Blown away by his positive mental attitude.

I come to you today from south Florida, where we await the arrival of Tropical Storm/Hurricane Ernesto tomorrow (tomorrow also being, providentially, the one-year anniversary of Hurricane Katrina). Naturally the newsfolk down here could find nothing else to talk about for the past week, even though the hurricane was still several hundred miles out to sea, and might not even be a hurricane by the time of its landfall (if, indeed, it falls on Floridian land at all, which remains uncertain as I write this). By late tonight, following the usual storm-coverage script, the news stations will have dutifully dispatched their intrepid reporters to various stretches of coastal terrain, each reporter's goal being to look more windblown than the next news station's.... Anyway, there is an actual point to this post, and it's this: As part of the wall-to-wall coverage of non-Hurricane Ernesto, we've also been treated to our share of person-in-the-street interviews. I was struck in particular by these words of wisdom from one shopkeeper: "The important thing is to keep a positive attitude." Meanwhile, clearly visible in the background were the windows of his store, which had not yet been boarded up.

Inasmuch as the hurricane, if it comes, won't give a rat's you-know-what about anyone's attitude--Ernesto is gonna do whatever it does or doesn't do, regardless of whether Floridians maintain a happy face throughout--I'd say that that guy's time is best spent taking out a hammer and some nails and boarding up his damn windows, rather than honing his upbeat mindset. But see, this is what a few generations of positive thinking have done to us...teaching us that somehow attitude trumps action, or is at least equally important. (Me, I'll take the guy down the street who has a terrible attitude--but had the presence of mind to construct his store out of reinforced concrete, with metal shutters on his windows.)

Just a thought....

P.S. On re-reading what I wrote above, I think it's just possible that I may have sacrificed clarity for snideness--a common foible of mine. My real point is that many of us today have been conditioned to fall back on PMA the way we used to (and still do) fall back on prayer--as if positive attitude alone can change the course of our lives (or the course of a hurricane, in this case). I'll grant you that yes, at some point this shopkeeper is going to get around to protecting his windows. But what else is he entrusting to attitude that--just maybe--he could take an active hand in achieving? How much energy is going into "hope" that could instead go into something more functional? Widening the lens a bit, how many of us are inclined to put our faith in someone with a "good attitude" when maybe what we really need is a more competent person who just happens to have a bad attitude? I think they're valid questions.

And the blog logs off...for a time.

There will be a short hiatus while I take care of some "family business," but please rejoin SHAMblog again around the first of September. Hope to see you all then. I'm sure the SHAMscape will give us plenty of fodder for thoughtful comment in the interim....

And now, for a truly inspirational story.

This past weekend was Round 1 of the playoffs in the men's baseball league in which I play (and serve on the board of directors). The playoffs always open with a best-of-three series: a game on Saturday, then a Sunday doubleheader. A fellow board member, Scott Pennypacker, pitches for one of four teams in the event, the Patriots. Scott knew going in that he'd almost surely have to pitch a fair number of innings in at least two of the three possible games. What he didn't know was that, due to other players' sore arms, he'd have to pitch the entirety of his team's games. What he also didn't know--and this is the part that still blows me away, even as I write it--is that both of the first two games would go into extra innings. Specifically, 16 innings for the first game and 13 innings for the second.* The bottom line is that this past Saturday and Sunday, August 19th and 20th, Scott Pennypacker, age 47, threw 29 consecutive innings of playoff baseball (plus, I later discovered, another four innings for a second team on which he plays!). Not only that, but he won both games, sending his team into the next round. As I told our local paper, the Morning Call, I've been following baseball a long time, and to the best of my knowledge, what Scott did out on that field last weekend is unprecedented in baseball's modern era. To be sure, I've never seen (or heard of) anything like it in the annals of adult recreational baseball, where even most of the ex-Major Leaguers who still pitch tend to top out at seven or eight innings in any one game. And they don't come back and pitch again the next day.

