wish people Merry Christmas in a TV ad and who cares if there’s a cross floating in the background? It’s Christmas, isn’t it? Christmas is about Christ, isn’t it?

Why is anyone surprised that the plainspoken, hardworking, God-fearing Americans of Iowa and the rest of Red America—of whom there are lots and lots and lots—would respond to this? He virtually screams authenticity.

On the other hand, if this explanation doesn’t satisfy you, you might want to consider the cui bono-based conspiracy theory floated on The Corner today—that Bill Clinton is behind Huckabee’s rise!

A week or so ago a reader from Arkansas wrote in to offer his theory of how Mike Huckabee has gotten so far. He pointed out that Bill Clinton and Mike Huckabee had always had cordial relations. He surmised that Clinton was grateful that Huckabee had not piled on during the impeachment hearings, or the various Whitewater-related investigations, even though, as his successor in the Governor’s mansion, Huckabee might well have known things the national and conservative media wanted to learn.

We all say that the Clintons would do anything to win, the writer noted. Who, he asked, is financing Huckabee? Where did Huckabee get the seed money to start the race, and to fly around, once he had begun to take off? Who would benefit most if Huckabee became the nominee?

Pick your poison, and get prepared to see more of Huck the Hick for a while.

As much as I hate polls, I love commonsense observations—like this one from Al Sharpton [e.a.]:

Until recently, Sharpton’s relationship with Obama has been more aloof. Sharpton has also been underwhelmed by Obama’s campaign. “He never came off as a fighter,” he says, a strategy that he thinks has hurt Obama with a key demographic: black women. “Black women like a fighter. Even if you’re fighting a fight that is not my fight, I will believe that you might fight my fight. And to come off as ‘I’m all right with everybody’ doesn’t give people who want a fight a comfort level. I want somebody who’s at least a little upset with somebody, because I’m mad as hell. If you’re not mad, how do I get passionate about you?”

Sharpton thinks Obama should take more cues from his wife, Michelle. He still thinks about the time he bumped into her at a recent Chicago fund-raiser. He claims the conversation went like this.

“How you doing, Mrs. Obama?”

She’s tall, and looked down at him. “I’d do a lot better if we had your endorsement.”

Sharpton tried to play dumb. “What do you mean?”

“We need your endorsement. I’m just telling you straight out: We need your endorsement. What are you going to do?”

Sharpton didn’t know what to say. “I’m like, ‘Uh, well, duh.’ I mean, she was like a sister back in Brownsville, where I grew up!”

It’s not the observation that Sharpton makes that I find particularly interesting (though I do find it interesting—and I think it’s true for white women as much as for black women: in times of trouble, of course we want someone who is going to fight for us). I find it interesting that, while debates rage on about race and IQ and whether you can even mention them in the same breath, Sharpton feels free to throw around general, unquantifiable observations about black women, knowing he’ll never be challenged to back them up with statistics and secure in the knowledge, as this same piece in New York magazine indicates, that for both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, he da man.

“Here, check this out,” he says, resting the cigar with a thud. He fishes in his pants pocket, produces a cell phone, pushes a few buttons, and passes it over for a listen.

The voice sounds familiar. “Hey, Al, this is Hillary Clinton, and…” Is it really her? Yep. …

He wants the phone back. “Here,” he says, making sure to save the message. “Now, check this out.”

Another voice. “Al, this is Barack Obama…” Obama! Seriously? The senator also wants advice about the debate at Howard.

This morning on BBC World, we were told about the latest in German reality television: Death TV. Watch the report here.

Michele Hartley explains that it’s undertakers who are behind this ghoulish, um, undertaking:

As if television isn’t depressing enough, starting in 2008, you can watch the death channel in Germany. Etos-TV, a new German channel which will start broadcasting in 2008, is devoted to death. The channel will feature documentaries on cemeteries and burials and other issues dealing with death. Additionally, you can spend your day viewing obituaries.

For people that have lost loved ones a photo and written obituary costs about 2,000 euros a photo for ten spots, and for a little more money, videos of the deceased and spoken narrative can be broadcast. Etos-TV calls itself the “neue Trauerkanel” (the new sad channel) and sees the new channel as a new vehicle for the undertakers of Germany to reach the public as well as capitalizing on the close to a million deaths a year in the country due to the aging population. It does make a for a nice tribute to loved ones and people have the added advantage of being able to put the tribute on the Internet once it has aired. For my money, it’s a bit more reality than I care to deal with.

