Trying out an image.

No time for a post, but I'm testing out the methods of linking to a Flickr photo.

Cinderalla Story?

Like many other people who walk this planet, I too well up a bit when I see Susan Boyle, that unemployed frumpy English spinster who shambled onto the stage of a British television show a couple years ago, faced a scornfully uppity audience, and then turned jeers into cheers within the first verse of her “I Dreamed a Dream.”  What’s not to like?  Her story has all the appearances of a modern-day Cinderella.  A musical Rocky who triumphs against the odds.  The rock that was once cast aside has become the cornerstone.

                I’d like very much to just leave it at that.  But there does seem to be another dimension to the Boyle story—especially that first public appearance that now has over 58 million hits on YouTube—and  this other dimension doesn’t entirely fit the Cinderella template.  In the case of Cinderella and Rocky--the classic underdogs--the audience is always on the side of the outsider.  What else is the wicked stepmother for if not to give us a pretty significant hint right from the get-go that we should cast our lot with the downtrodden and nurture our benevolent suspicions that the forces of poetic justice will turn the tables before all is said and done? 

                That’s not exactly the way Susan Boyle’s drama plays out.  In the Britain’s Got Talent spot, the audience is both the wicked stepmother and then, in a sudden flash, the faithful confidante of the downtrodden.  On display in that video is Miss Boyle’s crystal voice, but so is our remarkable capacity to, at one moment, indulge in the pleasure of demeaning someone who is comically vulnerable—and, fess up, there is pleasure to be had there—and then, when the situation alters, recast ourselves as the champions of the outsider.  Truth be told, we have the ability to pull this off so abruptly that it’s startling that we all don’t all settle to bed most days with nasty cases of whiplash.

                At least we’re in good company.   I suspect just about everyone is familiar with that very similar sudden reformation that utterly transforms a dog, from tail to snout.  One minute it’s all bark and threat and fang, and then the moment that Muttly figures he can’t win the battle, the head drops, the tail wags, and aggression turns into the kind of eager social invitation that risks embarrassment, like a kindergarten kid offering his classmates a dollar to be friends.

                If my tone sounds disparaging, it's not out of any contempt for our canine sistren and brethren.  Little could be further from the case.  But my affection for dogs isn’t enthusiastic enough to render me fully blind to the deficits in their character.  Unfortunately, neither is my own egotism sufficient to keep me from seeing bits of myself in the uncanny canine capacity for conversion.  What's more, those patterns also seem to be writ large in our national politics.  What, for example, lies behind Barack Obama’s recent swings in approval ratings, hitting 68% about a year ago, then dropping to 43% around election time—when attack adds fill our collective consciousness—and then unaccountably rising back to 50% according to Gallup surveys?

                Maybe there’s some part of us that actually likes the drama of the swing, some part that enjoys the dizzying pleasure of moving our positions and that isn’t much troubled by inconsistency.  So we build celebrities, and we tear them down.  Or maybe we’re always negotiating the best way to be on top, forever calculating and recalculating whom to be for and whom to be against.  Maybe the winning is all.

First Notes from an Underdog

                It’s difficult to say with any confidence what direction this blog will ultimately take, but I can say something about the ideas that have shaped its beginnings.  A couple years ago, I was driving my humble car somewhere in southwest Ohio, which is where I’ve lived for the better part of a decade, and an odd tidbit of a news story reported that some sociologists had taken up the dreadfully important and long-neglected work of assessing the life expectancy movie stars, more specifically those stars who have been nominated for an Oscar as well as those who have actually managed to take that prestigious golden icon home and rest it on their grand pianos.  (I draw this picture partly from experience.  I do know someone talented and fortunate enough to have actually waltzed home with an Emmy—close enough to an Oscar in my world—and who did in fact rest it on a baby grand.  Mind you that no one living in that house or in any reasonable proximity to that residence actually plays the piano, but, mercy, what better way to showcase such a rare thing.) 

The odd findings from this analysis just won’t leave me alone:  according to our best statisticians, the minute you put your hands on an Oscar, squeeze it to your chest, and launch into your acceptance speech, you have just added four years to your life.  Put less descriptively, Oscar winners live four years longer on average than their sullen peers whose distinction extends no further beyond being one of the four or five who had a shot at the high prize.  The Status Syndrome, a book by epidemiologist Michael Marmot, offers a little more insight into what this means:  adding four years onto a life is the equivalent to living in a society that has cured cancer and heart disease.

Are we all really that status hungry?  I’d like to think not, but it’s hard to fight the facts on this one.  Marmot’s book makes a pretty convincing case that our health, our quality of life, and our longevity has strong ties to the pecking order, and on some level, we seem to be aware of this dread significance because many of us spend much of our day immersed in activities that usually have some connection to pecking our way to some kind of prominence or other.  True enough.  But it’s also more complicated than chickens, and that “pecking order” metaphors shows strain after some small thought.  Unlike chickens, human beings are complex and contradictory enough to juggle more than one order at any given time, to invoke various hierarchies when we think about “placing” ourselves.  There’s the money pecking order, the beauty pecking order, the educational, occupational, and ecclesiastical pecking order (the best usual having some correspondence to the predicament we find ourselves in).  Pecking orders get defined by our affiliations with nations, sports teams, political parties, and hobies. Knock us down a peg on one order, and we’ll quickly assert our preeminence on another.  Many others.

So it’s all a muddle, but it’s a muddle we negotiate all the time on some level—and by gosh, I’m trying to look smart in this posting and failing to do so with each self-conscious thought that emerges.  If  Marmot and his sort are right, it’s a muddle with real consequences.  Seems worth thinking about.

And worth thinking about from the sidelines or from the bottom up, from the underdog’s subordinate place next to the dinner table where paws are not allowed to venture.  That’s the hope of this blog.

So I’ll take it on as the underdog, though this is not the name that my parents provided.  They did provide me a home and the accouterments associated with the middle class way of life.  The did send me to college—some years ago now—at a small, religiously affiliated liberal arts university in Cleveland.  Now, after attending a large state school in the South, I’m teaching a small, religiously affiliated liberal arts university in the southeast part of the Ohio.  Coming home again—almost.  And this will be my turf for thinking about pecking orders, how we win and lose by them, play with them, maybe invert them, all the while thirsting for our own Oscar.