My point is that this isn't a case of some woman with MD telling us how she's going to conquer the world from her wheelchair. And this isn't some schlocky motivator at a sales conference telling 250 salespeople from the same company that they can all be the No. 1 salesperson next year. This is one guy who actually went out and did something inspirational. Now, even saying that, let me be clear: When I use the word inspirational, I'm not implying that merely knowing what Scott did should magically enable the rest of us to go out and duplicate his feat, or achieve some analogous triumph in our own favorite endeavor, "if we just put our mind to it!" That's nonsense. Heck, what Scott did last weekend doesn't even mean that he could go out and do it again. And it certainly doesn't mean he could top it--by, say, throwing 50 innings next time. For all we know, the poor guy might've blown out his arm, and may never pitch effectively again. But looked at in the proper way--as a discrete, finite event; in its moment, its singular time and place--it is stunning evidence of human overachievement. And, yes--dare I say it--it's an example to the rest of us that maybe sometime we can go out and do something unexpected and wonderful.

Trouble is, we never know in advance when those sometimes are. And no, we can't simply will them to happen just by "wanting it enough..." No matter what Tommy Lasorda or anyone else tells you.

* For the benefit of those who know nothing about baseball, a "normal" game consists of 9 innings.

Another excellent reason to stop reading this blog.

Now and then I'll hear from readers--or more precisely, ex-readers--who take me to task for puncturing the feel-good myths that sustain them. They'll accuse me of being a wet blanket and an irredeemable downer. ("You're obsessed with finding the dark cloud in every silver lining" is how one woman put it.) At the risk of increasing the size of that contingent, I come to you with today's post, which concerns a segment I saw on the news this weekend. I didn't get the whole story, but it involves a self-help group consisting of people united by their various disabilities, who are individually determined to realize their dreams nonetheless.

Their spokesperson was a woman with muscular dystrophy who boldly declared into the camera, "I'm not going to let my MD hold me back! From anything." I italicize the word because it reflects how she said it--with bellicose, in-your-face panache. The half-dozen group members in the background, all visibly afflicted with serious maladies (including at least one young man with Down syndrome), cheered and applauded.

I'm sorry; I don't mean to be insensitive. If you knew me better, you'd know that I'm not a judgmental person or an elitist. And I happen to like an inspirational, against-all-odds story as much as the next gal. I'm particularly fond of movies that start off badly, then resolve to a nice, happy ending (which is one reason I've almost always got Lifetime Movie Network on in the background while I work, as an engaging form of white noise. I kid you not). But a person who bellows at me--from a wheelchair, no less--that she's not going to let her incurable illness hold her back "from anything" is not someone whom I find inspiring. Rather, I find that person delusional. And also, frankly, somewhat annoying.

Yes, I "know what she means." It's her way of saying that "just because I'm in a chair doesn't mean I'm curling up into a ball and dying. I intend to make the best of this. So watch out world, here I come!" Well then say that. Why do we feel compelled, in this society, to talk in overblown superlatives that are so manifestly out of whack with observable reality? Whom does that really help, in a practical sense?

What's more, this kind of thinking is not harmless. It promotes a sense of entitlement among people who--like it or not--do not enjoy the rights and/or privileges they've been conditioned to expect.* Consider, for one, Mario Cella, who last year extracted a $45,000 settlement from Pennsylvania's East Stroudsburg University. You can read the story for yourself, but in a nutshell, East Stroudsburg's great crime was its adherence to academic standards that Cella could not meet, due to his diagnosed learning disabilities. So, because he couldn't graduate, the college had to pay. Cella's case is not an isolated one. I give you, also, "J.P.," as he is identified in his successful action, for unspecified damages, against Pennsylvania's Southern York County School District (still under appeal). A special-education student, J.P. was angry at his high school because its special-ed programs did not enable him to perform well on standardized tests and thus "failed to prepare him to enter college and/or the workforce." Am I wrong to ask whether a special-ed student belongs in college? Are we all entitled to college (and then to sue for damages if we don't excel)?

That can't be what we really mean when we talk about self-esteem. It can't possibly be...

* amid today's don't-you-dare-offend-anybody mood of political correctness.

The last word on free will (from me, anyway).

