Ceci n’est pas trash-talking

June 29, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

The reference in the title is to this canvas by René Magritte.

There must be a word for this – the statement that is self-contradictory – but what is it? (Of course you could argue that Magritte is technically correct. It’s not a pipe; it’s a picture of a pipe.)

Paralipsis and apophasis come close – emphasizing something by saying you’re not emphasizing it. In politics, for example: “I’m not even going to mention the rumors that my opponent has deep ties to the Russian Mafia and hires prostitutes to pee on him.”

I’m thinking of something a shade more subtle – the statement or image that is itself the opposite of what it claims to be.  It came to mind a couple days ago when a right-winger I know who likes to bait me sent an e-mail with this.

why should anyone on our side want Obama to succeed in “transforming” America into a cesspool of political correctness, creeping socialism, leftist thugs on campus, and appeasement of Islamic extremism?).  By the way, are you down with programs to “re-educate” Americans who don’t see things your way? That’s what the left wants — clearly and openly. So resistance to all that brainwashing was the mission of Republicans under Obama, true. But I don’t remember any assassination fantasies. Current climate different: Not only no hope for reconciliation, but rumblings of violence. Already one Republican Congressmen nearly assassinated. More politically motivated violence to come, no doubt. (Madonna fantasy “blow up the white house” / Depp actor assassination fantasy / Kathy Griffin beheaded Trump imagery / Shakespeare in the Park Trump vicarious assassination to hoots of delight, etc. — you have great friends, Jay.)

I said that I could do a similar caricature of conservatives, but why bother? It’s just trash talk. The point is to taunt rather than to discuss. Maybe on the basketball court trash-talking enhances the game (my correspondent does have a beautiful jump shot), but it doesn’t do much for understanding, and I just wasn’t interested in talking trash right now.

He wrote back. “Not trash-talking - just reality, unpleasant as it is.”  It’s a perfect example of the thing I’m trying to find the word for – trash-talking by saying that not you’re not trash-talking.

The same day, an even better example from Page Six showed up in my Twitter feed.

Fatherhood — Breadwinners and Losers

June 26, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

Here is my favorite PSA of all time.
   

If there were an award for best performance in a 30-second public service ad, this actor should have won. He shows not a flicker of irony – no wink, no smile, no deliberate misstep – nothing to show the “role distance” that you might expect of a father chanting cheers with his daughter.

The ad also epitomizes the change in the role of father to include more social-emotional involvement with children. Through the first part of the 20th century, being a “good father” required little more than providing for the family.  Compare the PSA with this “ad” for a different style of father, written by a man who grew up in the 1920s and 30s.

My father never did any of the things that, according to the “parenting” wisdom of today, are supposed to be so important. I don’t recall him ever hugging me, or kissing me, or telling me that he loved me. . . I don’t recall ever having an extended conversation with him. . .  He was, and remains in memory, a version of the good father. [from “Life Without Father” by Irving Kristol, (Wall Street Journal, 1994)]

Things began to change after World War II. Although breadwinner remained central to the role of father, post-War America saw a cultural shift that added a new element  – greater involvement with children. Family sitcoms of 1950 and 60s – shows like “Father Knows Best” and “Leave It to Beaver” – served as both instruction and justification for this version of fatherhood.

Like many cultural changes, the new fatherhood spread downward through the class system. As more wives at all levels entered the paid labor force, fathers had to share more of the household duties, including parenting,

(Click on the chart for a larger view.)

The chart from Pew shows a big change from 1965 to 2015. The average number of hours that moms spent at work nearly tripled, and the hours they spent on housework were cut in half. But also nearly tripling was the time dads spent in child care.

We even got a new word to denote this gender-neutral focus on the child’s emotional and social development – parenting.

(Google nGrams showing the frequency of the word “parenting” in American books.)

But what about father-child relations among the poor. In a recent post (here), I cited Tally’s Corner, Elliot Liebow’s study of Black streetcorner men in 1963-64.  The jobs these men could get were sporadic and did not pay enough to allow a man to support a family. This failure not only led men to leave their marriages, it also freighted the father-child relationship with ambivalence. “To soften this failure, and to lessen the damage to his public and self-esteem, he pushes the children away from him.”

That was then. Today’s counterparts of these men, also left behind by a changing labor market, have seized on the social component of the father role. As Kathryn Edin and Timothy Jon Nelson say in their 2013 study Doing the Best I Can: Fatherhood in the Inner City, “the new-father role emerged just in the nick of time to offer an alternative way to engage with their progeny.”

Time spent with children, whether skillfully fashioning a daughter’s hair or teaching one’s son to pee in the bushes, is viewed as priceless and a treasure any man would naturally want to claim. The opportunity to express love and have rich conversations with children is a gift — not just to the children but for the fathers as well. These are the moments, fathers say, that truly make life worth living. . .     It is almost as if engaging in the softer “relational aspects” of the role is a must-have for men trying to forge meaning and identity in an economic age that has left the unskilled worker behind. Relating to children — not hanging on the corner with peers — is the vital ingredient that adds zest to life.  And even in these challenging neighborhood environments, visiting family is what fathers often want to do with their free time.