“Everone is entitled to an obituary,” says one of the guys interviewed in the BBC piece.

Indeed.

From the world of cultural studies, good news about hiphop:

Dr. Muñoz-Laboy spent three years studying the hip-hop club scene, talking to dozens of teenagers and watching them dance. While hip-hop music has been widely assailed as misogynistic, the researchers found that young women were the “gatekeepers” of boundaries on the dance floor, according to research published this month in the journal Culture, Health and Sexuality. Even during the highly sexualized form of dance known as grinding, in which bodies rub against each other, the girls in the study “were consistently vigilant about maintaining control over their bodies and space,” the study noted.

Most of the teenagers in the study were sexually experienced. But the researchers found that the overt sexuality of the music and dancing was not the main influence on sexual behavior. Rather it was the old standbys of alcohol, drugs and peer pressure that typically led them into sexual encounters.

From the world of public education, bad news about abstinence-only  programs:

Programs that focus exclusively on abstinence have not been shown to affect teenager sexual behavior, although they are eligible for tens of millions of dollars in federal grants, according to a study released by a nonpartisan group that seeks to reduce teen pregnancies.

“At present there does not exist any strong evidence that any abstinence program delays the initiation of sex, hastens the return to abstinence or reduces the number of sexual partners” among teenagers, the study concluded.

In the West, it is only in still-Puritan America that we are obsessed with trying to control our kids’ sexual behavior—which is essentially uncontrollable. That behavior is always about the social norms in their peer group, and kids trying to balance their personal values and urges with trying to fit in … somewhere.

Louis Auchincloss, chronicler of high society, tells it like it is:

[T]he one criticism that rankles is that his subject matter represents a vanished world. “I grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in a nouveau riche world, where money was spent wildly,” he says, “and I’m still living in one! The private schools are all jammed with long waiting lists; the clubs – all the old clubs – are jammed with long waiting lists today; the harbours are clogged with yachts; there has never been a more material society than the one we live in today. Where is this ‘vanished world’ they talk about? I don’t think the critics have looked out the window!”

“It is a myth,” he continues, that a once great and powerful class of white, Anglo-Saxon Protestants has been pushed aside; the ruling class has simply eliminated the ethnic and religious bars to entry, and expanded. “Proust studied this very carefully,” he says. “He understood that society would take in anybody it wants.”

Yep—and it leaves out the rest of us so we can live in peace. Thank heavens!

Nick Gillespie falls for “the last remaining specimen of the WASP” meme here. But he can be forgiven: his father’s mother worked as a cook and servant for the Auchincloss family.

The Economist goes to the red-hot heart of what is usually (that is, abstractly) referred to in the blogosphere as the “immigration issue”:

In the rarefied world of national politics (and in America’s even more other-worldly universities) blacks and Latinos tend to be lumped together in what Nicolás Vaca, a California lawyer, calls a “presumed alliance”. Last month Barack Obama, a Democratic presidential candidate whose father was Kenyan, assured a Hispanic conference that such a bond existed. Quoting Martin Luther King, he called the two groups “brothers in the fight for equality”. On the streets of America’s cities, however, rather less lofty attitudes are apparent.

“We’re being overrun,” says Ted Hayes of Choose Black America, which has led anti-immigration marches in south-central Los Angeles. “The compañeros have taken all the housing. If you don’t speak Spanish they turn you down for jobs. Our children are jumped upon in the schools. They are trying to drive us out.” Not, Mr Hayes emphasises, that he has anything against illegal immigrants personally, or against Mexicans who are in America legally.

Do you see any presidential candidate—of either party—who is capable of addressing the tribal tensions rising in America? (Neither do I.)

“Keeping up with the Joneses” takes on a new meaning in Silicon Valley, California, where a $3 million nest egg isn’t enough to keep away the uneasy feeling that everybody is doing better than you are, sayeth the New York Times of August 5, 2007:

So spare a thought for the poor working “Millionaires Who Don’t Feel Rich“

Mr. Steger, 51, a self-described geek, has banked more than $2 million. The $1.3 million house he and his wife own on a bluff overlooking the Pacific Ocean is paid off. The couple’s net worth of roughly $3.5 million places them in the top 2 percent of families in the United States.

Yet each day Mr. Steger continues to toil in what a colleague calls “the Silicon Valley salt mines,” working as a marketing executive for a technology start-up company, still striving for his big strike. Most mornings, he can be found at his desk by 7. He typically works 12 hours a day and logs an extra 10 hours over the weekend.

