"Durkheim saw groups and communities as being in some ways like organisms—social entities that have a chronic need..."

"... to enhance their internal cohesion and their shared sense of moral order. Durkheim described human beings as 'homo duplex,' or 'two-level man.' We are very good at being individuals pursuing our everyday goals (which Durkheim called the level of the 'profane,' or ordinary). But we also have the capacity to transition, temporarily, to a higher collective plane, which Durkheim called the level of the 'sacred.' He said that we have access to a set of emotions that we experience only when we are part of a collective—feelings like 'collective effervescence,' which Durkheim described as social 'electricity' generated when a group gathers and achieves a state of union. (You’ve probably felt this while doing things like playing a team sport or singing in a choir, or during religious worship.) People can move back and forth between these two levels throughout a single day, and it is the function of religious rituals to pull people up to the higher collective level, bind them to the group, and then return them to daily life with their group identity and loyalty strengthened. Rituals in which people sing or dance together or chant in unison are particularly powerful. A Durkheimian approach is particularly helpful when applied to sudden outbreaks of moralistic violence that are mystifying to outsiders...."

From "The Coddling of the American Mind: How Good Intentions and Bad Ideas Are Setting Up a Generation for Failure" by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt — which I started reading a couple days ago and am in the middle of reading.

I wanted to blog this passage because of the prompt, "You’ve probably felt this while doing things like playing a team sport or singing in a choir, or during religious worship." Tell me how you relate to that. I'll tell you how I do.

I've been in some situations where I have seen it happening to other people, and my own reaction was markedly to separate from the group and become especially aware of my individuality. I never feel pulled into the collective. It has the opposite effect on me. I don't know why I'm immune, but I may have been inoculated by Frank Zappa.

It was Friday, February 2, 1969, at the Fillmore East, and in the middle of the show Zappa — I believe he was wearing red velvet/satin pants — divided up the audience into parts — maybe 4 sections — each assigned to sing out when pointed at. I didn't sing when pointed at, but I was interested in the sound he got flowing through the big audience as he escalated to more and more elaborate pointing patterns. He kept going until the crowd — struggling to respond to his showy conducting — could not keep up and it became cacophony. At that point, as I remember it, Zappa gave the crowd a gesture — perhaps a contemptuous 2-handed get-outta-here — and said something to the effect of, You people were idiots to have followed me in the first place. But I had not followed him, and so my resistance to the ecstasy of crowd merger — which I'd worried was stand-offish and putting me at risk of a joyless future — was vindicated.

That was a rather innocuous occasion. (And — I had to look this up — the words "innocuous" and "inoculate" do not have a shared etymology. The "oc" in "inoculate" goes back to the Latin word for eye — "oculus" — which also came to mean bud. The idea of grafting a bud into a plant got transferred into the medical context we think of today, which I was using metaphorically, above. The extra "n" in "innocuous" should get you to see — with your oculus — that it's not "oc" but "noc." That word comes from "nocere," the Latin meaning to hurt, which is also the source of "noxious.")

So... that Frank Zappa routine was a rather innocuous display, but it worked — as he intended? — to inoculate at least some of us... at least me... from susceptibility to collective effervescence.

When else have I seen that kind of crowd merger and felt stronger in my sense of individuation? First, I remember another concert — Pantera, in 1996. I attended this concert here in Madison only because in those days I had the privilege of driving 15-year-old boys to concerts. I enjoyed it, but in a distanced way, and there were times when the lead singer was exhorting a crowd and the crowd was responding en masse in a way that made me contemplate what it would be like to be in the midst of a 1930s Nazi rally. And, most notably, I remember the Wisconsin protests of 2011, as they gained momentum day by day, with endless hours of drumming and chanting. The protesters would stay for long hours in the state capitol building — many of them overnight — and I would observe for a while then go home but come back another day. So the changes in the atmosphere were very striking to me. Whatever serious ideas and beliefs individual protesters may have had, their collective mind was courting madness.

IN THE COMMENTS: Lots of great stuff, but I wanted to highlight this video recommended byDust Bunny Queen ("One of the best recent examples of this spontaneous collective effervescence is the Green Day concert in Hyde Park, England in 2017. Green Day was late and to keep the crowd entertained the song by Queen Bohemian Rhapsody was played on loud speakers. The crowd spontaneously started to sing all the words, perform to the song, singing, dancing, jumping. Bohemian Rhapsody by by 65,000+ singers"):



That was great. I got chills watching/listening here at my little desk.

