Recently Talking Points Memo posted a 1960s coloring book sent in by a reader, who found it among her grandmother’s things. The coloring book, New Frontier, mocks John F. Kennedy and a number of his policies.
What’s fascinating is how closely some of the arguments in it match rhetoric in the presidential debate today. There’s concern that the President’s programs — in this case, Medicare — will negatively affect the quality of medical care, inserting the federal government between patients and doctors:
And an association with Harvard advisors was worthy of scorn then, too:
Another accuses Kennedy of attacking business at the expense of dealing competently with external national security threats:
It’s an interesting reminder that many of the attacks we see against President Obama today aren’t new; there’s the newest round in an ongoing struggle about social policies and political priorities.
Americans are familiar with seeing the phrase “In God We Trust” on our paper money. The motto is, indeed, the official United States motto. It wasn’t always that way, however. While efforts to have the phrase inscribed on U.S. currency began during the Civil War, it wasn’t until 1957 that it appeared on our paper money, thanks to a law signed by President Eisenhower.
The motto wasn’t simply added in order to please God-fearing Americans, but instead had a political motivation. The mid- to late-1950s marked an escalation in the Cold War between the U.S., the Soviet Union, and their respective allies. In an effort to claim moral superiority and demonize the communist Soviet Union, the U.S. drew on the association of communism with atheism. Placing “In God We Trust” on the U.S. dollar was a way to establish the United States as a Christian nation and differentiate them from their enemy (source).
Earlier this year a University of Wisconsin-Madison student at a fraternity house yelled racial slurs and threw a glass bottle at two Black female students. The story is reported in the Wisconsin State Journal with the following title:
Notice that race isn’t mentioned, but alcohol is. This makes no sense. The March 23rd article is about an instance of racial harassment that occurred on March 16th. The “alcohol incident” was old news; it had happened six months earlier in September. Why is the old news the headline?
This wasn’t on purpose, was it?
It looks that way.
Reader Nils G. pointed out that the URL of the article reveals that there was a decision to change the title of the article from one that focused on race to one that focused on alcohol. When you’re posting an article, the program automatically creates a URL using the first title you choose. If you later change the title, the URL stays the same. The URL of this article?: ”UW Fraternity Temporarily Suspended for Racial Incident.”
So, there was a choice to change the impact of this article from one that put race front-and-center to one about (frat) boys being (drunken frat) boys. We can only speculate about why.
Many of you may have seen a video featuring Reverend William Barber speaking out against North Carolina’s Amendment One, which banned same-sex marriages (and which was approved by voters on Tuesday). The video is heartfelt and passionate, and is also a great example of the importance of how we frame issues in social movements.
Reverend Barber argues that media coverage of the amendment has asked the wrong questions. Whether same-sex couples should be allowed to get married isn’t the core issue here, he says; what’s really at stake is whether the majority should get to vote on which rights will be guaranteed to those in the minority, a decision he sees as a dangerous standard in a nation that has used it previously to exclude racial/ethnic minorities, women, and the poor from the full benefits and protections of citizenship. This reframes the amendment from an issue about same-sex marriages to a broader question about rights, equal protection, and the dangers of codifying inequality into our governing documents:
Jacob and Isabella were the most popular baby names last year. Some observers, even some sociologists, see this as the influence of the Twilight series. (See here for example.)
But Jacob, Isabella, and even Bella were on the rise well before Stephanie Meyer sent her similarly-named characters out to capture the hearts, minds, and naming preferences of romantic adolescents:
The forecasters predict a bumper crop soon in Rue, Cato, and perhaps other names that are from the Hunger series. Still, since the YA (Young Adult) audience for these books and movies are more Y than A, I’m hoping for lag time of at least a few years before they start naming babies. As I blogger earlier, Splash, the film with Darryl Hannah as Madison the mermaid, came out in 1984, but it was not until nine years later that Madison surfaced in the top 100 names. And if there’s a Hogwarts effect, we’re still waiting to see it. The trend in Harry and Harold is downward on both sides of the Atlantic, and Hermione has yet to break into the top 1000.
Don’t look for any Katnisses to be showing up in your classes for quite a while.
@Thom82 tweeted a photograph of a parking space at Ikea. By “family friendly,” I assume they mean people with kids. By coupling the phrase with the image, however, it defines the family as a heterosexual, nuclear one with 2.0 children. People without kids? Not a family. Single people with kids? Not a family. Best friends who support each other? Not a family. Sorry 80% of people in the U.S. who aren’t married with kids, you’re not a family.
But seriously. It’s not a big deal, all things considered. But, when you add it to all the other little reminders, it leaves little doubt as to whose families really count.
This 48-second ad is a fantastic example of framing, as well as a super-ridiculous blast-from-the-past. Paid for by the movie theater industry, the ad attacks the idea of cable. Cable, of course, was going to deliver more content to television sets and potentially compete for the business movie theaters enjoyed. So they frame cable as “pay tv” and counterpose it to “free tv.” They don’t, you might notice, frame cable as “pay tv” and the movie theaters as “pay movies” because that comparison is not as useful for them. Instead, without drawing attention to the fact that they charge for entertainment, they try to delegitimate the idea of paying for on-screen entertainment at home.
They also try to argue that cable tv will bring scary monsters into your living room. So cute. In an era where millions of instances of pornifed violence are just a click away, it is almost incomprehensible to imagine wanting to make sure that scary movies stayed at the theater.
Sociological Images encourages people to exercise and develop their sociological imaginations with discussions of compelling visuals that span the breadth of sociological inquiry. Read more...
