"I'm really, really sorrry about that murder I didn't commit..."

The other night I watched a Dateline true-crime story that made my blood boil. (Many do. But this was a special case.) The judge in the case handed down the maximum sentence, in part, he noted, because the defendant "showed no remorse."

But the man had pleaded "not guilty."

Why in the world would a defendant show remorse while protesting his innocence? More to the point, why would he be expected to? The whole construct strikes me as at least an indirect violation of a defendant's Fifth Amendment rights against self-incrimination.Or are we saying that the minute a man is convicted, he's suddenly supposed to change his entire tune, fall to his knees and beg for forgivenesss...even if he really knows in his heart that he's innocent?

I think this might be a good place to reprise a blog from some time ago. Or if you're really intersted in the topic, you might try this one. Or, if you're a true glutton for punishment, this one. We'll see if I can make your blood boil.

It's not about glass houses. It's about crappy, porous foundations.

Seems that the inspirational empire of Peter Lowe, whose movable motivational feast became quite the rage during the mid-90s, has again run aground. In the early 2000s his "Success" seminars flamed out amid a sea of unsavory allegations about money mismanagement, unpaid vendors, and false advertising that touted A-list speakers (e.g. Bill Clinton and cookie-preneur Debbi Fields) who sometimes failed to appear at the designated events. Out of that rubble, Lowe managed to salvage his current venture, "Get Motivated" Seminars (which, incidentally, mis-use the following quote from my skeptical 1998 Wall Street Journal piece as their very first endorsement: "a barnstorming feel-good tour-de-force." More false advertising?). Now Lowe is mired in an ugly divorce battle with wife Tamara, a self-confessed drug dealer-turned-motivational speaker who runs a company called Take Action Media. Peter has accused Tamara and her brother, Brian Forte, formerly one of his top lieutenants, of not just taking action but also taking his intellectual property in the process: back-stabbing him and his company by stealing "trade secrets."

Got all that straight? Need a scorecard?

As for me, I'm left thinking that if that's what "success" is all about, I'm not particularly "motivated" to want to get it.

Every time I blog something in this vein, there are always readers who chide me for "dancing on someone's grave." (That allegation took on a near-literal meaning after I wrote cynically about the suicide of David Bassett, husband of anxiety guru Lucinda.) I also ruffled a few feathers when I lampooned Tony Robbins for hawking videos about keeping romance alive in your marriage at around the same time he was trading wife No. 1 for Wife No. 2. And I've often drawn ire for my here-and-there comments on Dr. Laura's nonstop sanctimony..

Please understand—and this is important—that I am not getting on these people for their hypocrisy, per se. (Trust me: I'm the last one who's entitled to be casting first stones.) It's not about schadenfreude, either. I am getting on these people because their personal foibles, to me, are emblematic of the core flaw in the self-help movement as a whole: Through their mishaps, they demonstrate beyond dispute that success is no simple matter...certainly not a simple matter of repeating a few affirmations or cultivating seven bullet-pointed habits. And this applies regardless of what kind of success we're talking about, whether in relationships, business, one's career, etc.

After all, if the link between knowledge and success were that ironclad and reliable, then who would we expect to be more successful, to do a better job of embodying those traits, than the gurus themselves? So when Tony puts out a video about keeping the magic in your marriage, I am reasonably moved to wonder: If the techniques were all that good, or that easy to master, then why couldn't Tony keep the magic in his own marriage? Or if Cindy Bassett's prescription for beating anxiety and depression were so inspired, shouldn't she at least have been able to keep her business- and bed-partner from toting a shotgun out onto a lonely stretch of Malibu beach?

If the folks who originate these concepts, and live with them daily, can't even make them work in their own lives, then what level of life-changing epiphany are you apt to achieve in a three-day retreat or even after spending a few weeks curled up with their books or DVDs?

I ask you: Would you pay good money to be taught foolproof financial planning by a guy who's now in bankruptcy, being sued for back taxes, and has a credit rating that's a negative number? And even if your rebuttal is, well, he knows what to do, he just can't do it because of certain personal demons...you're just making my point. If a self-improvement system depends for its efficacy on foolproof people—if it can be sabotaged or even undone by certain everyday human idiosyncrasies, or if you basically have to be a very specific type of person to use it successfully...then it's not foolproof. It's kind of like organized religion. In theory it provides comfort and peace. In practice...well...look at the world! If something that sounds so poetic in concept can turn so counterproductive, if not lethal, when actually introduced into society, then what good it is?

See, it's just not that easy, folks. There are too many variables. Human nature being what it is, there can't possibly be a one-size-fits-all (or even "fits-most") path to achievement. Then we have the fact that when you reduce complex philosophies or strategies to bullet points (which you must do for marketing reasons), they lose all nuance and subtlety, making them virtually impossible to apply to any real-world situations. Then we have the law of unintended consequence to deal with (i.e., sometimes what you think you want does not turn out to be what you really need once you have it; or sometimes your pursuit of that goal sets in motion a whole other dynamic that totally backfires on you).

Am I arguing that there's no point in trying to better one's self? Of course not. I'm arguing that the Lords of SHAMland are knowingly and outrageously overstating the promise when they claim to have The Answers to Whatever Ails You. And I'm arguing that you're delusional if you're a self-help addict who believes that by mastering a few key phrases and retraining your mind to think a particular way, you can predictably, unerringly enjoy the kind of rewards that projects like The Secret dangle before you.

Just ask Peter Lowe.

Before I fell...to pieces...?

First of all, Happy New Year (slightly in advance) to the SHAMblog community. Gotta be honest, a month or so ago I didn't think I'd see 2012 ring in. (I still haven't quite gotten there yet, but we're within hours, so I'm hopeful.)