As I look over some of the back-and-forth in this debate on free will vs. determinism, I am reminded of one of the core elements of my argument against self-help, and one of the primary misconceptions that inspired me to write SHAM: that the need to believe in something is not, ipso facto, justification for something, and certainly not proof of its existence. To shift the context slightly: I have heard it said many times by many people that they simply must believe in an afterlife, because the notion that "this is it"--that we spend a few short decades struggling our way through life on earth, then die and go to dust--is unacceptable to them. They can't face the new day (or the loss of loved ones, or the myriad other reversals that are part and parcel of being human) without holding in their hearts the prospect of "something more." Well...tough noogies*...logically speaking, that is. Now, there may turn out to be a heaven. Personally, I'm all for it. But our passionate desire for a heaven does not make it so--and has no place in a rational debate about whether heaven exists. Similarly, the fact that we want to see ourselves as imbued with free will, as masters of our personal domains--and that we abhor the notion of being mere puppets on some grand metaphysical string--does not mean that free will exists. Would society fall apart if we stopped holding people accountable for what they do? Yes. Does that mean that people are accountable for what they do? No. Not in and of itself, it doesn't.

No matter what we're discussing--no matter how sensitive the topic or how serious its implications for civilization--the rational side of us should insist on evidence. That is, evidence that meets the burden of proof that we apply in the scientific judgment of other facets of life.

* as we used to say in Flatbush.

I guess I was just driven to write this post.

Today I read with interest the lead feature in my local paper, The Morning Call. It concerns Greg Hogan, the Lehigh University student who made it onto the national radar screen after he robbed a bank last December in order to pay off his debts from online gambling. Hogan faces sentencing today.

If you look at the story, notice first how the headline reverses subject and object. It's not titled "How Greg Hogan Ruined His Life Through Online Gambling." It's titled "How Online Gambling Toppled Greg Hogan's World," a headline that personifies/anthropomorphizes online gambling (and even attributes sinister motives to this new entity). That sets the stage for the paper's sympathetic treatment of Hogan throughout this extraordinarily long story: nice college kid, cello player, minister's son, "not the criminal type"--i.e. a good boy who just got caught up in this tragic addiction. (Clearly, poker is the heavy here, not the guy who went out and robbed a bank.) Now, you could make a class/race thing out of this (and I'm sure some will, with justification): How come this newspaper--like others who've covered the story--expends so much time and empathy on this one (white) college kid? Especially since the Call's general editorial take on felons could be summarized thusly: "fry 'em!" The story blames online gambling for "driving" Hogan to do what he did. Well, what about the circumstances that confront inner-city kids daily? Wouldn't that be enough to "drive" inner-city youths to commit crimes? You wonder, among other things, why the Call and the rest of the media typically have such little compassion for the ghetto drug addict who turns to crime to finance his addiction.

Which brings me to my larger, more SHAMblog-gy point. The Call piece tells us that Hogan was "wired to be a gambler." Hmmm. "Wired," huh? That would seem to negate (or at least erode) choice. So the Call is saying that something inside Hogan predisposed him to do what he did.

I can't claim to know how much choice we do or don't have in life. My gut feeling is: not much. That is, any choice we do have exists within narrow parameters. This is just common sense to me.* The rabid Hezbollah follower--being a rabid Hezbollah follower--is not going to suddenly "choose" to be a Zionist, or even to live in peace among his Jewish brothers. Ain't gonna happen. And it's not just that he doesn't want to do it; it's that he can't do it. He's prevented from doing it by being who he is. While most of us would concede the truth of that, we don't stop to think about the implications for the rest of us--that we're all shaped and directed to some degree (I would argue it's a large degree, if not 100 percent) by thoughts and feelings and impulses and inscrutable genetic "wiring," the combination of which makes us who we are, and dictates our "choices" in life. So then: Why do we treat some people as if they had a real choice in the matter, and others, like Hogan, as if they're "victims" of themselves? The older I get, and the more I think about it, the more I believe this is something you either apply across the board or not at all. You can say we have no choice. None of us, ever. Or you can say we have free will. All of us, always. But I don't see how you can reasonably argue that some people, sometimes, have a choice, and others don't. Just doesn't make sense to me.

UPDATE, THURSDAY AFTERNOON. The judge was unimpressed with Hogan's plight, sentencing the 20-year-old to a minimum of 22 months behind bars.

