In the article, they point out that the press has widely referred to President Obama as the “Sports President.” While Obama, no doubt, enjoys watching sports, filling out March Madness brackets, and playing pick-up hoops, he is probably also aware that cultivating this image may reap political rewards by enhancing his likability or relatability with the public. This may explain why he was willing recently to sit down with The Sports Guy, Bill Simmons, for an extended interview about all things athletic.

Kyle and Doug rightly critique the assertion that Obama is the first “Sports President.” Appreciation of sports and athleticism have long been requisite interests for American Presidents. As they write, “The celebration of Obama seems to be a case of collective amnesia … if we peruse the historical archives, it seems almost every president was hailed [as the Sports President].”

Here’s where I disagree a bit. Though he’s certainly not the first “Sports President,” I think Obama might be the first “ESPN President” or “SportsCenter President.” Of course, ESPN existed under Clinton and W. Bush. But Obama hit his 20s just as ESPN was founded. So, he was the core age demographic for the network in its first two decades of its existence. To the extent that ESPN changed sports culture, it seems like Obama is the first President to be a part of that new culture.

Now, what is the sports culture created by ESPN? I’m not sure I can pinpoint it and would love to know about research that has tackled that question. It seems to me that among the biggest changes wrought by ESPN is that fans can easily be far more knowledgeable about a whole range of sports. No longer a Mets fan or even a baseball fan, many people today (especially men) can be “sports guys,” interested in and knowledgeable about more players, more teams, and more sporting activities. ESPN has also been a leading proponent of more complex statistical analysis of sports and stats-based gaming like March Madness and online Fantasy sports leagues. Finally, ESPN also seems to have bridged the gap between sports and other pop culture. With their trademark snarky asides and references to movies and TV, they have changed the fabric of sports culture, making it more playful and, perhaps, more widely accessible.

Update: In a funny coincidence, Doug Hartmann and I posted on the same set of issues within a seconds of each other. Read his take here!

Though there are many divisions within sociology, one I have personally experienced is how utterly bizarre ASA is to a faculty member at a small liberal arts college. For most of us at SLACs, we’re more likely to apply Marx, Durkheim, and Weber to contemporary social problems than we are to be aware of the latest issue of ASR or AJS. We are deeply invested in the learning and lives of our students and course releases are unthinkable. Big NSF grants and the latest greatest modeling techniques using Stata or R seem like a foreign language. At ASA, as we encounter our grad school buddies who now work at research schools, we listen to their insider gossip and stories of whiz-kid grad students with a mixture of awe and self-conscious insecurity. For many SLAC faculty members, ASA is a project in sense-making. All too often, we are painfully aware of our own marginality within the discipline.

Don’t go feeling bad for us. Speaking for myself, I love that I am a teacher first and foremost. I’d rather talk with colleagues and enthusiastic young people about contemporary politics than contemplate the results of multi-level models. But life at a SLAC is a different world of sociology than life at a R1.

For many of us teachers, David Brooks is a regular figure in our brand of sociology. He’s not someone who we read merely for leisure whose columns exist quite apart from our work. He is someone who tends to misrepresent scientific findings and sociological theory to buttress often conservative opinions that would steer American society away from social justice and equality. Being disgusted with the latest David Brooks column really means something to us. So, when ASA gave him an award, it felt like one more sign of how marginal we are.

And it’s not just SLAC or community college faculty. The same holds true for many sociologists who study gender, racial, and class inequalities as well as some qualitative researchers who feel marginalized in Top Journal Sociology. The boos at the awards ceremony were not truly aimed at Brooks. They were aimed at ASA for picking him. They voiced greivance and resentment over a feeling of alienation within sociology. The boos speak not so much to the Left-leaning ideology of the discipline (which, let’s face it, is longstanding), but to the stratification within it.