“I know people looking in from the outside will ask why someone like me keeps working so hard,” Mr. Steger says. “But a few million doesn’t go as far as it used to. Maybe in the ’70s, a few million bucks meant ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous,’ or Richie Rich living in a big house with a butler. But not anymore.”

As if their status anxiety isn’t enough to keep them awake at night, now the new working rich must also take their share of the blame for harming the middle class, and society at large, by displacing those anxieties on the unsuspecting.

In his new book “Falling Behind: How Rising Inequality Harms the Middle Class,” Professor [Robert H.] Frank deftly updates the argument for our current gilded age. The rise of an overclass, he convincingly argues, is indirectly affecting the quality of life of the rest of the population — and not in a good way.

Knowing that Steve Schwarzman of the Blackstone Group made almost $400 million last year, or that he spent $3 million last February on his 60th-birthday party (entertainment: Rod Stewart, Marvin Hamlisch, Martin Short, Patti LaBelle), doesn’t simply make the typical American green with envy, and hence unhappy. Rather, Frank argues, the problem is that extreme consumption — at which Schwarzman excels — helps shape norms for the whole society, not just his fellow plutocrats. “The mere presence of … larger mansions, for example, may shift some people’s perceptions about how big a house one can build without seeming overly ostentatious,” Frank writes.

Got that? While you, Mr. Jones, lust after East Egg, Mr. Smith lusts after a tenth of your nest egg.

Stop lusting after more and faster and bigger and better and newer and shinier and cooler! You’re hurting America!

From the Pew poll of Americans’ political and social views over the last 20 years (via Ankush, at Penguins on the Equator), here (buried deep in the summary) is the reason why the politics of resentment (class, income, or otherwise) doesn’t catch fire with Republicans and why it will continue to be popular with the Democratic base. (It also answers Thomas Frank’s extraordinarily condescending question “What’s the Matter with Kansas?“):

Republicans and Democrats remain far apart in their fundamental attitudes toward government, national security, social values, and even in evaluations of personal finances. Three-in-four (74%) Republicans with annual incomes of less than $50,000 say they are “pretty well satisfied” with their financial conditions compared with 40% of Democrats and 39% of independents with similar incomes.

If I polled everyone I know, I wonder how many people would say that they’d be “pretty well satisfied” with an income of less than $50,000 a year.

Here’s my (semi-educated) guess: no one in New York City, and a lot of people in the rural hamlet in Red America where I go to escape all the strivers.

There’s lots of other interesting stuff in the poll, too. (Pew claims it makes the territory favorable to Democrats.)  Check it out.

The Nation magazine salutes the “lineup” of antiwar college students seen at recent demonstrations:

Almost all major campus antiwar groups are working closely with veterans, through groups like Iraq Veterans Against the War, and bringing them to speak on campus at teach-ins. Iraq vet and Bowdoin student Alex Cornell du Houx recalls his unit receiving a CARE package in Iraq from Bowdoin College Democrats and a Bowdoin peace activist group. “When the other guys in my squad found out where the food came from, they reacted very positively,” says du Houx, now working for a CDA media team. “It changed their perception of the College Dems and peace activists.”

Four years ago numerous polls found that students, like the majority of the population, overwhelmingly supported the war. Now students, more than any other age group, oppose the war. Without doubt, student antiwar activists are more sophisticated and coordinated than ever before.

 Then comes the big question, namely:

whether the movement can ignite the silent antiwar majority on campus. It remains to be seen if the legacy of the Class of Iraq will be one of acquiescence or resistance.

Based on anecdotal evidence,*** it’s easy to predict: acquiescence—total acquiescence. There is a revulsion toward war as the terrible cost of it is displayed to us on our TV screens, but is no anti-war movement, except in the fevered imaginations of the netroots and their cheerleaders.

Based on a recent study, which found that today’s college students are narcissistic and obsessed with making lots of money, I’d say it’s even easier to predict acquiescence.

——————

*** My children were raised among the glowing embers of leftism in downtown Manhattan. One of them is studiously apolitical, not to say anti-political (a not infrequent result of indoctrination). The other one currently attends one of the premier left-wing colleges in the United States. Believe me: there is no anti-war movement on American college campuses. There is, however, a deep love of all things hedonistic: like, for instance, eating great food, and cooking it.