* though as always, I admit that I could be wrong.

And a little bit of heartbreak...for teens.

Jay McGraw's legions of teenybopper fans will be distressed to learn that the 27-year-old heartthrob reportedly married Playboy model Erica Dahm this past weekend. McGraw's chief claim to fame, of course, is that he's the spawn of Dr. Phil, and author of several books spun off from the elder McGraw's growing literary library--such books created by the Proustian device of appending the phrase "for teens" to the end of the Dr. Phil bestsellers from which they're respectively derived. Dahm's chief claim to fame is that she's one-third of the Dahm triplets, who enlivened Playboy's pages in a December 1998 photo spread. (Click here to see more of Erica, as well as sisters Nicole and Jaclyn. Erica's in the middle.) The triplets also had a bit part in that unforgettable Hollywood classic, Juwanna Mann. And just in case you thought this Cinderella story couldn't possibly get any sweeter, the couple met on the set of a Fox reality show (Renovate My Family) in 2004. When McGraw popped the question around this time last year--sealing the deal with the obligatory 5-carat diamond ring--Dahm is said to have blurted, "Oh gosh, is this real!?" It remains unknown whether she was questioning the authenticity of the diamond or the proposal.

Well, at the risk of solidifying my reputation as a male chauvinist, I'll say this much: At least Jay appreciates the concept of genuine self-help.

In case you feel you didn't get your RDA of SHAM today.

Did an interesting interview--a podcast--with the New England Skeptical Society this past week. Second time around with them, for me. Click here to download and listen in. The format is nice, because I really get a chance to "stretch out" a bit, rather than having to worry about condensing key points down to sound-bites due to time constraints. You'll have to endure about 27 minutes of un-SHAM-related content--I couldn't figure out how to bypass the first part of the show in the link--but I think you'll find that it's interesting stuff. Quite possibly more interesting than the part devoted to yours truly....

But enough about me.

Well folks, I don't know how many of you follow baseball, or once played it, or still play it--I'd imagine there are less of you in each successive category. And I know that none of you woke up thinking, "Gee, I really hope Steve posts something about his ongoing baseball exploits...." But it so happens that today is the final game of the hardball league in which I play, and I'm feeling melancholy. (I'm in the "over-38s," a division for which I qualify with almost two decades to spare, it pains me to admit). It's at this point of every season that I'm reminded of that timeless bit of poesy from the late baseball commissioner Bart Giamatti (father of today's nonpareil character actor, Paul, pictured above*): "It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring--when everything else begins again--and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone..."

Also at this point in the season--speaking of "selves"--I can't help but recognize how much I've always defined myself via baseball. I once wrote a long, searching piece about my lifelong love affair with the batting cages, which through the passing decades have served as my rabbi and my refuge. (SHAMblog regulars will have no trouble believing that I've led a solitary, largely friendless life.) I've also written on the way my father and I bonded through baseball, and how I later attempted to reproduce that bond with my son. Of course that effort failed, as almost all such attempts at generational rebirth inevitably do. In fact, my story on the experience for Sports Illustrated generated a ton of mail from equally defeated fathers who'd thought they were alone in the world. So I guess you could say that was my first "self-help piece"...

In any case, I've long been fascinated by the process by which something that starts off outside of you gets inside of you and becomes intrinsically part of you--no less so than an arm or an eye. (What is the biological mechanism of that?) Baseball is such a thing for me. It is more of who I am than writing or jazz--and if you knew me well, you'd know what a monumental statement that is. Baseball is, in fact, such a part of me that, when it ends--for good--I might seriously consider "doing a Hemingway." (No need to schedule a mental-health intervention just yet. I expect to be playing for years to come.)

All of which leaves me wondering what sorts of things--other than, say, (y)our children and/or significant others--fall into that extrinsic-but-now-intrinsic category for any of you?

* Although perhaps best known for his mesmerizing work in Sideways and Cinderella Man, Paul Giamatti is most memorable to me for all but stealing the show as the "Pig Vomit" character in Howard Stern's uproarious biopic, Private Parts.

The word is Hawaiian for "give me your money so I can buy a bigger yacht."