Now, I personally believe in a sociology that is scientific and seeks the truth absent of political ideology (not one in which sociology courses are indoctrination sessions). But I also believe in a sociology where questions spring forth from deeply-held values and one where we use our findings to pursue a more informed, democratic, and just society. I think David Brooks believes more or less the same, even if he is less scientifically rigorous and arrives at some different conclusions. We shouldn’t have booed him, but if ASA more fully represented all sociologists, I doubt he would’ve received the award.

But it wasn’t always that way. In a deeply disquieting chapter from Joe Feagin and Robert Parker’s Building American Cities: The Urban Real Estate Game, they describe the ways in which the “auto-oil-rubber industrial complex” worked tirelessly to disrupt the extensive systems of electrically-operated mass transit developed in most American cities between the 1880s and 1940s. In just one example, Feagin and Parker tell the story of how Los Angeles went from having more than a thousand miles of trolley car track and 2,800 scheduled runs a day in the early 1920s to having a system based on diesel buses in the 1940s due to systematic efforts by General Motors, Firestone Tires, and Standard Oil. GM was ultimately convicted in federal court of conspiring to convert trolley systems to diesel buses — the sales of which GM had a monopoly on.

And now, here’s the VP of the very same company, saying that we need to raise gas prices. Lutz believes that it will be affordable once we have a full range of fuel efficient hybrid cars. But maybe we should all be even more excited about the coming of high speed rail.

Click here to view the embedded video.

Orwell begins with the claim that culture differences between nations are big and meaningful: “Till recently it was thought proper to pretend that all human beings are very much alike, but in fact anyone able to use his eyes knows that the average of human behaviour differs enormously from country to country … Things that could happen in one country could not happen in another. Hitler’s June purge, for instance, could not have happened in England.”

This sort of claim remains controversial today. Browning’s Ordinary Men argued that the Holocaust wasn’t based on intrinsic characteristics of the German people, while Goldhagen’s Hitler’s Willing Executioners countered with just the opposite claim. Today, we often hear much about the immutable cultural differences between Americans and Europeans (“Americans live to work, European work to live”). Advocates of a single payer system of health care have repeatedly been told that such a system would never be accepted in the United States. Tom Friedman wrote just this Sunday about how a $1 gas tax should be, but is not up for debate in the U.S. (despite sky-high gas taxes in European countries). The mandatory religious rhetoric in any American political speech (e.g., “God Bless America”) would be the cause of scandal in Europe.

While such limitations on political speech and manner of living are profound burdens, Orwell also claims that being a member of a national culture is, ultimately, meaningful to each of us. “And above all, it is your civilization, it is you. However much you hate it or laugh at it, you will never be happy away from it for any length of time … Good or evil, it is yours, you belong to it, and this side the grave you will never get away from the marks that it has given you.”

Though we might threaten to leave (if Bush is elected in 2004) and though the vile racism and hatred and ugly nationalism at town halls and “tea party” events might disgust us, America will always feel like a home to those of us who were raised here. We breathe easier in the air we’re accustomed to. Talking loudly while eating a slice of pizza and walking down a city block, the choice of sixteen varieties of mustard in the grocery store, and the simple pleasure of a gas-guzzling muscle car and an open road are, for better or for worse, things that feel like home.

“Yes,” says Orwell, “there is something distinctive and recognizable in English civilization. It is a culture as individual as that of Spain. It is somehow bound up with solid breakfasts and gloomy Sundays, smoky towns and winding roads, green fields and red pillar-boxes. It has a flavour of its own.”

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes about the continuing legacy of the rice paddy for Asian cultures, the “culture of honor” in the American South, and the significance of hierarchy in Korean society. To be sure, our nations and our cultures constrain our behavior and even our ways of thinking. But perhaps perversely, the very culture that limits us also comforts us.

In exchange donors get rewards from the project planners. If it’s a band, maybe you’ll get a sticker for a $5 donation, a digital copy of their album for $10, and a live performance at your house for $1000. The rewards depend on the project.