   
The troubling part of the Edin-Nelson account is that for the men in their study, the relational aspect of fatherhood is not just a complement to being the breadwinner. It has become a replacement.

a seismic shift has occurred in lower-skilled men’s ability and willingness to shoulder the traditional breadwinning responsibilities of the family. According to our story, at the bottom end of the skills distribution we see not just a withdrawal but a headlong retreat — it is nearly a dead run — from the breadwinner role.

Word Association: I say Trump. . .?

June 22, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

A Quinnipiac poll done last month had an item that I hadn’t seen before. The poll had the usual Favorable/Unfavorable  questions about Trump, Paul Ryan, Nancy Pelosi, and others. (Trump’s 35% Favorable / 58% Unfavorable was best in show.) But Quinnipiac then, in Item #9, asked for more specific reactions.

9. What is the first word that comes to mind when you think of Donald Trump? (Numbers are not percentages. Figures show the number of times each response was given. This table reports only words that were mentioned at least five times.)

Here the results. I have sorted them into Favorable and Unfavorable. (Some respondents may have used “president” as a neutral term. After all, even those who think unfavorably of Trump acknowledge that he is in fact the president, and that he is a rich businessman. But I’m going to assume that these all carry positive valences.)

(Click on the chart for a clearer view.)

The sheer numbers – 343 negative to 184 positive – reflect Trump’s unpopularity, of course. But what about the variety? Is this peculiar to Trump? Does he offer so many things to dislike? Or do we just generally have a richer vocabulary of negative adjectives? Is it harder to come up with different ways that we like someone?

Missing Fathers, Missing Jobs

June 21, 2017
Posted by Jay Livingston

“Millions of poor children and teenagers grow up without their biological father.”

Thus David Brooks begins a recent column. As usual, Brooks pays close attention to culture, psychology, and the dynamics of relationships while pretty much ignoring structure and economics.
                                                       
Brooks is correct in saying that the reasons men leave have more to do with the man-woman relationship than with the father-child relationship. Since this happens far more frequently among the poor, most people would probably focus on financial factors – lack of income, lack of jobs, lack of education. 

Not David Brooks. Instead, he focuses on the young man’s ideas.

The fathers often retain a traditional and idealistic “Leave It to Beaver” view of marriage. They dream of the perfect soul mate. They know this woman isn’t it, so they are still looking.

But while the young father is “ stuck in a formless romantic anarchy,” the mother must necessarily be more realistic. The collision dooms the relationship.

Buried in the rigors of motherhood, the women, meanwhile, take a very practical view of what they need in a man: Will this guy provide the financial stability I need, and if not, can I trade up to someone who will? The father begins to perceive the mother as bossy, just another authority figure to be skirted. Run-ins with drugs, the law and other women begin to make him look even more disreputable in her eyes.

Brooks is working from Doing the Best I Can : Fatherhood in the Inner City (2013), by Kathryn Edin and Timothy Jon Nelson, a study of men in Philadelphia and Camden, NJ. The authors note the dismal job market the men face. “By the 1970s, when the new-father ideology first came on the scene, the job prospects of those with no credentials beyond a high school diploma, including in Philadelphia and Camden, were already in free fall.”

Fifty years ago, Elliot Liebow surveyed this same territory – Black streetcorner men in Washington, DC – in Tally’s Corner.  Liebow saw that the central problem in marriages was the man’s inability to, as Brooks says, “provide financial stability.” But unlike Brooks, Liebow looked outward at the labor market for the reasons. The basic fact underyling the men’s lives – as husbands, fathers, friends, and lovers – was that the kinds of jobs that these men could get did not pay enough to allow a man to support a family.

Marriage is an occasion of failure. To stay married is to live with your failure, to be confronted by it day in and day out. It is to live in a world whose standards of manliness are forever beyond one's reach. where one is continuously tested and challenged and continually found wanting.

Or as Herb Gans, at around the same time, put it in his “Reflections on the Moynihan Report”

The Negro man . . .cannot provide  the economic support that. is a principal male function in American society. As a result, the woman becomes the head of the famly, and the man a marginal appendage who deserts or is rejected by his wife.

While work and income remain central to the problem of absentee fathers, other things may have changed. The man on Tally’s Corner in 1963 was, typically, ambivalent about his children, for the child, like the wife, was a reminder of his failure to live up to the role of breadwinner. The man moving in with someone else’s children was more likely to be affectionate towards them than towards his own biological children.

To soften this failure, and to lessen the damage to his public and self-esteem, he pushes the children away from him saying, in effect, “I’m not even trying to be your father so now I can't be blamed for failing to accomplish what rm not trying to do.”

According to Edin and Nelson, a cultural shift at all levels of US society has allowed men to have a different reaction to their children. I hope to take up in a later post.