I guess I'll try again next year.

Faithful SHAMbloggers will note that I've changed the blog template and also made some minor tweaks to layout and such. To be honest, I was getting pretty sick of having the same layout staring back at me day after day. I wanted to do some nominal update, while retaining the "trade dress," as it were. I also think the changes should be a boon to both the readability and navigability of the blog, going forward. Unfortunately—going backward—this seems to have had an adverse effect on the look and layout of many of my previous posts. And try as I might, I don't seem to be able to defeat the gremlin, whatever it is. So, my apologies to those who may peruse older posts and find certain elements of the look off-putting. I'll keep trying.

Again, have a safe and happy New Year. Did I say safe...?

The real social disease? And Happy New Year.

So, Saturday afternoon I'm working on a rewrite due first-thing Tuesday, and as is my custom, I'm also watching a Lifetime movie out of the corner of my eye.* This one is called Dying to Dance, and it's about the unrelenting pressure on female ballet hopefuls to make themselves into living stick figures. The 2001 film follows a young woman as she drives herself to lose more and more weight and finally descends into the depths of full-blown anorexia. Obviously, though the film is set in the dance realm, it has wide relevance for others; the impact of the body-image nightmare on young women throughout America is well-documented, as is the prevalence of associated eating disorders.**

I bring this up because three-quarters of the way through the flick, there's a pivotal scene in which the girl collapses to the sidewalk after a confrontation with her mother, who is understandably terrified by the teenager's weight loss and unwillingness to seek help. No sooner does the girl hit the ground than the screen fades to black and we go to commercial. And what's the commercial? It's that obnoxious and recently ubiquitous NutriSystem spot featuring that teeth-grating woman who finally "feels so sexy" again. After slimming to a size 2.

A size 2. And the message to American women? You wanna be sexy? Get to be a size 2. Somehow.

The size of today's "typical" American woman is a matter of some controversy, but all reliable studies of the subject suggest that she wears something like a 12 or 14. I'm not saying that's a good thing, and I'm not saying it's a bad thing. No question, there are millions of Americans (plenty of men among them) who could stand to lose a few pounds for health reasons. Thing is, the nonstop assault on women's egos has little to do with health. In fact, one of the great tragic ironies of American culture is that too often, the women trying desperately to lose weight are not the ones who need to do it for health reasons. Instead, those who are most frantic to shed every available ounce are perfectly healthy (soon-to-be formerly healthy) young women, victims of a loose but effective conspiracy between advertising, entertainment, our friends at NutriSystem and the rest of the diet industry...and oh yes, the very sharp tongues of some very dull young men.

We're never going to conquer the enormous body-image problem afflicting young women by constantly bombarding them with unrealistic goals—or by running TV movies sponsored by ads that breed the very same disease that the movie laments.

Now have a Happy New Year, and if you resolve to lose weight in 2007, please do it for the right reasons.

* I swear to you—I'm straight.
** Yes, here as elsewhere, the "honest stats" have sometimes been subject to perversion by those with an agenda. But the sheer volume of evidence leaves little doubt that excessive body-consciousness has reached pandemic proportions, especially in certain subcultures and social strata.

Hey, life is a snap. Just be successful!

Wednesday's GMA featured an interview with life coach Cheryl Richardson. Realize for starters that Richardson gets to be a TV life coach not so much because her advice is better than most other folks', but because her face is. She's cute. This, of course, is the same phenomenon that explains why, when it came time for The Today Show to anoint a new in-house expert on consumer finance, countless seasoned reporters and editors had to make way for the cherubic Jean Chatzky. My only question at the time was, could the show's audience put its full trust in financial wisdom from a girl who then looked to be about 12? (Be patient. We'll get to Bambi.)

The Richardson segment was one of those new-start-for-the-new-year things, with GMA hoping to get the jump on its competitors by inducing viewers to mull their 2007 resolutions a few days early. In the spirit of eternal helpfulness to which SHAMbloggers have grown accustomed, I'll summarize Richardson's insights here. In fact, tell you what: We'll let her talk for herself until she says something suspect. Then and only then will I interrupt. 'K? Here goes:

GMA: "Cheryl, how would someone go about laying the groundwork for success in the New Year?"

Richardson: "Well, the first thing is, look at what you did last year that worked, and...."

OK, stop.

How do you know what really "worked" last year? Because it had a "successful outcome"? Isn't it possible that you succeeded in spite of whatever it is you did, not because of it? And certainly it's at least possible that there are other things you could've done that would've been more successful, perhaps even far more successful, than what you actually did. Anyway, how can you be that precise in separating out all the variables in your life, such that you can say with any degree of certainty that this caused that? Finally, how do you know how it's all going to work out in the end? Maybe you did such-and-such a thing and it got you a great promotion, but maybe that promotion is going to get you shipped off to open your company's new office in Dubai, where you'll eventually be kidnapped by Islamic terrorists and turn up on CNN in an orange jumpsuit....