The NY Post has a long article about one man who is annoying people by taking up too much space on the commuter train from White Plains.

"Metro-North riders fed up with man who sprawls out on train." I guess somebody knows somebody who works at the Post.

“He takes up all four seats with his dirty feet up all over the seats,” said a rider who methodically took photos of the pro sleeper from the same angle every weekday morning for nearly a month. One day someone tried to sit where his feet were, and he didn’t even move....

“I messaged Metro-North several times, and they kept replying, but then I realized they were sending generic responses and no one was going to do anything about it,” said the commuter, who gets on the same car of the 5:36 a.m. from White Plains and encounters the sprawled-out sleeper every time they make the 35-minute commute into Grand Central Station.

The Post did interview the man, who obviously lives much farther out from the city than most people. He has to get up and onto the train very early, so he's able to get the seats he wants — all 4 of them — and get into his sleeping position and complete the night's sleep that got broken up by the necessary early rising.

ADDED: This is class politics, no? The man is 90 minutes away from the city, apparently because it's cheaper to live that way, or at least so the commuters who get on from closer-in suburbs must think. Based on his clothing, he does not seem to be traveling to a very well paying job. The richer folk get on, better dressed, with their blessedly shorter rides, but no good access to open seats, and they view him with contempt.

But they don't do anything directly. The petition the authorities and complain about the low priority given to their needs. And they "methodically" photograph him and pass the photographs to The New York Post to make an issue out of this one man, and The New York Post complies and serves as the mouthpiece of the affluent.

Did commuters on the train ever regard this man as a human being and talk to him? I see that "One day someone tried to sit where his feet were, and he didn’t even move," but not that anyone ever requested that he move his feet. I can see why he feels firmly entrenched in taking what he may very well feel is his rightful place.

One commenter on this post, Dust Bunny Queen writes: "Water bottle set on squirt. Works to keep the cats off of the counter." And that is exactly my point. The riders from the more affluent places see the man as subhuman, an animal.

I see in the article that the conductors on the train are doing nothing about this man who is annoying the close-to-the-city suburbanites. Have these affluent commuters considered that the conductors may feel solidarity with the sleeping man? Who's annoying whom? There are many vectors of annoyance in stratified America.

Queen Dust Bunny approved labeler.

Brother Family Labeler (PT1090BK) by Brother. At no additional sacrifice to your own bottom line. Dust me off and label me appreciative.

Steven Tyler appears in drag on "American Idol" and quotes Bob Dylan's "Talkin' World War III Blues."

He came out as if he were the last contestant and maybe it took half a second to recognize the big rock star (who was on the judge's panel last season). The news reports of the little stunt emphasize the drag and the (miniscule) surprise, but even where the lyric is quoted, the attribution to Bob Dylan is missing. Here's the NY Daily News:

"What the, what?" Randy Jackson said when he got a first glimpse of his former co-star on stage.

"My name is Pepper. I'm going to sing a song called 'Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa, Our Love Going to Grow, Wah Wah,'" he joked to judging panel. "But before I do I'm going to judge you all (bleeps) first."

I'm not finding any news reports that place the lyric — which I have engraved on my brain — in the old Bob Dylan song. "Talkin' World War III Blues" has 12 verses of Bob talking his way through a dream he had about walking through post-nuclear NYC, with all the people gone from the "lonesome town." Here's the 9th verse:

Well, I remember seein’ some ad
So I turned on my Conelrad
But I didn’t pay my Con Ed bill
So the radio didn’t work so well
Turned on my record player—
It was Rock-a-day Johnny singin’, “Tell Your Ma, Tell Your Pa
Our Love’s A-gonna Grow Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah”

Tyler said "Ooh-wah, Ooh-wah," by the way, just like Dylan, not "Wah Wah," as the Daily News would have it.

Now that you get the reference, is there anything to be made of it? Maybe Dylan was making an in joke at the time and Tyler was referring to that joke. Maybe Tyler wanted to alert us to the threat of nuclear war. Maybe Tyler wanted to wink at Dylan fans. But the best clue I found — as I did a Google search to see if anyone had recognized the Dylan quote — was an article from back in November about  friction between Tyler and current-season judge Nicki Minaj. Tyler had said in an interview:

“If it was Bob Dylan, Nicki Minaj would have had him sent to the cornfield! Whereas, if it was Bob Dylan with us, we would have brought the best of him out, as we did with Phillip Phillips....”