It takes a lot to get my jaw to drop these days. Suffice it to say that in the course of researching SHAM, and prepping for media work in the year since, I thought I'd seen and heard it all. But the subject of this post may be the all-time topper. It comes to us courtesy of motivational guru Joe Vitale,* whom we've met before, and who now claims to have stumbled upon an ancient Hawaiian miracle cure known as Ho'oponopono. The brilliance of this, from a sheer marketing standpoint, is that Vitale's latest gambit doesn't just represent a program for (supposedly) infallible self-help. That'd be pretty pedestrian. Instead he touts ho'poponono'opopopoopoo, or whatever it's called, as a way of healing everything. That's right! Everything in this big wide world. And how would one do this? Simple. By "healing you," Vitale explains. "If you want to cure anyone, even a mentally ill criminal," you do it by "healing the part of [you] that created them," writes Vitale. "In a literal sense the world is your creation." Talk about empowerment!

The article speaks for itself better than anything I could say in critiquing it. But the most incredible thing to me is that as I write this, Vitale's piece is a hot commodity online, buzzing 'round the Web via email forwarding and newsgroups. Not so much because folks think it's hilarious and are sharing the joke with their friends. No siree. People are taking it at face value--click here for a typical example**--and are distributing the inspirational gem to everyone in their address book. Just unbelievable.

* and actually, I must give credit where credit is due: It was one of the most faithful of the faithful, Cosmic Connie, who first brought it to my attention.
** and note the "adult friend finder" ad that pops up alongside the copy, at least on my browser.

Warning--extreme (semi)-adult content.

As the SHAMblog faithful will know, we try to keep things clean around here. Yeah, on very rare occasion, even your upstanding host has resorted to one of the milder expletives (pertaining to bulls and what they do with unmetabolized food) in order to make a point. That said, I've also alluded to the hate mail I receive when I do media, especially if the discussion turns (as it always will) to Alcoholics Anonymous. If you've read my book, you already know that I'm harder on AA than on any other facet of the SHAMscape, not just because I think the organization plays fast and loose with facts (which it does), but also because AA became the model for the Recovery Movement and the so-called culture of blame, both of which have had provably disastrous effects on America. Anyway, after a long period of radio silence, I've begun doing interviews again in connection with the forthcoming release of the paperback version of SHAM. Today, someone attempted to post what follows on the blog. The opening South Park allusion refers to an instant-classic episode of the show ("Bloody Mary") that parodies AA and its mindset. I find it interesting that in that same reference, the commenter essentially makes my case: that the recovery movement has given an awful lot of people easy outs for bad behavior.

Originally I blocked this from appearing as a comment, but on reflection I think it provides valuable insight into what happens when you attack some people's sacred cows--even if you have the weight of evidence on your side. It also shows the degree to which people will get all wrapped up in anecdotal evidence, giving it a weight and meaning that may have nothing at all to do with the Big Picture. And so, without further ado:

"Following in South Park's monument of ignorance? That's okay. Too many people say that they are "alcoholics" these days to gain social graces and pity, or "addicts" or "mental disorder suffererers."

Real alcoholics, once they quit, cannot drink again. Read that, fucker. CANNOT DRINK AGAIN. They will relapse and lose most of their money, property, and social position (meaning they will get fired). Real alcoholics, like my father still is, keep sober and keep going to meetings because they know the danger of relapse. Shit, ask my brothers who watched my father waste his live away in a box under a bridge for so many years with booze and drugs. Addicts do NOT get to come back in moderation.

Your kind of thinking and that of the South Park creators about that episode is fucking dangerous and will cost lives. But it's okay, you guys don't give a fuck. Hell, you're just trying to find the next tiny revolution and gain a little bit of social status. Who cares if a few junkies or drunks die in some alleyways because they refused to believe in the programs after reading and watching/reading the new "alcoholism doesn't exist" bullshit? Pfft, their problem, right?

Oh, to be clear: Fuck you and die."

For the record, I am very, very sorry about people who lose their lives and/or souls to alcohol and other mind-altering substances. That is why I want there to be a cure--a real one; a permanent one--for the nightmare of addiction. That is why I don't want pseudo-recovery organizations to be able to hide behind misleading or made-up statistics in their effort to save face or protect their own turf and public image.