So, Stevie-boy, you're saying that nothing matters and we're all doomed. No. I'm saying that too many things matter—that there are too many variables, and their interplay is such that they can't be neatly separated out and analyzed as if they were independent elements. Especially not by a casual onlooker like a life coach, and even less so by a life coach you saw for three minutes on GMA. I'm also saying that most things can't be predicted—not very well for the short term, not at all for the long term. Sure, we have to live anyway, which means decisions have to be made. We all have to do what we have to do to puzzle through our lives. Our lives. No life coach can see the future. They're consultants, not clairvoyants. And in function, most of today's coaches are more like cheerleaders. Real coaches, after all, call the shots*; real coaches say no to their players (and even take players out of the game). Garden-variety life coaches, on the other hand, won't tell a client what they know a client doesn't want to hear. In any case, the life coach offers no insurance policy against failure, and may well do you substantial harm by patting you on the back (or persuading you to pat yourself on the back) when he or she shouldn't. Yanno, maybe giving up your middle-management job to open a taco stand isn't the best thing for you at this juncture in life. Don't get me wrong: If that's what you want to do, maybe you should go for it. However, if you're going to bring in a coach, then the coach should give you a no-holds-barred assessment, not just an attaboy or a lot of nebulous verbiage. (As you may have guessed by now, I'm not too high on life coaches.)

Quick story. When I decided to trade my sales bag for a typewriter back in 1981, I went to the newsstand, found a magazine that I thought "sounded like me," and mailed off my rambling, 6,500-word manuscript about selling mirrors in Harlem. That magazine was Harper's. If you're in the writing biz or know anything about it, you're probably laughing right now, because the odds of selling your very first piece to Harper's, especially "over the transom" (i.e. without being asked for it), range between insanely long and fuggetaboutit. Harper's is, without question, one of the toughest sales in the business. A good writer can spend his entire career submitting to Harper's and never click once. Nonetheless, editor Lewis Lapham loved the piece, bought it, and it ran in the magazine's January 1982 issue. I became something of an overnight sensation in magazine circles; agents, too, were beating a path to my door. For me, then, sending off my unbidden manuscript was "what worked" that year. (That's what Cheryl Richardson would've told me.) But any writer who looked at what I did and used it as a template for success—"Hey, I know! I'll just whip something up and send it to Harper's!"—would almost surely set himself up to fail, and fail miserably. (And the odds of failure wouldn't be that much lower even if you didn't confine yourself to Harper's. Mailing out unsolicited manuscripts is not the way to go in freelancing. That's something I myself had to learn after my first few charmed years.) Besides, though the Harper's sale ignited what some would consider a successful career in writing, the jury's still out on whether the overall shift—from selling to writing—was a good thing or a bad thing. For me and/or my family. I don't want to encumber you or this blog with all sorts of details about my financial life and family history, but suffice it to say I've begun to envy my blue-collar acquaintances who are looking forward to collecting government pensions in a few years. I suspect that my wife envies their wives.

Which brings us, at long last, to my deer story. Hunter goes into the woods. Sees a nice buck. Takes aim with his .30-06, fires. First shot misses. Second shot is a clean kill. Goes back to his truck feeling ebullient; it's a good day. He get back-slaps all around from his hunting pals. Only later does he find out that his first shot—the one that missed—hit a pregnant woman sitting in her driveway in a nearby housing addition, warming up her car. True story; happened about 20 minutes from my house.

Get my drift? That hunter learned a hard lesson—unlike most of us, who seldom get to see the full and final effect of all of the shots we take in life. While we're toasting our successes, admiring the racks (no wisecracks, OK?) on the metaphorical deer we took down, somebody somewhere may be grappling with the consequences of the shots that got away... Of course, the opposite is also true: There's no way of knowing about the unintended good we do, either. (See: The Five People You Meet in Heaven.) And that's really the only way to leave it: There's no way of knowing. So can we please stop pretending we know? Or hiring people to pretend for us?

* I'm not saying that we should want this from a life coach. I'm just saying that the average person misperceives the role played by the coach, and that the coach derives a faux credibility and standing from the misuse of the more authoritarian terminology. Who would pay $250 an hour for a "life cheerleader"?

The Secret to getting my own book slammed.

A little while ago I posted a scathing (but, if anything, understated) review of The Secret on Amazon, where the literary version currently reposes at a gaudy No. 8. Let's see how long it is before a succession of scathing reviews of SHAM—which hasn't had many new reviews in a while—begin turning up as well. (While we're at it, let's also watch as the "negative feedback machine" swings into high gear on my review.)

Can a C-movie have a B-plot with A-implications?

I don't know why movies are so much on my mind (or at least on my blog) of late, but today's post returns to that murky cultural well. A few nights ago I spent 35 minutes watching an apocalyptic charmer called The Omega Code. Thirty-five minutes was way too long in this case, as Omega is a film where the term "disaster movie" has a double meaning. (IMDB denizens rate it at 3.1 out of 10, which is pretty damn bad.) It was unwatchable, a failure on every level: terrible acting, terrible directing, and above all, terrible continuity/editing (so bad that when the camera shifted from one point-of-view to another during the same scene, the characters often appeared to have different expressions on their faces, or even to be facing in different directions from where we left them a half-second earlier). I stuck with Omega for as long as I did only because* the B-plot concerned a best-selling author/motivational speaker who becomes the puppet of the deranged megalomaniac who's planning to take over the world. In the film, the motivational guru's latest book is titled Empower Your Future by Embracing Your Past!, a bit of winking wryness (and perhaps the one redeeming feature of the movie) that embodies the very best and worst of Dr. Phil, Tony Robbins, Wayne Dyer and even Oprah, all rolled into one.

