Divorce Is for the Masses

Americans continue to divorce at a high rate, but divorce rates have gotten smaller in recent years.  This is especially true for the professional/managerial class.  According to a study by the National Marriage Project at the University of Virginia, only 11% of college-educated Americans are now divorcing within the first 10 years of marriage, compared with almost 37% for the rest of the population.  It appears that college–educated Americans, who in general are more politically and socially liberal, are developing a greater commitment to getting and staying married.

This trend has economic ramifications and, in particular, contributes to growing disparities in wealth distribution.  In this day and age, both husband and wife are likely to work for pay outside the home, and two-income households are usually better off than single-income households.  It’s further proof, I guess, of the way the private family sphere is always intertwined within the public market sphere.

For more discussion of the topic, see Pamela Paul, “How Divorce Lost Its Cachet,” New York Times, 17 June ’11, Styles 1:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/06/19/fashion/how-divorce-lost-its-cachet.html?pagewanted=all

 

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R.I.P. Caylee Anthony

An Orlando jury decided on July 5 that Casey Anthony was not guilty of murdering her daughter Caylee, who was only two at the time of her death.   Hundreds of protestors gathered outside the courthouse after the verdict was announced, and local police worried if they would be able to protect the building from being torched. Few of the protestors stopped to reflect on the large role popular culture played in both their sense of outrage and in the jury’s verdict.

Most obviously, the media played up the case to the nth degree.  The media time and again broadcast winning photos of Caylee and also seemed never to tire of a home video showing her singing “You Are My Sunshine.”  Viewers of the cable news shows also saw countless screenings of Caylee’s scantily clad mother grinding in bars while her daughter was still missing.  Then, too, has anybody not heard of the “bella vita” tattoo that Casey obtained shortly after Caylee’s disappearance?  HLN host Nancy Grace was especially relentless in demanding that Casey be convicted of her crime, and for the most part the public had decided Casey was guilty.

At trial, meanwhile, it seems the much-discussed “CSI effect” played a role. 

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The Media and Dominique Strauss-Kahn

Last month I was contacted by the Italian newspaper Il Foglio and interviewed regarding criminal proceedings against Dominique Strauss-Kahn.  A French banker and head of the International Monetary Fund, Strauss-Kahn has been charged with sexually assaulting a maid for the $3000-a- night hotel suite in which he was staying in New York City.  To my surprise, the reporter was not interested in the legal proceedings themselves but rather in the way the case was being presented in the American mass media.

The case is still another example of the way the prosecution of a rich and/or famous person can be and frequently is presented to the public as a type of contemporary morality play, that is, as a dramatic allegory about temptation, sin, and – in the end – either damnation of salvation.  Comparable media packaging of cases involving O.J. Simpson, Michael Jackson, and Eliot Spitzer spring to mind.

The added twist in the Strauss-Kahn drama is that the featured player in the morality play is a wealthy and worldly European who found out the hard way about down-to-earth American norms and values.  The best comparison might be to the mass media’s packaging of the attempt to extradite the Polish filmmaker Roman Polansky, who allegedly raped a teenager in California.  Lionized by the French artistic community, Polansky squirreled himself away in Switzerland and in the end avoided the grasp of the American authorities.  Strauss-Kahn, meanwhile is under house arrest in Manhattan and waiting trial.  Might Attica be his hellish fate?

The Il Foglio article appears on the front page of the “Martedo, 24 Maggio 2011” edition, but since the article is in Italian, most of us will require the good services of colleague Irene Calboli in order to read it . . . .

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