I'm posting this older vid for a few reasons. First of all, my sense is that very few of you saw it when it happened live, back at this time in 2006, at the height of the scandal over Oprah's endorsement of James Frey's blockbuster work of faction, A Million Little Pieces. Second, someone who'd been Googling me uncovered it and asked me if I knew it was "out there." (No, I did not. Or maybe I'd forgotten.) Third, the core tenet of the James Frey defense—it's OK to tell outrageous lies for fun and profit as long as you can claim that your motives are "pure"—has always been the dominant ethic of SHAMland. Fourth, it's been a while since I've posted anything, yet I remain at a loss to know what to write from scratch....so in jazz circles, this post might be called a vamp.

Fifth and final, though I remember hating the way I looked that night in the studio lighting, it's funny how some added years and further (mis)adventures can change one's point of view. I was never any Brad Pitt, but it's nice in these disquieting days to see myself at a time when i didn't (quite) look 114 years old and/or altogether hairless. A worthy lesson for all of us, maybe?

The mortality rate of Cheez-its.

I'm beginning to realize that when something like this happens, and people who purport to care about you say, "It's essential for you to eliminate some of the stress from your life," what they too often mean is, "You have to develop coping mechanisms and better ways of putting up with the fact that we're not going to lift a finger to avoid stressing you out."

I do not find that especially helpful. In fact, I find the realization to be a source of stress anew.

What I'm talking about here can be (and frequently is) a simple, trivial thing. Like, let's say it has always irked or disgusted me when people eat things, especially crumbly things (e.g. chips or crackers), in the car. So, their prescription for my continued emotional well-being is for me to learn to live with (literally) the fact that there may be Doritos or Cheez-Its on the floor mats or dispersed across that impossible-to-clean carpeted area under the console. Because they're not going to stop eating the damned things. See, it's my problem to modify the stress; it's not their problem to modify the stress-inducing behavior.

I grant you, crackers on the floor is not a big deal in the grand scheme of things, certainly not worth dying over. But if that's the case, then, similarly, why is the need to have crackers in the mouth such a big deal, either? (Understand, we're not talking about diabetics or hypoglycemics who are sudddenly overcome by nerves or nausea. We're talking about people who just didn't feel it was necessary to get in the house before breaking open the box on the way home from the grocery. Or who thought waiting the 11 minutes till lunch-time was an unbearable sacrifice.) Is it so important for my tormentors to assert their right to munch crackers while in transit that they'd risk contributing to the already-too-high stress level of someone they love?

That is obviously a very minor example of a phenomenon that I have encountered in more significant settings (e.g financial matters) as well since My Event.

Tell me: Is it me? I want to know.

No atheists in foxholes or ICUs.

I was motivated to post again today. Maybe it has to do with my own crisis of faith, recently, when I had my event. Oh, I wanted to ask for Divine help, and I finally did. (Though I consider myself a realist and a person of basically secular inclinations, I've also made clear on this blog that, for whatever reason probably having to do with the conditioning of my youth as well as my sheer wonder at the magnificence of the "natural" world, I've always harbored an instinctive belief in...Something. And yet, because my rational side has also, always, prevented me from worshiping in the joyous, hosanna-in-the-highest tradition, part of me feels that if there is indeed a God, He's pretty disgusted by now with the idea of hearing from people like me mostly when we're frightened that we're about to meet Him or whatever. Religion is not something you should do halfway if you really expect to be taken seriously Upstairs, is how I see it. Designer religion, the kind of user-friendly, no-sacrifices, all-about-me spirituality popularized by Joel Osteen and his Church of Ralph Lauren—where you "follow" a gospel that consists of little more than what you were going to do to please yourself anyway, with or without God in your life—is no religion at all. Same for our New Age friends like James Ray and his Universal genie, who appear to argue that God and the Ever-Abundant Universe exist simply to feed your innate narcissistic tendencies.

On second thought, I guess what brings all this to mind is the news of the death of 76-year- old Judy Lewis, the secret love child of Clark Gable and Loretta Young. I was reading the obit linked above when this passage stopped me in my tracks:

"Gable, then 34, and Young, then 22, fell into an affair while filming 'Call of the Wild' in Washington state during the winter of 1935. When a pregnancy followed, Young had no choice but to go into hiding—being a staunch Catholic, an abortion wasn't an option. "Wouldn't you [unhappy] if you were a movie star and the father of your child was a movie star and you couldn't have an abortion because it was a mortal sin?" the actress was quoted as saying by Lewis in her 1994 memoir 'Uncommon Knowledge.' "

So there you have it. She couldn't have an abortion because she's a "staunch Catholic" and abortion is a mortal sin. Now I could be wrong, but I think there may be a little entry in Catholic doctrine about extramarital sex, too. It think it might even be a mortal sin in its own right. Understand, I'm not judging Ms. Young for having the baby, or even for having sex with Mr. Gable. I'm simply judging the cafeteria Catholicism that makes it so difficult for me to abide people who present themselves as members of the faith in good standing while picking and choosing which religious laws they consider personally relevant. They appear to give themselves a nice pious pat on the back for avoiding certain extreme behaviors (e.g. abortion) while totally ignoring the piety implications for other behaviors that may be more enticing and thus less comfortable for them to forgo (e.g. adulterous sex with fellow movie star Clark Gable).

Trust me, there have been times over the past several weeks, typically at night, when all gets quiet and it's just me and my thoughts in the dark, when I only wished I could give myself to God with full passion and belief. But I just couldn't. I'd be insulting Him, wouldn't I? How can you ask someone for help that you've disrespected so many times in life? I can't even say His prayer with conviction. What kind of worship is that?