But despite the tackiness of the movie and the purposeful hokiness of the aforementioned book title, the overarching notion does give one pause. If, say, a guy like Robbins can have a convention center full of people nodding and smiling and going along with the program, taking even the cheesiest shtick in stride, doing whatever he tells them to do at each evolving moment; if a Joel Osteen can twist the whole ostensible point of religion to his personal aims, most of which seem marketing-driven and not a few of which seem outrageously incongruous with such bedrock Christian ideals as modesty and self-sacrifice...is there any limit to what today's high-powered motivational techniques can be successfully used for? How far would Dr. Phil's audience follow him if he decided to undertake a serious sociopolitical crusade? The evidence to date says: They'll follow him just about anywhere. They've already followed him into realms where his competency is dubious at best (e.g. diet and nutrition). Meanwhile, leading politicians increasingly turn to the likes of Robbins and Stephen Covey for their strategic insights.

I know what you're thinking: Gee, Steve, that was an awfully long build-up to such a thin, inferential payoff. Where's the beef?

Sorry, folks. Best I can do in the midst of returning everything I got for Christmas.

* Well, OK, I grant you, some of the scenery was pretty. And the film made me remember how much I liked Catherine Oxenberg's accent.

Splendor in the class?

So, having burned out (as it were) on the Yule log after 47 straight hours of viewing pleasure, I scanned the dial early Christmas morning and came upon the classic Elia Kazan film, Splendor in the Grass, which dates to 1961 and which I had never seen in its entirety. (The film is based on the William Inge play of the same name, which took its title from a bittersweet Wordsworth poem.) Splendor casts an almost ludicrously young Warren Beatty opposite an almost impossibly lovely Natalie Wood. The basic theme here is that Beatty is going out of his mind with lust for Wood, a "good girl" who then really, clinically goes out of her mind (to the point of becoming suicidal) after deciding to offer herself to her beloved—and being refused. He doesn't want to "ruin" her, you see.*

The rest of the plot elements—especially Wood's mother's repeated harangues about "those kinds of girls"—are as overwrought as you'd expect. I'd tell you how it all ends, but you can probably guess, and I'm a little bit like Beatty's character in that regard: I wouldn't want to "ruin" it for those who might wish to see it.

All I'll say here is...wow. Anyone who doesn't think society and its mores have changed over the past few generations needs to sit down with this movie for a while. (In fairness to Splendor, there's also a class-warfare angle that has stood the test of time better than the morality-play component.) I'm not passing judgment on whether those changes are good or bad; there are things to be said on both sides of the ledger, I think. I'm just saying that seeing this poor couple agonize and ultimately go insane over the question of whether to have sex—and they're very much in love, mind you.... Yanno, it might be fun to take a class of today's typical college students and have them watch Splendor all the way through. They'd literally be ROFL after the first 15 minutes.

* Evidently in real life the sexual tension proved too strong for the glamorous young costars to resist. It is widely and credibly reported that Beatty and Wood had a torrid affair during and after the filming of Splendor.

Believe it or not, I still hear it.

This may sound a bit odd, coming as it does at the end of such an unusually curmudgeonly week—even for me—but I'd like to wish all SHAMbloggers a Merry Christmas till we reconvene next week sometime. May each and every one of you get what you wished for...and this is one case where I fully expect your hopes and dreams to come true.

So sit back, watch Miracle on 34th Street (the Natalie Wood version only, of course), maybe see if Jeff Garcia really can get it done and, most important—semi-obscure reference No. 94—listen for the bell....

Steve

P.S. Did I mention that SHAM makes the perfect last-minute stocking-stuffer for the person who thinks he is everything? (wink)

The real mystery is why anyone listens. Or buys.

Today we have another headline self-help feature from AOL that just cracks me up. It's called "How to Live in the Now," and it comes to us courtesy of the online community's "wellness coach," Loretta LaRoche. If you click through* to the actual feature, the main text reads, "Don't give the past power over your present. And don't let the future steal this moment from you. Every moment is 'the' moment." LaRoche reinforces that sentiment in a video presentation, which consumed a couple of my precious minutes.

I understand the motivation here. We all do. You're not supposed to let yourself "get stuck," paralyzed by regret, anxiety, and fear. But can you imagine if everyone literally took LaRoche at her word? If we all lived in this moment only, as if there were no preexisting obligations or future consequences to consider? You'd have chaos. The apocalypse would be upon us in a matter of a very few such "moments."

This is as good an example as I've seen of what I've been saying all along about self-help and its fundamental pointlessness. I'm sure that Ms. LaRoche would argue, "Well, of course you have to weigh things. I didn't mean you shouldn't consider any other circumstances." But see, as soon as you begin weighing things, the utility of the original advice breaks down. Completely. You're no longer "living in the moment"; you're living in the overall context of the moment. Which is just what she was trying to wean you off in the first place. So the whole thing is circular; a paradox. In self-help, the message must be extreme ("Live for the moment!"), or it loses its appeal as a rallying cry (and marketing hook). But you can't actually apply that message to life in its raw form; you must qualify it, append it with constraints and caveats. So it's functionally useless. It's no more a "program for daily living" than my saying "now go out today and be happy!" What does that mean in practice? Take drugs? ("Well, I didn't mean that kind of happy.") Kill that neighbor who's been annoying you? ("Come on now, your happiness shouldn't entail hurting others.") OK, so let's say I realize that I want a divorce. In order to be happier. Won't that hurt others? ("Well now, that's a different story...")