It occurs to me that this would be a fantastic way to fund research. It would mean that research was conducted for which there was genuinely popular demand. Maybe the public wants an ethnography of transgendered cowboys in the rodeo circuit, but has little interest in funding a survey on TV viewing habits. It would mean research went forward that matters to people.

Heck, I’d put one of my own future projects up there for funding, but I’m not sure what rewards I can offer. What’s the limit on how many people you can thank in a journal article’s acknowledgement?

Here’s what I’ve been able to pick up so far:
-It is a widely repeated or imitated cultural idea, image, or practice.
-It supposedly acts in a manner similar to a gene, in the sense that through vast repetitions, more environmentally “fit” versions of the meme gain greater sticking power.
-With reference to the Internet, it often just means “fad.”

Some questions I have:
-Aren’t we just talking about the social reproduction of culture here — something that happens in everyday socialization?
-What is the unit of a “meme?” How does one delineate the parameters of a “meme” within a sea of culture?
-What on earth would make us think that culture is evolutionary, rather than just constantly changing without particular order?
-Isn’t the word “meme” just an attempt to make discussions of culture sound more sciencey?

So, here are a loose collection of my observations:

-My employer, Concordia College, canceled classes yesterday and today not because of any risk, but simply so that students and staff could help with the flood preparation. Moreover, the administration sent out a message on Saturday saying that all students were expected to show up at 9 am on Sunday to volunteer. Now, I’m very impressed with Concordia’s great expectations for their students, but, frankly, I’m stunned. I have great pride in my alma mater, but I know they would never, ever say that they expected (encouraged, maybe) students to do anything on a weekend –nevermind the intense manual labor of sandbagging and dike-building. I’ve been considering what might explain the difference between the two and find it difficult to say. Is it a Midwestern thing? Is it a social capital thing derived from Concordia’s status as a relatively homogeneous, Lutheran-affiliated school? Is it because Skidmore students tend to have a higher class status and approach college with a consumer model?

-The organization of sandbagging is remarkable. They have developed Sandbag Central (pictured here),

Sandbag Central

-The rhetoric of the flood and dike-building is fascinating. Though no human life is at risk, during the entire week leading up to the flood, residents have anticipated it with immense fear and growing panic. I would dare say that some of my fellow volunteers even got a pleasurable rush from the emergency scenario. On my first shuttle bus, I was seated next to a bunch of college guys (not Concordia students!) who had done shots of Jager before showing up to build dikes and had no shortage of homophobic puns about the activity. At the actual dike-building site, there was no expert or official clearly in charge, so there was hyper-masculine jostling for a leadership role. Volunteers got into minor squabbles about the proper method of laying sandbags, engaged in unnecessary demonstrations of manly strength, and attempted to out-veteran each other (“You may have been here for 1997, but let me tell you, I was here for the ’73 flood”). There was also an overwhelming sentiment that real success was achieved by common folks, not by the government. “This is how houses get saved, not by the government spending money — and that’s all they know how to do.” By contrast, I think in a similar situation in New York City, there would be much greater trust in the government, but also a sense of entitlement that it was the responsibility of the government to protect us.

-Though I can’t say I enjoyed the presence of my fellow volunteers, the strength of the community and the willingness to help unseen strangers was very inspiring. And it hearkens back to a sort of society that Robert Putnam claims died off half a century ago.

Of course, like many of the media management tactics that administration employed, the policy itself pre-dates George W. Bush’s arrival in D.C. The ban was put into place during his father’s tenure in the White House, but was never fully enforced until the invasion of Afghanistan in 2001. For journalists already accustomed to the notoriously secretive ways of the second Bush administration, it was no surprise that they would deny access to such politically powerful images. Many of Bush’s advisors, including Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld, felt strongly that images of soldiers’ coffins had turned public opinion against the Vietnam War and hoped to avoid a similar result in the current conflicts. Less than a year into Bush’s first term and already known for their ability to shape media storylines with a vice-like grip on information (starkly contrasting the leaky Clinton White House), the administration officials surprised no one by restricting access.

