Having a Stupid Idea Doesn't Make You a Bad Person
I first heard about this from Atrios.
Many of the lefty bloggers that I read are smart folks, whose ability to write multiple long, literate posts a day I often envy. But they're not perfect, and this is an example of that. In fact, I just as often worry about the nit-pickery in which we engage being just as problematic as that deployed against Clinton and Gore. Additionally, there's a disconnect between, on the one hand, bloggers' bemoaning the mainstream media's own complaints about blogging being not-journalism – the bemoaning argument often comprising two parts: (A.) we're not journalists, we're just people with blogs (Kos has written this, but the DailyKos search function apparently doesn't search the contents of postings, so no link), and (B.) such journalism as we do is better than much mainstream journalism (I oversimplify, but read my damn post!) – and, on the other hand, bashing other bloggers when they post something that isn't of paper-news (or, in this case, peer-reviewed—journal) quality.
People have dumb ideas. In fact, probably most ideas that anyone has are dumb. But in order for "natural selection" to select them out of the idea pool, they actually have to be put in said pool. Some people can't see an idea from all angles until it's outside of their brain. Even then, other people often point out things about your ideas that would never have occurred to you in a million years. People must be allowed to have dumb ideas. We should be worried about right action, not right thinking.
Then, too, there's the matter of context. For all of the blogosphere's concern with History, history often seems not to register. Take Pope Ratzi's faux pas last year. You'd think he set out to discuss faith & reason and went looking† for an Islam-insulting quotation to use. In fact, he had been reading some stuff for another reason, and the quotation that included the Islam-insult sent him off on the faith & reason tangent, to which the Islam-insulting sentence was itself tangential. Some criticized him for not using a better quotation to make his point, but that actually misses said point: the quotation was the starting point of his idea. The quotation came first.
Likewise, in the thing that motivated this posting and to which I am slowly but surely coming around, if you read it, you find it's part diary, part idea. And the idea is barely worthy of the name; it's more of a musing, a thinking-out-loud, an idea that could certainly do with greater consideration but wasn't important enough to the writer to receive it. (We all have those kinds of ideas.) It is hardly "passionate," unless there's been quite a lot of 'passion deflation' lately (which I wouldn't summarily dismiss, given Christina Aguilera's and Justin Timberlake's impression that society is too prudish).
Slogging onwards: I don't really know who James Lileks is. The name sounds vaguely familiar, and from the post that started this all, it sounds like he's a newspaper columnist. I'd never heard of his blog before this. So there's the disclosure.
This is what he wrote that began it. First, there's a long 1943 ad for single-serving boxes of cereal that basically says eating them at home is as cool as eating them on the train [the airliner of the time]; and, of course, the ad shows a black train steward in a white coat (as do photos of train wait staff of the time). Then he writes:
I don't know if he got mail that said it, but he certainly got blog postings that did. I sent him an email, with the subject "Not going to accuse you of missing Jim Crow." I think it's not bad, so here it is.
***
The radio and television characters to which you refer were characters in broadcast programs, which were meant to make money, which was done by attracting audiences, &c., &c. So I don’t think one can fairly consider them to offer "idealized" representations of any social ideal, unless you want to argue that the sitcoms of today portray, e.g., the ideal interaction between parents and children. They were entertainment, many of them were comedies, and they were trying to get laughs. I don't think one can say, as you do, that these shows "pretended [inequality] didn't really exist," except on the surface. In the case of the sassy domestic servant, the joke depended upon the audience's knowledge (and acceptance — otherwise it'd have been satire, which it usually wasn't) of real-world inequality between servant and employer. Social inversion is a comedic strategy of long standing. Remember the old Greek ideas about tragedy and comedy, both relying upon the hubris of the protagonist but differing in the social status of the protagonist: tragedy involved the fall of the aristocrat, comedy of the peasant. The shows pushed beyond the limits of what was socially acceptable in the real world, and that is part of what made them funny. The "idealized equality" you hypothesize was part of the joke. As a counterexample, consider the failure of Nat 'King' Cole's TV show, because how dare he hang with white folks in a classy way? It cost him viewers, which cost the advertisers, which killed the show. Really, the only way that black servants could be "fully integrated into the family" and be accepted by the audience was to make a joke out of it. To do it seriously would have been subversive. And sass is funny — unless you're the one receiving it. In real life it flirts with rudeness and isn't often tolerated except in jest, even among real members of the same family. Thus, sassiness in the relationship between characters marked it as a gag relationship rather than a nod to equality.