See what I mean?

LaRoche wraps up her short blather-fest with the following bit of whimsy, which I've heard dozens of times: "And try to remember: Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift. That's why they call it the present!"

No, Loretta. That's why some of us call people like you simplistic buffoons.

* Some folks are reporting trouble with the link. My apologies. I guess this is such special content that you have to be a member to avail yourself of it. By the way, AOL membership is now free to anyone with an existing broadband connection. All you have to do is sign up. (Dial-up members pay some nominal fee for the connection service.)

I'm just a neigh-sayer, I guess.

Know for starters that I am a very sentimental person. I also love animals; just love 'em. And so, like millions of other Americans, I choked up when Barbaro went down at the Preakness, and again later when it appeared that he might finally succumb to his injuries after all. It follows that I could not be more thrilled at the progress he recently has shown. I'd love for him to be able to leave therapy behind and trot happily off to his new life in stud. All that said, I got brought up short this morning when I heard one of the co-anchors on GMA introduce a segment on Barbaro's recovery by saying the following: "He has shown he has the heart of a champion. His courage and never-say-die spirit serve as an inspiration...."*

Ummm...folks? This is A HORSE we're talking about. He does not have a life plan. He does not have well-thought-out goals. (And I'm pretty sure that if horses did have life plans, Step 1 would be, "OK, I'm gonna throw that little dude in his metrosexual get-up off my back and show him very specifically what to do with that whip thingie he keeps smacking me with....") Basically a horse eats, poops, runs around, and looks for other horses who are interested in hooking up. As for a horse's sense of self-determination, my Dad used to say that equines as a class "are so dumb that you have to prevent them from running back into a burning barn."

Now before I start getting hate mail from horse lovers, let me concede this: Maybe there are all sorts of trenchant thoughts running through any given horse's mind. We just have no evidence of it, is all. And horses certainly don't live their lives as if they spend much time in introspective deliberation. I've often said that I wrote SHAM with one overarching purpose: to separate what we assume from what we can prove. In our attempts to have an intelligent discourse, we need to stop talking about things for which we have no meaningful evidence as if we do have evidence. (And yes, while we're on the subject, that goes for religion as well. I'm with Bill Maher on this one: Unless you've been to heaven and back, please stop preaching to the rest of us about what God** wants for us and plans for us, etc. Recognize that your faith, even as potent a force as it is in your life, basically reduces to an opinion. And your opinion is no more inherently worthwhile than mine. Merry Christmas.)

According to the brilliant minds at GMA, we homo sapiens are supposed to take a lesson in "courage" and "inspiration" from a horse. This is why I sometimes think it's a lost cause. When it gets to the point where we'll anthropomorphize to this degree, holding up a freakin' horse as an inspirational role model...is there much hope for clarity and reason?

P.S., 6:40 p.m. In a teaser for tonight's segment on Barbaro, ABC anchorman Charles Gibson, normally a voice of sobriety and restraint, says this: "...And a beloved race horse proves once again that he has the heart of a champion...." Then, after covering another story, he adds: "Still ahead: The injured race horse that refused to quit..." I give up.

* I can't claim that this is an exact quote, because I was doing something else as I was listening, and of course I didn't expect to hear something I'd want to transcribe. It's very close, though, and it's faithful to the spirit of what was said.
** assuming God or Allah or Buddha or whichever exists, which is also an opinion. And yes, I say that even though it's an opinion I happen to share. Believe it or not.

Writer, tout thyself...

The aforementioned interview is up this morning on The American Spectator. I think it covers the ground that needs covering about as well as I can cover it (and I give much of the credit for that to writer/blogger/social agitator Shawn Macomber, who did a masterful job of leading me through the terrain). As always, reactions and comments invited....

I mean, heck, what's another wasted $10 billion or so?

Occasionally when I'm feeling discouraged (as happens to just about everyone who writes for a living and whose surname isn't Grisham, King, Rowling or Brown*), I get a pleasant surprise. Today, an acquaintance emailed me to say that when he typed the search coordinates "self-help" and "fraud" into Google, three of the first four hits, and four of the first seven, were connected in some way to me and/or SHAM. And that felt pretty nice. For about a minute.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that, while it's validating to me, it's a good news/bad news situation at best, if we widen the lens. Because what it tells us is that the world of formal journalism has little interest in exposing, demystifying or even just investigating self-help. Throughout American culture, people either laugh it off or take it at face value. As I wrote early in my book: "Everyone underestimates [self-help]. You may think Dr. Phil is the greatest thing since sliced bread, or you may chortle at his braggadocio and his sagebrush sagacity. But almost no one worries about Dr. Phil. Like the rest of SHAM, he slips in under the radar."

That remains true today. Even after SHAM, even after Self-Help Inc., even after One Nation Under Therapy, even after The Last Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need. Even after the occasional forays into the genre by Quackwatch's Dr. Stephen Barrett and the impressive, largely unheralded body of work being compiled by our Cosmic Connie in her own right.

It's a damn shame, folks.