Manaj thereafter tweeted:

“Steven Tyler said I would have sent Bob Dylan to a cornfield??? Steven, you haven’t seen me judge one single solitary contestant yet!”

And:

“I understand you really wanted to keep your job but take that up with the producers. I haven’t done anything to you. That’s a racist comment.” 

Racist because it's against her... or because sending someone "to the cornfield" is a reference to slavery?

“You assume that I wouldn’t have liked Bob Dylan??? why? black? rapper? what? go f— yourself and worry about yourself babe.”

To quote Bob Dylan — especially while dressed in a garish blonde wig and big inflated breasts — is to tweak Nicki. Talking blues is related to rap, somewhere in the ancestry. The quoted line, which is talked, is about singing, singing like a rockabilly guy — "Rock-a-day Johnny" — and Tyler was acting as though he were going to sing the song Bob Dylan heard. Dylan is all alone in his dream, looking for company, and in his desperation, he turns on the radio, and then puts on a record, and it's this pop culture idiot, singing nonsense — ooh-wah, ooh-wah —but it's very poignant, because, after the war, Bob is longing for any kind of a voice. In the 10th verse, he calls the telephone number where a recorded voice says the time, and he listens to that voice, repeating the same time — 3 o'clock, the time the war started — for over an hour.

So Steven Tyler had a lot to say, if anybody wants to notice. He's saying we don't get artists like Bob Dylan anymore. The music industry — like NYC after the bomb — is devoid of real people. We're desperate for a human voice. And Nicki Manaj is the embodiment — for all her voluptuous physicality — of emptiness. He was spoofing her, critiquing everything, crying out for real human art, which — for him — Bob Dylan embodies.

But did anyone hear him? He pranced out as a clown. He was dressed as a woman. It resonated in the hollowness that has always been television. In drag, with that wide smile, he even looked like Milton Berle.



IN THE COMMENTS: In this post where I chide others for missing the Dylan reference, Mumpsimus dings me for missing a reference:

"To the cornfield" refers to the SF/Horror story "It's A Good Life" by Jerome Bixby. Or, more likely in this context, to the Twilight Zone episode based on that story.

Dust Bunny Queen links to this TZ clip.

"Do you think Palin has ruined Alaska as a symbol of the untrammeled frontier for future filmmakers and novelists?"

"No. Hopefully, she fades from memory quickly."

Hope won the election, it's true, but that is one hope that will not be fulfilled.

IN THE COMMENTS: Dust Bunny Queen:

I don't get the connection between Sarah Palin, Alaska as an "untrammeled frontier" (whatever that means?) and making a film about a woman and her dog.

Seriously, these people -- the interviewer and interviewee -- are deranged and irrelevant. They wouldn't recognize an untrammeled frontier since I doubt they are ever more than 15 minutes from a Starbucks.

Don't understand what "untrammeled frontier" means? What is a "trammel," anyway?

1. A shackle used to teach a horse to amble.

2. Something that restricts activity, expression, or progress; a restraint.

3. A vertically set fishing net of three layers, consisting of a finely meshed net between two nets of coarse mesh. 4. An instrument for describing ellipses.

5. An instrument for gauging and adjusting parts of a machine; a tram.

6. An arrangement of links and a hook in a fireplace for raising and lowering a kettle.

Now, what are we supposed to picture being done to a frontier?

WaPo on "racial attitudes" in Wisconsin.

Jeez, they really made Wisconsinites look like a bunch of hicks!

IN THE COMMENTS: Original George said:

A clown making balloon-animals. Big-wheel bikes. An ol' timey band. Cloggers.

Looks like the Village from an episode of "The Prisoner."

Needs a big bouncing bubble-gum bubble....

Dust Bunny Queen said:

Oh, and they make you look like a bunch of hicks, because that's what they really really think you are.

Bitter and clinging to your guns and religion, banjos.....and cheese!!!

Meade said:

The Hick race, from which I descend, has a long proud history of tolerance for banjo players from every race, creed, and religion.