Finally, I apologize to anyone who was offended by this. We shall now revert to our customary G rating.

A preemptive p.s. (re Friendly's etc.)

And please, spare me any rebuttals along the lines of, "Steve, you're imagining things. Friendly's is just trying to give women 'equal time.' A woman can catch a baseball, too, you know." If that were the case, why is it necessary to have the boy say first that his dad dropped it? Why not just have the kid reply, "Actually, my mom caught it"? And leave it at that?

No, I am not imagining the deprecating tenor of the ads in this category. It's there. And it was put there intentionally.

I'm mad as hell...but (sigh) I guess I just have to keep taking it some more.

This post may seem a bit off-theme--and also may end up picking at a few cultural scabs among the faithful--but today I feel like crazed protagonist Howard Beale in that classic scene from Network. That's because I just finished watching, for about the four-millionth time this week, the latest in Friendly's menu of "family-oriented" commercials. Instead of giving me the warm and fuzzies, it makes me want to walk into my nearest Friendly's, find the first person wearing a label identifying him/her as management, and shove that person's face into a hot griddle. In the ad's central action, a server arrives at one of her tables to see a boy, about 12, fondling the souvenir baseball that presumably was caught at a ballgame the whole family just attended. The perky server says something about the boy being proud of his dad for catching it for him. Dad beams. Whereupon the boy replies, "Well, actually, my dad dropped it and my mom caught it...." Revealed for the hapless loser that he is, dad grins his embarrassed, yes-I'm-a-schmuck grin and the ad moves on to tell us what a wonderful place Friendly's is for families to bask in their familial joy.

The reason I'm so ticked about this ad is that it's not an isolated incident. It's emblematic of a trend in modern advertising where you're "allowed" to dump all over the group that supposedly enjoys the upper hand in life and thus is fair game. So it is that in almost every ad built around some tension or situation involving men and women, the men are incompetent buffoons, while the women are (a) heroes of some sort, as in the Friendly's spot, and/or (b) our long-suffering species-mates who tolerate us despite our being jerks and lowlifes. (Perhaps you've seen the one for Vonage where the wife is explaining the eminently sensible reasons why they switched their phone service, and meanwhile, off in the background, her dork of a husband is intent on his goofy and disjointed dance moves.) Similarly, if the ad features a mixed-race group, the minorities are invariably depicted in a more flattering light than the whites. If there's a problem to be solved, the white guy usually causes it (or, again, is ineffectual at solving it) and the black guy becomes the white hat, as it were, swooping in to save the day.

You will not see a black person depicted as a fumbler--especially a malfeasant one. You will not, in mixed-gender commercials*, see a woman depicted as an imbecile or a venal shrew.

What got me thinking about this was that in the past week I happened to catch parts of both Dirty Harry and the original Death Wish, and I found myself laughing aloud, again, at how careful Hollywood had to be in those days in its portrayals of blacks and minorities. So hypersensitive was the mood that even street gangs were absurdly depicted as multicultural affairs. You'd have a scene in which the hero is mugged by three dudes in gang colors: a white guy, a black guy, and a Chicano. (Some years back my son wandered by as I was watching just such a scene and said, "Hey, they need a Chinese guy, and somebody in a wheelchair...") The reality of America's urban gangs, of course, is such that you would never find a gang with that sort of ethnic balance. Black gangs and Latino gangs tend to be mortal enemies. And neither of them is out recruiting in white suburbs in the spirit of inclusion. But such were the good old 1970s.

Then again...as Friendly's and others show us...such are the good new 2000s.

Contrary to what advertisers (and, no doubt, many viewers) probably believe, these ads do not signal progress. If anything, they signal the opposite. They signal the institutionalized and steadfastly reinforced belief that individual people are not individual people, but representatives of "their" group or category. And that remains very sad for us all.

* In commercial spots directed solely at women, and thus featuring all-female casts, yes, there is often a somewhat foolish or even despicable character who acts as a foil for the others. The same is true of commercials featuring all-minority casts.

Another guy who didn't want it enough.