* Of course, additional surnames that might seem to belong on this list include McGraw, Robbins and Schlessinger, among others...but notice I said writes.... Leaving snideness aside, notice that I also said "writes for a living." Few self-help gurus are dependent on their literary endeavors for their next bottle of Dom.

Was it just one of those things? Or did he sweat the small stuff?

ONE CAN NEVER—should never—make light of a death. Every death is tragic in its own way, certainly to at least some someone left behind, which is why I found it a bit personally hard to join in the rather ghoulish revelry at the demise of Uday and Qusay. Say what you will about how Saddam's sons lived, they were people—human beings—and deserved a bit more dignity in death.* And so I want to be clear that, in this post, I take no joy—at all—in pointing out that Richard Carlson, who rose to meteoric heights with his 1997 instant self-help milestone, Don't Sweat the Small Stuff, has died of a heart attack at age 45. Carlson fell ill while on a plane, en route to New York to promote his latest book, Don't Get Scrooged. In Scrooged, he proposed to teach his fans how to better cope with holiday stress.

Whatever silent physiological forces may have been at work here, it is sometimes said that heart attacks in relatively young men are classic signs of an anxious, Type-A personality.

* I remember thinking, as I watched the nonstop media images of their battered bodies and bloodied, misshapen faces: Is this really so different from when our enemies parade down the street carrying the corpses of our dead GIs?

Points to ponder?

Every once in a while when I can't sleep—which is pretty much nightly, so we're talking about an ongoing event—I get to thinking about things like, well, what makes the self the self, anyway? (This, again, may explain why I have no friends.) We've had this discussion on SHAMblog before, and I was surprised that a majority of those who weighed in seemed to feel that the self is infinitely malleable; in other words, it's whatever you make it into, regardless of how different the end result may be from what you began with. I think of this, today, apropos of the Miss Universe Pageant, currently in the news because of the alleged "behavioral and personal issues" of 20-year-old Miss USA title holder Tara Conner. Seems The Donald, who co-owns the pageant, has got his shorts all bunched up over whatever it is Tara did; they're not specifiying, for the moment, but I'm sure it'll be all over the Web before you can say "Paris and Britney." He's considering dethroning her. Anyway, I hadn't seen Ms. Conner before today, so I Googled her. Hence the intriguing photo, and this post.

I could be wrong here; I've made such misjudgments before. But to this untrained eye, Tara's upper torso shows fairly unmistakable signs of artificial enhancement. Further, whenever I see such work on a contestant in a pageant, I always wonder what else they may have had done—a nip here, a tuck there. Nasal contouring, say. Or maybe they had a set of Dumbo ears pinned back. Whatever. Now, if you're going to allow people to have such things done and then participate in competitive events...where do you draw the line? (Answer: nowhere, apparently. Click here and scan down to the tenth question for the Miss Universe pageant's official non-policy on cosmetic surgery.) In theory a woman who looks like Ugly Betty could walk into a plastic surgeon's office with a blank check, tell him to "make me look like Charlize Theron, except with really big boobies," and once the sutures heal and the swelling subsides, she could compete to become the next Tara Conner*. Weight problems? No problem! There's always lipo or even stomach stapling. Though I realize that beauty pageants are rather superficial affairs to begin with, if we're going to have them at all, should the judging not be based on raw material, instead of manufactured images?

You see where I'm going. Whether we're talking beauty pageants or anything else, if you make yourself into something that's so far removed from what you once were that the old you is no longer recognizable in the new you...then I'm sorry, for my money (actually yours) you are no longer you. We can debate whether this is inherently good or bad, if either; I still haven't made up my own mind. I'm sure that, as with most things, balance and moderation play key roles. At the very least, however, we should call the process what it is. It ain't self-actualization. It's self-abandonment.

And I'll say this: In the same way that boobs like Ms. Conner's—with that absurd Cleavage of Death—look silly, unreal and ultimately unappealing (to me, anyway; I do know a few guys who'd differ), the personality traits that many people try to simply bolt on in the aftermath of a Tony Robbins seminar also come across as fake, insincere and ultimately unappealing. Something to think about.

* And every time I read or write the name, in my mind's ear I hear Schwarzenegger in The Terminator saying "Sar-ah Con-nor?" as he bursts through that poor woman's front door and blows her to smithereens in one of the film's early scenes.

They say "God doesn't do baseball." Does He "do politics"?

I'm sure I'm not the first person to think this or even say it over the past 18 hours, but if South Dakota Sen. Tim Johnson doesn't pull through or is otherwise unable to continue in Congress, I hope—and, yes, pray—that we won't have to listen to a lot of stage-whispered fundamentalist crap about how "You see? God didn't want the Democrats in charge of Congress...." And you know, it's a testament to the absurdity of the political climate in this country that Johnson's staff, mindful of the political ramifications of his possible absence from the Senate, initially denied reports that he'd suffered a stroke or any kind of serious health setback. For the record, if Johnson were to die or be incapacitated, by law his replacement would be appointed by SD governor Mike Rounds, who is a Republican and would almost surely name a member of his own party. This would eliminate the Democrats' recently won 51-49 majority, leaving the tie-breaking vote in any such impasse to Vice President Dick Cheney.

The senator is listed in "critical but stable condition" at this writing.

Is "Salerno" the Italian word for "long-winded"?

