Becoming a conservative icon

In sociological social psychology, role theory examines the effects of the various social roles that individuals take on. A recent article by Jacob Weisberg at Slate (excerpted from his recent biography) examines how Ronald Reagan transitioned from being a “liberal anticommunist” (and sociology major!) to the man who would become a conservative icon during his time working for General Electric from the mid-1950s until 1962. Reagan’s tasks for General Electric included hosting a weekly show called “General Electric Theater” and traveling the company’s plants as a “goodwill ambassador,” which included giving speeches to employees.

As Weisberg states,

For Reagan, it was a dry run for politics. He learned how to interact with a live audience, and not just perform for the camera and microphone. He learned how to test which jokes went over and refine the way he told them. He learned how to preserve his voice and manage his energy during weeks of uninterrupted travel. He learned how to come across not as a distant matinee idol, but as a man of the people.

His interactions with company officials, though, may have had an even bigger impact. He traveled from plant to plant with a GE public relations officer named Earl Dunckel, a strong conservative who challenged Reagan’s liberal views. Weisberg also reports that he was influenced by GE’s chief labor negotiator, Lemuel Boulware, through his interactions with countless midlevel executives and plant managers. He states,

Over time, Reagan’s speeches came to match the message from headquarters about the inefficient, irrational, and meddlesome federal government. After a couple of years, Reagan was professing concern about the “business climate,” a term Boulware coined, and recounting tales of “government interference and snafus.” Now that he could no longer shelter his income through the “temporary corporation” loophole, high marginal tax rates were a constant preoccupation of his.

Thus, as his roles changed, so did his attitudes, and he became the man that conservatives revere today. It is interesting that changes as a result of our roles often seem “natural” in hindsight. Reagan probably looked back on his younger self as foolish and inexperienced, ignoring the fact that different roles would have led to different attitudes.

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“Like” Memoirs of a SLACer on Facebook to receive posts and links about Reagan and other conservative icons via your news feed. If you do, you’re sure to be disappointed!

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Baltimore

In the 23 years since Dr. Dre released the song below about the events following the Rodney King verdict, he has gone from “Gangsta” rapper to near-billionaire Apple employee. Unfortunately, the rest of the country hasn’t changed nearly as much.

On a related note, a symposium about intellectual activism, social justice, and criminalization is being held at noon today at the University of Maryland and can be streamed at this link.

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Russell Brand for Daily Show host

Based on his movies, you may have been surprised by how intelligent and engaging Russell Brand is when discussing various issues on TV. While he is certainly more aggressive than Jon Stewart (although Stewart can be aggressive, too), Brand’s web series The Trews suggests that he would be a worthy successor when Stewart leaves The Daily Show later this year. Despite the fact that Brand seems to spend most shows talking about current events from his bed (fitting?) he has the ability to interject his humorous takes on serious issues between clips from various news shows. In the episode below, he discusses recent murders in Chapel Hill, NC and Copenhagen in the context of the broader cultural scripts regarding Muslims and terrorism. I’d watch a Daily Show with Russell Brand.

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Hate the sport? Watch We Are the Best! instead of the Super Bowl

If you find yourself reacting to the upcoming kickoff of Super Bowl [insert roman numerals here] with trepidation, and especially if you find yourself reacting to the Super Bowl by marveling at how much money is being spent to televise a bunch of millionaires playing a kids game when that money could be better spent fighting nuclear proliferation, let me suggest an alternative. We Are the Best! is a Swedish movie set in the early 1980s and featuring three girls in their early teens who start a punk band. Their first (and basically only) song is called “Hate the Sport,” and includes lyrics about people dying while others focus on high-jump basketball soccer teams. The movie also includes a brazen attempt to save a Christian with the wonders of punk (though I guess that, as the girls point out, you can’t hang God without accepting that he exists…).

We are the Best! is available for streaming on Netflix and you can see the trailer here:

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Have yourself a snarky little Christmas

Today is December 15, which means that there are 10 more days to gear up for Christmas or, alternatively, ten more days until you will stop hearing “Jingle Bell Rock” everywhere you go. In either case, here are some snarky Christmas-themed posts to pass the time:

2014: Christmas as social control

2013: Christmas at Fox News

2012: Kevin McCallister, murderer?

2012: Toys for rich and poor

2012: Toys for boys and girls

2012: Thoughts on Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

2011: Holiday advertising gone wrong (a.k.a. the Folgers commercial)

2010: The world’s most offensive Christmas song

2009: Christmas spells relief

Christmas Bonus: A subscription to the Jelly of the Month Club? No, its the Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog for 2012, 2013, and 2014

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“Like” Memoirs of a SLACer on Facebook and I promise I will stop playing “Jingle Bell Rock” (and doing the dance from Mean Girls).