Nonetheless, from the Pentagon’s perspective, the increased enforcement of the ban on such images marked a reversal of a larger trend. I have written elsewhere about the history of media-military relations, but, in short, military officials felt that journalists had far too much free reign in the conflicts of Vietnam and, much more recently, Somalia. Such independence, they believed, had led to largely negative coverage. In an impulsive leap to the other extreme, the Pentagon stowed journalists in pressrooms in Kuwait during the first Gulf War – an arrangement reporters and media outlets bitterly decried. For the 2003 invasion of Iraq (and to a limited extent in Afghanistan), the Pentagon introduced its controversial media embedding program, allowing journalists to attach themselves to units.

Importantly, this strategy was the exact opposite of their domestic media strategy. Rather than block media access altogether, they gave the press in-depth access to soldiers and military units, while at the same time, successfully steering them away from covering the consequences of the invasion for the civilian population. Though the embedding program was as successful a media management tactic as the secrecy in D.C., it did not breed the same sort of resentment in journalists as it provided them with fascinating (albeit one-sided) coverage. For this reason, it was the better strategy: shape the coverage, but leave them happy.

In some ways, we should question why the Bush administration didn’t reform the soldier coffin ban themselves, employing the lessons of their international media strategy with the domestic press. Rather than blocking images (which only generated more interest from the press), why didn’t the administration encourage the Pentagon to arrange sessions with vetted pro-invasion military families who would speak of the importance of the sacrifice their son or daughter made? Perhaps, they feel the image of dead Americans on U.S. soil would simply unpalatable to the American public. Returning to the current administration, the question for the future will be whether they are ushering in a legitimate age of transparency and broader media access, or if they’ve simply learned a lesson about savvy media management from their predecessors.

Back in 1994–that Reality Bites, Kurt Cobain year–the show wanted to explain people in their 20s to themselves: the aimlessness, the cappuccino drinking, the feeling that you were, you know, “always stuck in second gear.” It soon wisely toned down its voice-of-a-generation aspirations and became a comedy about pals and lovers who suffered comic misunderstandings and got pet monkeys. But it stuck with one theme. Being part of Gen X may not mean you had a goatee or were in a grunge band; it did, however, mean there was a good chance that your family was screwed up and that you feared it had damaged you.

This quote particularly resonated with me, despite the fact that I was 13 in 1994 and not a late 20-something. Ever since, the concept of generations has been gnawing at me. According to Strauss and Howe’s Generations, Generation Xers were born between 1961 and 1981. Defined by being the first post-Baby Boom generation, Gen X has lived in the shadow of the 60s generation and, in general, has seen less success and prosperity than their parents despite coming of age in the generally prosperous 80s and 90s. For many children of divorce in Gen. X, like the characters on Friends, they were reluctant to marry at a young age. I was born in the final year of Gen X and the cultural stuff of coffee shops, goatees, and grunge rock were aspirational — not lived experiences — for me and my peers. If Generation X’s quintessential movie is Reality Bites, Lost in Translation spoke more to people my age.

The supposed next generation, Generation Y, the Millennials, or the Net Generation, according to the wisdom of Wikipedia, were born “anywhere between the second half of the 1970s … to around the year 2000.” This huge window includes both me and my students (many of whom were born in 1990) and is not a generation to which I feel particular attachment. While I can remember life before the Internet, most of them cannot. While I was molded politically in the Clinton era (free from major foreign threat), they have come of age during Bush’s War on Terror. By most survey indicators, they are relatively more conservative and more eager to get married and reproduce than Gen. Xers.

My own relative confusion about which generation I fit into is, I think, more broadly revealing. Does anyone ever feel completely attached to the constructed identity of a generation? Is “generation” even an intellectually useful concept or should social scientists limit ourselves to the empirical measure of “age cohorts”? If, indeed, the notion of generations is useful, what might be some useful parameters for defining them?