Just this morning I came across this transcript of a very long—verrrry long—interview I taped last month for a popular Australian radio show, The Spirit of Things. If you can get past the verbosity and the nonstop rhetorical fumbling (like, say, restarting a given thought three or four times in one paragraph; where are the freakin' editors when you really need 'em??), I think you'll get a fair amount of added insight into self-help and its SHAMsters. Especially if you haven't read my actual book (and by the way, wouldn't SHAM just be the perfect gift for people on your list who either "have everything" or could use a bit of an attitudinal adjustment? Hey, I allow myself one shameless plug per fiscal quarter.) If nothing else, the transcript makes for good "filler" content on an ultra-busy Tuesday.

Oh, also this morning I caught Barbara Walters on GMA hyping her interview with Joel Osteen, best-selling author and the premier "crossover guru" at the intersection of religion and self-help. (This was a segment from tonight's Walters special, 10 Most Fascinating People of 2006.) She shows a clip of Osteen leading his enormous and ever-growing flock through a mass prayer...for Christmas bonuses and the like. You know, I see this stuff and I still don't quite believe it.

And now, a belated word on the election.

It might be dangerous to read too much significance into the events of this past November 7. Midterms are notoriously unkind to the party in power, and we may one day look back on the Democrats' stunning 2006 congressional gains as just the latest in a typical pattern. Amid the building mood of Hillary-mania, we forget that even Bill Clinton, the once-and-again darling of Democratic Party politics, learned this sobering truth first-hand in 1994. That said, I find it intriguing and relevant that pundits now draw at least some linkage between the sea change in national control and a commensurate change in the tenor of the parties' respective messages to voters.

Historically, as I recount in SHAM, it was liberals who cornered the market on Victimization, and then wore out their welcome by endlessly stoking the "average American's" sense of disenfranchisement in the face of virulent capitalism and those much-maligned (but never quite defined) "special interests." That has changed. Of late, it's been the GOP trying to make its constituents—the very guys* who enjoy the upper hand in life—feel more like underdogs by bemoaning such familiar (and now generally discredited, abandoned and/or adjudicated) themes as the injustice of affirmative action, the evils of feminism, etc. Make no mistake, at one time there was ample justification for such carping. But the nation has shifted to a more MOR, less PC lens on its social problems, and many folks have grown weary of the persistent reverse-victimology hysteria. Especially since the GOP has held sway over the White House and both houses of Congress since 2000. (Bear in mind, I make these observations as someone who, for much of the mid-90s, served as the "designated pinch-hitter" columnist for the opinion page of The Wall Street Journal, the nation's most visible and influential conservative medium.)

This is not unrelated to what all agree was The Big Issue on that November Tuesday. The Republicans had made The War in Iraq a metaphor for their politics and a litmus test for responsible governance. "Trust us on this one, America," they declaimed. "You'll see..." We'd already been victimized on 9-11 and, they warned, could soon be victimized again: If we didn't get to Saddam first, he would get to us. Originally, they told us, he was going to do it with those mysterious WMDs; then he was going to do it by harboring terrorists ("We have to fight them there or else we'll have to fight them here...") So we'd just waltz in, clean the whole thing up and establish a workable template for democracy that would overspread the Mideast, in the process somehow resolving millenium-old enmities. For this, everyone would love us and we'd have peace on Earth forevermore. After making that ideological bed, the GOP was forced to sleep in it—and be judged by what the world looked like when we all woke up. These days it's hard for anyone to construe the developments in Iraq as a "gray area of interpretation," as a presidential press aide once put it; clearly the war has begun to strike just about everyone as a disaster for America, and a holistic one at that (militarily, economically, diplomatically, and perhaps morally as well, let alone in terms of lives lost). In the run-up to November 7, 2006, the Sean Hannitys began to sound irrelevant and out of touch. Asinine, even. Little by little, week by week, almost everything they'd told us about Iraq was revealed as an untruth. Not necessarily an outright lie, you understand; they deserve the benefit of the doubt on some of it. But an untruth is an untruth.

My point is, for several election cycles the right wing has been screaming at its base and the rest of America that "we're in danger!!" We're at risk of being victimized, whether it's by feminists or gays or Mexican immigrants or morally dissolute liberals** or obscure foreign despots who, even if they developed a bomb, would then have to carry it across the ocean and dump it in New York harbor, where it probably wouldn't detonate anyway. Having made the war in Iraq a symbolic crucible for those theories (and conservative politics as a whole), the right wing lost its credibility when the war went south. Young boys, after all, were dying every day; if the fear-mongering, Victimization line they were selling us on such a vital matter turned out to be one huge steaming pile of b.s., then maybe everything else they were selling us at home was b.s., too. I'm no Tim Russert, but that's how it seems to me.

* and make no mistake, they are, almost always, guys. "Angry white men," as they were dubbed.
** And just how ironic does that seem, now?

The new 3 Rs: reading, writing, recriminations.

Every so often, when I stumble across some new critique of my book or hear intelligent, influential people line up behind some key SHAM element, the unease kicks in and I start to wonder if I'm overreaching with regard to self-help's wider effects on society. Then along comes a headline like the following, which appeared above an opinion piece in my daily paper, The Morning Call, just before I left for Vegas:

HIGH SCHOOL MATH PROGRAMS ARE ACADEMIC CHILD ABUSE.