I hesitate to write about this for fear that I will jinx what looks like a growing trend of … seriousness … in our culture, but I’m ready to pass on to you some good news for once and I don’t want to lose the opportunity.

First, a recent poll indicated that, unusually, Americans are following the 2008 presidential campaign even though they will have to continue following it for another 20 months in order to find out what happens.

[[Yes, that's how Americans are following the campaign: as a horse race, or a grand sporting event, or a soap opera---in installments. Don't laugh, but John F. Kennedy, Jr., never got the credit he deserved for reaching this insight before almost anyone else: that his generation can be made to follow politics (which they were notoriously uninterested in during the go-go Clinton years) if you present it to them as the greatest show on earth. That was the animating idea (in 1995) behind his magazine, George. ***]]

Now there is even more evidence that our population might be more attentive than it has been credit for. The Seattle Post-Intelligencer says that the reports of the demise of reading may have been greatly exaggerated:

Teens buying books at fastest rate in decades

New ‘golden age of young adult literature’ declared

…

“Kids are buying books in quantities we’ve never seen before,” said Booklist magazine critic Michael Cart, a leading authority on young adult literature. “And publishers are courting young adults in ways we haven’t seen since the 1940s.”Credit a bulging teen population, a surge of global talent and perhaps a bit of Harry Potter afterglow as the preteen Muggles of yesteryear carry an ingrained reading habit into later adolescence.

Not only are teen book sales booming — up by a quarter between 1999 and 2005, by one industry analysis — but the quality is soaring as well. Older teens in particular are enjoying a surge of sophisticated fare as young adult literature becomes a global phenomenon.

All of which leads Cart to declare, “We are right smack-dab in the new golden age of young adult literature.”

The piece underscores that the teenagers’ interest in books has surged as the books themselves widen their scope to include serious (”adult”) themes and issues:

Fantasy and graphic novels are especially hot, and adventure, romance, humor and gritty coming-of-age tales remain perennial favorites. In addition, racy series such as “The Gossip Girls” — often likened to a teen “Sex and the City” — have created a buzz.

More notably, though, there’s a new strain of sophistication and literary heft as publishers cater to the older end of the spectrum with books that straddle teen and adult markets.

King County librarian Holly Koelling has been tracking these trends as she writes an upcoming edition of “Best Books for Young Adults,” an American Library Association reference book.

“There has been an increase in the age of the protagonist, the complexity of the plotting and the content — the gravity of the content,” Koelling said. “I think it may be a reflection of a more sophisticated teenage population.” [e.a. See also Steven Johnson's Everything That's Bad Is Good for You, in which he similarly argues that audiences who eagerly follow the complex plots and multiple storylines of TV series like, say, The Sopranos are indicative of a smart, attentive audience, not a "dumb and dumber" one.]

The trend may also reflect more sophisticated parents, and a more “sophisticated”–not to mention more realistic—society: one in which there’s no such thing as forbidden books, ideas, and subjects, even if they are controversial.

(Or perhaps especially if they’re controversial. Because controversy sparks thinking and debate. And a democratic society needs thinking people and healthy debate in order to remain democratic. And it’s never too early to get people to start thinking.)

So let’s follow this “trend” together: Has the “dumb” and “dumber” trend reached a plateau? Is America becoming “smart and smarter”?

———-

*** In 1999, after JFK Jr.’s death, Anthony York wrote in Salon:

The four-year-old political mag is Kennedy’s legacy. After a well-publicized wrestling match with the New York State Bar exam, and a brief stint as a Manhattan prosecutor, Kennedy left his law career behind to found George, and he gave it the tagline, “not politics as usual.” When asked about its mission, he often riffed that politics was the greatest show on earth, and he wanted a magazine that covered politics the way Sports Illustrated covered sports.

George covered politics, Kennedy-style, with a heavy dose of glamor and celebrity. It made sense for a man born in the public eye, whose every developmental stage, since birth, has been captured by the cameras. The fusion of celebrity and politics defined George, from the first issue which featured Cindy Crawford cross-dressed as a midriff-baring George Washington (the magazine’s namesake)on the cover, to the most recent, dated August 1999, the political humor issue, featuring actor Ben Stiller.

“Clearly, he was not editing this magazine for people who knew a lot about politics,” said Edward Klein, former editor in chief of the New York Times Magazine and author of several best-selling Kennedy biographies. “It was an effort to reach audiences who needed politics to be sugar-coated with pop culture — and he being the greatest pop culture figure of them all.”