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The sociology of The Hunger Games

When I initially read The Hunger Games novels by Suzanne Collins, I appreciated the third book for its depiction of the messiness of revolution. It is not surprising that this messiness allows people from a variety of political orientations to connect with the story, as Sarah Seltzer and sociologist Mari Armstrong-Hough discuss at Flavorwire:

Beyond just advocating personal resistance to forces of political control, she says the books put forth the idea that “violence breeds docility.” “I don’t mean that threatening people with violence makes them docile, because it doesn’t. I mean that teaching people to be violent and consume violence makes them docile,” she explains. “The Games institutionalize a political docility not so much because they threaten violence to the districts’ children, but because they create a society in which people think they must choose survival over solidarity. I think a lot of people, regardless of their political affiliation, feel like there has been a lot of being forced to choose survival over solidarity going around in the US.”

Via: The Society Pages

See Also: Katniss Everdeen on the Academic Job Market and The Hunger Games and Movie Relationships

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Ferguson

There is a nice post on Ferguson (to the extent that a post about Ferguson can be “nice”) by Doug Hartmann at The Society Pages.

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Republicans take their ball and go home

In case you hadn’t heard (in which case, you may be a student), the government shut down last night at midnight. Republican demands to delay the implementation of the Affordable Care Act (a.k.a. Obamacare) because they don’t like it, despite the fact that it was passed in the house and the senate, signed by the President, and withstood challenges in the Supreme Court, reminds me of when a kid who loses a game takes his ball and goes home because if he can’t win he would rather not play at all. After thinking of this earlier today and congratulating myself for being clever, I watched last night’s episode of The Daily Show and noticed that Jon Stewart said essentially the same thing.

Slate has a nice roundup of stories about the shutdown, including an article written in the style that we would likely use if it was occurring in another country. I also like this collection of wire photos used to depict the impending shutdown (Slate is not immune to these tactics – see the photo on the aforementioned article).

Over on the blogs, John Quiggin at Crooked Timber reposts an analysis from 2011 and Dan Hirschman talks about the plight of graduate students who need to use the National Archives (as does Tenured Radical).

Finally, Jimmy Kimmel demonstrates the importance of survey wording by asking people whether they prefer the Affordable Care Act or Obamacare without informing them that they are the same thing:

This is all so exciting that I can’t wait to do it again in a few weeks when the debt limit is reached! On another note, my “Government Inaction” category has never been so apt!

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White people and the March on Washington

At Gawker, Tom Scocca explains how White people have ruined the March on Washington, starting with a simplification of King’s speech:

Here is what King actually said, in this one quote of his that today’s white people take as proof he was on their side:

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

When white people cite this passage, they tend to replace “my four little children” with something generic—”people,” for instance. The specific facts of 1963, of a caste of children born in a society that intentionally excluded them from opportunity, give way to an ahistoric (and therefore pointless) idealism. America is about how everybody is treated the same. Equality is replaced with equivalence.

So we arrive at a color-blind society, one in which if you did look at the people who are poorer, or less educated, or sicker, or more likely to be imprisoned, or more likely to be turned aside from the polls under voting laws passed this very year, you would see that they just happen to be disproportionately nonwhite. But it is wrong to look. Dr. King—the white people’s version of Dr. King—told us so.

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The genuine Martin Luther King Jr., 50 years ago, said this:

When the architects of our Republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men—yes, black men as well as white men—would be guaranteed the unalienable rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check, a check which has come back marked “insufficient funds.”

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we’ve come to cash this check, a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice.

Here is where white Americans failed themselves and their country. That image of the promissory note was too much for white people’s greed and selfishness to accept. White people had defined themselves, as a race, by having the things that other people could not have. So the vaults of opportunity would not be opened, not without white people staging a run on the bank first. If the public schools had to educate black children and white children together, the white people would get out of the schools, declare war on the whole idea of public school. If black people could participate in civic life, white people would clear out of the cities. White people would revolt against paying taxes, against poverty relief, against food stamps, even.

And then, after decades of this, white people would look back at the things white America had abandoned or refused to build, and they would blame black people for living in the ruins. Their character. Their culture. Their music. Their pants.

This is what blaming the victim looks like.

Also on the subject of Martin Luther King and the failure of whites, here is a segment from Keith Olbermann’s new show on ESPN:

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No College Student Left Behind?

The President of the American Association of University Professors has released a damning statement on President Obama’s higher education plan. In it, he states:

Blaming “complacent faculty” who remain “shortsighted” ignores the reality of higher education in the 21st century. It is not the tenured and tenure-track faculty, much less the army of contingent faculty who have been displacing tenured faculty, who are complacent or shortsighted. If anyone has lost touch with reality it is the metastasizing army of administrators with bloated salaries, who make decisions about the allocation of resources on our campuses, and our university presidents who are now paid as though they were CEO’s running a business — and not a very successful one at that. Unfortunately, these are the very people President Obama plans to consult while implementing his plan.

Read the whole thing here.

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