To be honest, at first glance, I figured one of two things was going on: (a), the piece was comic relief, a good-natured swipe at the difficulty of today's math classes. Most opinion sections like to run such pieces now and then, as a much-needed break from the hand-wringing over Iraq, Exxon's obscene profits and the like. But that seemed unlikely here, since everyone knows how poorly U.S. students rate in math achievement among free-world countries; our math classes (and science classes as well, for that matter) don't exactly force students to stretch. So that left (b): The headline was a purposeful attention-getter. The Call's editorial-section manager, Glenn Kranzley, is a very fine editor for whom I myself have written on numerous occasions. And like all savvy editors, Glenn reserves the right to exercise editorial license in crafting headlines that may be somewhat more provocative than the actual content of the associated stories. So assuming the piece wasn't in category (a), I thought that's what had happened here. Until I read the author's opening line:

"Do we need a Megan's Law or an 'Amber Alert' to protect our children in grades K-12 from the dysfunctional world of math education in America?"

Wow.

As I moved through the essay, which I can no longer link (it's archived, and you have to pay for such content), I realized that the author, local parent Dana Guerra, was herself being a bit rhetorically sly, using the "child abuse" motif as a thought-provoking metaphor. But her basic line of argument remains: that by failing to prepare students for the rigors they know they'll encounter in college, elementary schools are not just traumatizing kids but, yes, willfully mistreating them. At one point Guerra refers to today's math students as "young human tragedies" whose parents are "rising up against this academic child abuse" (thus, Glenn's ready-made title).

Victims, victims everywhere! We've learned to label just about everything we don't like as abuse, even when the things we're attacking are formal policies enacted after sober-minded discussion by duly appointed, well-meaning officials. Above all, where our kids are concerned, we focus so intensely on their emotional well-being* that when we find something that causes them pain, we start screaming "abuse!", as Guerra does here. (I suppose that flawed curricula may signal a certain detachment, perhaps even neglect. But abuse? We need an academic Megan's Law? As my old pal Dr. Phil would say, get real....) It has been pointed out by Wendy Kaminer, David Blankenhorn and others that when you call everything abuse, what you ultimately succeed in doing is leaching the term of its power: If all the wheels squeak, how do you know which one really needs service? Then we have the students themselves. Do they bear no responsibility for working hard and at least mastering the lowest-common-denominator (NPI) math they're now being taught? Heck, American kids aren't even doing that, if SAT scores and other objective metrics count at all.**

Finally, and on an unrelated front: I know it's considered good clean fun to make jokes at the expense of our neighbors to the north, but I say you just gotta love 'em. Especially since they seem inclined to buy SHAM at the drop of a hat—or the drop of a few well-placed quotes. I'm told that early this week, the aforementioned article in Maclean's had SHAM in the top 1500 again on the above-border version of Amazon. It remains at 5,800 at this writing. Canadians were also one of the strongest markets for the book when it was first released in summer 2005. And so I hope you'll all join me in a rousing chorus of... "Ohhhh, Can-ada..." (Now if only I could get more Americans to read it.)

* And of course, this obsessive, moment-to-moment hypersensitivity to our emotional well-being, and that of the people we love, is something else for which we can thank the self-help movement.
** See SHAM chapter 10 for more detail on this point. Also, tragicomic true story: I once knew a kid who got 650 on the verbal and 470 on the math. He then added the two subtotals and got a final SAT score of—1020. Personally, I think that being able to successfully add the individual components of your SAT exam should be a final requirement before receiving a high-school diploma. Then again, it's not as easy as it used to be: There are now three such components, with the addition of an essay section a few years ago.

When it comes to my money, what goes to Vegas, stays in Vegas.

I’m way too jetlagged to return to the nominal topic of this blog, so I thought I’d vamp by offering a few impressions of Las Vegas*, a city I hadn’t visited since 1995. Inasmuch as anyone can have a bad day, in most cases I’m not naming names when it comes to the individuals or hotels at the heart of these anecdotes and observations. But they know who they are. Not that any of them is apt to read this blog, or even care one way or the other.

For a town that owes its very identity to an industry with the word hospitality in its name, Las Vegas bestowed very little of it on me.
I did succeed at prying some TLC loose from supervisory types, but the rank-and-file workers with whom I dealt were—to a man/woman—rude, rushed and even resentful, though I can't imagine what they could have been resentful about except that their jobs forced them to interact with guests and paying customers. A typical occurrence: One night my wife and I stood in front of the Mrs. Fields Cookies concession in a very pricy hotel, surveying the extensive menu. (Mrs. Fields ain’t just cookies anymore.) After mere seconds the counter-lady said “Can I help you?” in a tone of voice that really would've been more appropriate to the question, “Can I spit on you?” But I held myself in check (this was early on, and became progressively less true as the week continued), replying good-naturedly, “Wow, there’s a lot to look at here. We’re just going to take a moment to absorb the menu, OK?” Frowning, she disappeared into the recesses of the food-preparation area for about eight full minutes. That is a great deal of time when people are standing at your counter. When I finally called in after her, she said, even more sarcastically than before, “Oh, I was just giving you time to absorb the menu.” HELPFUL NOTE to job-seekers: If you dislike people, or can’t stand waiting on them, then you should probably avoid accepting employment where you’re obliged to cater to people's needs. (The relevance of this vignette, as well as the preceding caveat, extends far beyond Vegas, of course, and applies to just about every teenager working in fast food.)