During a speech today at the unveiling of an exhibit in his honor, legendary Temple University basketball coach John Chaney felt obliged to trot out the familiar Sportsthink mantra: "You can be anything you want to be," he told the crowd.

I did some research on Chaney. Without question, he has enjoyed an enviable career--a charmed one, really. Despite his occasional on-court detonations, he's an American icon, certainly in basketball circles. But wouldn't he have rather been Michael Jordan? In fact, despite a distinguished career as an amateur player, John Chaney never made it to the NBA. Isn't that something the man might have "wanted" to do? This isn't hair-splitting; I'm just taking Chaney at his word and putting that word to the test, using him as a guineau pig in an experiment of his own design. Remember, Chaney isn't saying that "you can have a great life if you try" or merely that "every person can probably go farther than he thought he could" (both of which I dispute anyway). He's leaping to the ultimate promise: You can be anything you want to be!

Well, sorry, but no you can't. In his own life, Chaney, at least, got close. (That is, I assume he did. For all I know he might've wanted to be president, as a young man.) How many others, seduced by that promise, will "die trying"--spiritually and emotionally, if not literally?

So is love a disease?

From today's Peoria Journal Star comes another textbook lesson in how the managers of alcoholism's public image have achieved cultural saturation with their so-called "disease model" of drinking (and substance abuse as a whole). In essence a glowing tribute to the recovery movement, the article by writer Jodi Mailander Farrell drips with phrasing that unquestioningly (and, I might add, very un-journalistically) buys into the notion of alcoholism as a bona fide "chronic disease that can be treated just like asthma or cancer." Farrell talks about how a "group of activists are hoping to end discrimination" against substance abusers through the same types of "public awareness campaigns that pushed breast cancer and AIDS onto the country's radar screen." (I could be wrong here, but I gotta believe that many folks who wear those pink breast cancer ribbons would be somewhat offended at being lumped into the same group with the guy around the corner who spends his evenings doing lines of coke.) She also speaks of people who have "learned to live with their addictions," as if the thing they're learning to live with isn't, to any degree, something they brought upon themselves. (Am I totally wrong to make the comparison to a convicted bank robber who's "learning to live with being in jail"?) Further, with no apparent sense of irony, the writer quotes sources who complain about the "moral stigma attached to this disease." I'm not saying there should be a moral stigma attached to alcoholism, necessarily. I'm asking whether a writer should write such a piece in a way that so totally disenfranchises segments who do hold drunks at least partly accountable for their predicament. Especially given the flimsiness of the evidence supporting the disease model.

You don't have to look very hard to find subsantial evidence that many of the things AA has told us* are suspect at best, false at worst. This should not come as a surprise, given that the storied founders of AA, Bill W. and Dr. Bob, basically pulled the program's dogma out of--I'll be polite here--a hat.

Think of some of the things we've been led to believe about addiction:

--Once an alcoholic, always an alcoholic. Suspect.
--An alcoholic can never revert to mere social drinking. Suspect, and likely false.
--An alcoholic needs help to quit...he can never do it on his own, cold turkey. Outright hogwash. In fact, the reliable, verifiable literature on the subject suggests that drinkers who go it alone actually have better odds of lasting success than those who turn to AA!

I'll concede that once a drinker is fully immersed in his drinking, he must often contend with a constellation of physical problems that can be considered a disease (or maybe syndrome is the better word): liver damage, heart damage, nerve damage and so forth. That has nothing to do with turning to booze in the first place, which--many will argue--is a decision. And if one is going to counter that people who are predisposed to drink or stuck in environments that tend to promote drinking do not bear personal responsibility for their fates... Well, couldn't the same be said of, say, inner-city drug dealers or gang members? Why do we hold them responsible?

What I find most interesting about Farrell's piece, however, is that despite her overwhelmingly sympathetic tone, she eventually gets around to making the same point I made in SHAM (a point that earned me more condemnation during my media tour than anything else I said in the book): She admits that "nobody knows exactly how many Americans have achieved [recovery]."

This begs two questions: 1. If we don't have a good handle on the efficacy of the very programs Farrell lauds in her piece, then why are we lauding those programs, and why are we steering people to them? 2. The government in 2000 estimated the aggregate national costs of alcoholism at $184 billion per year (surely above $200 billion by now). Given that, don't we need to know what works and what doesn't? Not just guess at it. Not just trust people's "good intentions." But know. For sure....?

