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.