So whether "Birdie was fully integrated into the family, and shared the same values" in the Gildersleeve shows doesn't necessarily speak to actual society; and even if it did, it's unclear to me what the significance would have been — as long as there has been a middle class, it has thought that its manners and mores should be adopted by everyone, anyway. So it's not just a question of who the shows were being made for, but by whom they were being made, which would largely be the same white middle-class audience. The thing is, there're the servants, and whatever they may have wanted, too. To what extent was being "integrated into the family, and shar[ing] the same values" just a practical part of one's role as a servant? In Katherine Anne Porter's short stories, the white folks are surprised and dismayed to find that their servants don't think of themselves as part of the family. So in that sense Gildersleeve probably did represent the ideal society in that Whitey thought of blacks as aspiring to be like them; but then you run into the problem of privileging some people's ideals over others'.
If you consider the white housekeepers in "Meet Me in St. Louis" and "The Brady Bunch," who weren't nearly as sassy as their black counterparts, a couple of other points emerge. First, there was less impropriety in a white servant being friendly with her white employers. Second, the existence of strong class divisions can paradoxically provide for easier interpersonal relations between individuals: being friendly towards a subordinate does not threaten one's own position; or if you're the subordinate, a friendly working relationship is much more desireable than an unfriendly one. But, again, Alice and Katie were TV/movie characters whose role included serving as foils.
And then there's the influence of gender roles....
___________
† Those illiterates in Michigan who put out the annual list of words and phrases that they think should be suppressed are too pedantic even for me. What brings this up? Their poorly argued opposition to the phrase "gone missing," which came to mind just now when I typed "gone looking."
Many of the lefty bloggers that I read are smart folks, whose ability to write multiple long, literate posts a day I often envy. But they're not perfect, and this is an example of that. In fact, I just as often worry about the nit-pickery in which we engage being just as problematic as that deployed against Clinton and Gore. Additionally, there's a disconnect between, on the one hand, bloggers' bemoaning the mainstream media's own complaints about blogging being not-journalism – the bemoaning argument often comprising two parts: (A.) we're not journalists, we're just people with blogs (Kos has written this, but the DailyKos search function apparently doesn't search the contents of postings, so no link), and (B.) such journalism as we do is better than much mainstream journalism (I oversimplify, but read my damn post!) – and, on the other hand, bashing other bloggers when they post something that isn't of paper-news (or, in this case, peer-reviewed—journal) quality.
People have dumb ideas. In fact, probably most ideas that anyone has are dumb. But in order for "natural selection" to select them out of the idea pool, they actually have to be put in said pool. Some people can't see an idea from all angles until it's outside of their brain. Even then, other people often point out things about your ideas that would never have occurred to you in a million years. People must be allowed to have dumb ideas. We should be worried about right action, not right thinking.
Then, too, there's the matter of context. For all of the blogosphere's concern with History, history often seems not to register. Take Pope Ratzi's faux pas last year. You'd think he set out to discuss faith & reason and went looking† for an Islam-insulting quotation to use. In fact, he had been reading some stuff for another reason, and the quotation that included the Islam-insult sent him off on the faith & reason tangent, to which the Islam-insulting sentence was itself tangential. Some criticized him for not using a better quotation to make his point, but that actually misses said point: the quotation was the starting point of his idea. The quotation came first.
Likewise, in the thing that motivated this posting and to which I am slowly but surely coming around, if you read it, you find it's part diary, part idea. And the idea is barely worthy of the name; it's more of a musing, a thinking-out-loud, an idea that could certainly do with greater consideration but wasn't important enough to the writer to receive it. (We all have those kinds of ideas.) It is hardly "passionate," unless there's been quite a lot of 'passion deflation' lately (which I wouldn't summarily dismiss, given Christina Aguilera's and Justin Timberlake's impression that society is too prudish).
Slogging onwards: I don't really know who James Lileks is. The name sounds vaguely familiar, and from the post that started this all, it sounds like he's a newspaper columnist. I'd never heard of his blog before this. So there's the disclosure.
This is what he wrote that began it. First, there's a long 1943 ad for single-serving boxes of cereal that basically says eating them at home is as cool as eating them on the train [the airliner of the time]; and, of course, the ad shows a black train steward in a white coat (as do photos of train wait staff of the time). Then he writes:
Note the opening premise: We’re not traveling anymore. That was a given. Everyone got it, and everyone knew why. [The war, in case you can't figure it out.]