Btw, credit for the title of this post goes to my son. When I told him what I was writing about, he said, "So then is love a disease? How can something be a disease if it's not tangible?" How, he wanted to know, do you quantify it?

Bravo, son. Couldn't have said it better myself. And while I'm in family mode, let me take this opportunity to offer posthumous birthday greetings to my father, who passed in 1978 at age 60. The skeptic in me isn't sure there's a heaven...but if there is, Dad's there.

* The verification here is way too complex and voluminous to furnish through links in this post. You might use relevant sections of SHAM as a road map to your own inquiry, should you choose to make one. And as always, reasonable dissent is more than welcome.

Out for a morning jog in Lebanon...

This has nothing to do with the nominal subject of this blog, but I couldn't resist posting the photo.*

Probably like you, I watch people try to live their lives amid this kind of chaos and devastation--I watch the networks interview trembling, sad-eyed mothers as they wait for their kids to come home (or not come home) from school--and I cannot imagine transacting life, sanely, under those conditions. It's a hokey cliche, of course, but those of us who work and play and go about our daily business here in the U.S. of A. really do have no idea "how the other half lives." Not a clue. Despite the wake-up call of 9-11, most of us by now have settled back into our more-or-less customary sense of peace, tranquility and, perhaps above all, detachment. Bin Laden and Al Qaeda, today, are fodder for jokes by Jon Stewart and Jay Leno. We laugh without shame again, because it's not really relevant to how we live. (And I'm sure, at least in part, that's why they hit us: because we're just so damned detached and "above it all....") In fact, you probably laughed at this photo, when you first saw it. As I did.

Leaving the hair-splitting political differences aside, and/or regardless of how we feel about this or that nuance of the American way, we should thank our lucky stars (or get down on our knees and thank God, if you're of that persuasion) each and every day.

Sermon over.

* Even though it's an AP copyright and will cost me a reprint fee.

"I see...I see...I see you paying for lots of half-assed advice you don't need..."

Comes an interesting piece today from one of our friends across the pond, writer Stephen Armstrong, about how growing numbers of us apparently are going to Psychic School. One would think being psychic is much like being pregnant--you either are or you aren't. Of course, where money's involved--which is to say, when some savvy entrepreneur can fill a need that consumers seem to think they have (in this case, to "develop" their paranormal abilities)... Well, we know what P.T. Barnum supposedly said about suckers and how often they're born.*

According to Armstrong, the College of Psychic Studies, founded in 1884 by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (of Sherlock Holmes fame), now offers more than 50 SRO courses, including the likes of "Heart Centered Soul Healing" and "First Steps as a Psychic and Medium."

The most relevant part (to me) is that the writer sees today's become-a-psychic movement as the New New Thing in self-help, another sign of the Me Generation's** laughably egocentric tendency to obsess over (and therefore, they hope, have an increasing "say" in) every last aspect of life--even if they have to go to The Other Side to get the feedback, counsel, and affirmation they crave. (We touched on this briefly in SHAM, notably a Sylvia Browne appearance on Larry King.) I'm struck in particular by a quote from Professor Chris French, who heads the Anomalist Psychology Research Unit at the University of London's innovative Goldsmiths College: "I've been a believer in psychic phenomena for over half my life," French told Armstrong. "But the more I learn about psychology, the less I believe." Personally, I've always found it amusing that the very same folks who blindly buy into psychic phenomena will dispute so many other things for which volumes of bona fide evidence exist. But I guess it goes hand in hand: If you're looking to avoid having to deal with the "real reality," what better way than to find a psychic to tell you what you want to hear? It's the ultimate self-indulgence--denying what you can plainly see and instead going to Madame Zamba for permission to take the Burger King approach to life, i.e., "have it your way."

Armstrong's bottom line? "Psychics are the new rock 'n' roll..."

* The writer, in fact, invokes Barnum at one point in the article--though historians disagree about whether he ever actually uttered the famously cynical line.
** and its generational offspring, which I suppose we could call the "mini-Me's."