The Steward was one of those peculiar archetypes of American apartheid — along with the Porter and the Maid. Unlike the domestic servant, though, he contained no sass. Think Uncle Ben: big toothy smile, yassir. Domestic servants, however, were allowed a great deal of sass — listen to the old Great Gildersleeve shows, and you get a perfect picture of the popular idea of this idealized relationship. Gildy is henpecked and outdone by all his domestic associates, but the only person who comes across with any degree of pride or level-headedness is Birdie, the servant, and Gildy’s relationship to her is one of kindness and deference. You could say that’s easy: she didn’t count, so it was easy to be nice to her. But that’s wrong. There was a fundamental decency and mutual affection in their relationship. Yes, yes, idealized depiction of inherent inequalities, etc. As the argument no doubt goes, the shows perpetuated inequality by pretending they really didn’t exist. But it’s instructive to note what the popular culture held out as the ideal. Equality, not subjegation. Birdie was fully integrated into the family, and shared the same values. Nowadays I suspect a sitcom with a Black servant in a middle-class family would milk the clash of cultures, not the similarities. Wanda Sykes would star.
I am now bracing for the mail that accuses me of missing the days of Jim Crow. Whatever.
I don't know if he got mail that said it, but he certainly got blog postings that did. I sent him an email, with the subject "Not going to accuse you of missing Jim Crow." I think it's not bad, so here it is.
***
The radio and television characters to which you refer were characters in broadcast programs, which were meant to make money, which was done by attracting audiences, &c., &c. So I don’t think one can fairly consider them to offer "idealized" representations of any social ideal, unless you want to argue that the sitcoms of today portray, e.g., the ideal interaction between parents and children. They were entertainment, many of them were comedies, and they were trying to get laughs. I don't think one can say, as you do, that these shows "pretended [inequality] didn't really exist," except on the surface. In the case of the sassy domestic servant, the joke depended upon the audience's knowledge (and acceptance — otherwise it'd have been satire, which it usually wasn't) of real-world inequality between servant and employer. Social inversion is a comedic strategy of long standing. Remember the old Greek ideas about tragedy and comedy, both relying upon the hubris of the protagonist but differing in the social status of the protagonist: tragedy involved the fall of the aristocrat, comedy of the peasant. The shows pushed beyond the limits of what was socially acceptable in the real world, and that is part of what made them funny. The "idealized equality" you hypothesize was part of the joke. As a counterexample, consider the failure of Nat 'King' Cole's TV show, because how dare he hang with white folks in a classy way? It cost him viewers, which cost the advertisers, which killed the show. Really, the only way that black servants could be "fully integrated into the family" and be accepted by the audience was to make a joke out of it. To do it seriously would have been subversive. And sass is funny — unless you're the one receiving it. In real life it flirts with rudeness and isn't often tolerated except in jest, even among real members of the same family. Thus, sassiness in the relationship between characters marked it as a gag relationship rather than a nod to equality.
So whether "Birdie was fully integrated into the family, and shared the same values" in the Gildersleeve shows doesn't necessarily speak to actual society; and even if it did, it's unclear to me what the significance would have been — as long as there has been a middle class, it has thought that its manners and mores should be adopted by everyone, anyway. So it's not just a question of who the shows were being made for, but by whom they were being made, which would largely be the same white middle-class audience. The thing is, there're the servants, and whatever they may have wanted, too. To what extent was being "integrated into the family, and shar[ing] the same values" just a practical part of one's role as a servant? In Katherine Anne Porter's short stories, the white folks are surprised and dismayed to find that their servants don't think of themselves as part of the family. So in that sense Gildersleeve probably did represent the ideal society in that Whitey thought of blacks as aspiring to be like them; but then you run into the problem of privileging some people's ideals over others'.
If you consider the white housekeepers in "Meet Me in St. Louis" and "The Brady Bunch," who weren't nearly as sassy as their black counterparts, a couple of other points emerge. First, there was less impropriety in a white servant being friendly with her white employers. Second, the existence of strong class divisions can paradoxically provide for easier interpersonal relations between individuals: being friendly towards a subordinate does not threaten one's own position; or if you're the subordinate, a friendly working relationship is much more desireable than an unfriendly one. But, again, Alice and Katie were TV/movie characters whose role included serving as foils.
And then there's the influence of gender roles....
___________
† Those illiterates in Michigan who put out the annual list of words and phrases that they think should be suppressed are too pedantic even for me. What brings this up? Their poorly argued opposition to the phrase "gone missing," which came to mind just now when I typed "gone looking."
posted by Dr. Bubbles at 09:53
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home