“Hey... What if we gave Disney $50 billion or so to design an actual working city…!”
You don’t have to have visited Las Vegas in recent years to know that the town has gone luxe in a big, big way. Still, the change is hard to fully appreciate without experiencing it first-hand. The public spaces of many of the newer hotels—the Venetian and Mandalay Bay come to mind—are so cavernous that if you had to traverse a similar distance in most actual cities, you’d consider taking a cab. Comfortable shoes are a must. (Permit me the mild crudeness, but I had to laugh my ass off at the high-born women trying to negotiate some of the cobblestone streets in stiletto heels. The only ones who seemed to manage it well enough were the obvious rent-a-babes**, who, one assumes, have had a lot of practice walking those streets, as it were.) The hotels themselves are breathtaking in the scope of the themed illusions they work so hard to create and sustain: the Venetian, with its careful evocation of the famed canal city; the Bellagio, with its wider lens on Italianate design; Paris, with its presentation of, well, Paris; New York, New York, with its painstaking recreation of a city-in-miniature, faithful right down to the Greenwich Village street scene, whose sights, sounds and smells are eerily real. Overall, it’s a huge sensory spectacle…. It’s just that at a certain point I wonder: All that marble and all that art and all those arches and all those gondoliers crooning love songs as they pilot their watercrafts through the hotel’s interior waterways beneath ever-changing, achingly brilliant (faux) Mediterranean skies… Is it really worth paying six bucks for an iced tea? I’m just askin’. Which brings me to:

Nothing is included. Everything is extra.
Once upon a time, and not all that long ago, either, Vegas was a relatively cheap getaway. Because the massive revenue and tax base generated by the gaming industry supported just about everything else in town (and half the state as well), you could get a room and show for $49; the best steak-and-lobster buffets in the city could be had for $5.99. Now $49 barely covers the incidentals many hotels add to the basic room rate (i.e. the rate you thought you agreed upon) just because, well, they can. The buffets, meanwhile, average around $17 (more like $25 in the newer top-end hostelries). Yet that still isn’t enough, apparently. The materials promoting the Monte Carlo, one of the hotels in which I stayed, said a full gym and business center were “on premises.” And they were. Only, they cost $22 and $25 a day, respectively, to use. I checked around and it was the same story everywhere. Outside Vegas, I've stayed in all kinds of hotels over the past decade, from budget to big-budget, and I’ve rarely been charged so much as a dime for using the gyms and business centers. Which brings us to:

Together, we can save our planet. (Or at least our profit margin.)
The first part, i.e. sans the parentheses, was the upbeat inscription on a placard left in my bathroom in one hotel—not a new-generation glam-fest, but a Strip mainstay and hardly a Motel 6. The placard went on to explain that the hotel hoped to conserve water and spew less detergent waste into the ecosphere by changing my bed linens every other day, unless I specifically objected. Fair enough. Now, would that also explain why most of a spaghetti dinner, including quite probably the largest meatball ever made, lay in plain sight on the carpet, next to the elevator bank on my floor, for an entire day? (I like to assume it fell off a room-service plate; that is the most benign explanation, and the one I much prefer, compared to other possibilities.) Methinks the operative concept here is not environmentalism but something more like “saving money on housekeeping” and “cutting staff levels to the point where you can’t really deliver optimal customer service anyway.”

In one respect, however, the New Vegas is still the Old Vegas.
You can’t walk more than 50 yards down any given stretch of The Strip without some dude extending himself part-way into your path and thrusting a small brochure in your face. Most of these brochures read more or less as follows: BEAUTIFUL NUDE MODELS, DIRECT TO YOUR HOTEL ROOM! 24 HOURS A DAY! Rest assured, this is not a euphemistic way of soliciting for prostitution, because that would be illegal (yes, even in Vegas, contrary to what many people think) and I’m sure that any of the beautiful girls who show up at your hotel room to model for you at 3 a.m., nude, would be grievously offended if you even suggested such a thing! (How do they get away with this?)

I am the worst gambler ever born.
In truth, I am worse with money than anyone I know, gambling being just one aspect of the malaise. Seriously, it is laughable. “Playing the slots,” in my case, consists of deciding on what denomination bill*** I’m going to contribute to the casino’s bottom line, allowing the slot machine's intake mechanism to suck the bill in, then dutifully pulling the arm that spins the wheels, turn after turn until the money is gone. Poof, just like that. I have watched other people, including some in my family, build an entire evening of gambling fun around a single $20 bill. Ha! A twenty lasts me maybe 10 minutes, on a quarter machine. If I hit anything at all, it’s just those damn cherries in the first line, gaining me back a few quarters and thus prolonging my inexorable march to insolvency by 30 seconds.

I should not ever go to a place like Las Vegas. But my grandson is there now, and we are the very bestest of buddies. So I get on the plane....

* Which is fitting anyway, Vegas being the impressionist capital of the world.
** Let me be clear: We’re not talking about hookers in the classic, Times Square sense. We’re talking about women who look like Pam Anderson, complete with silicone, and command upwards of $1000 a night for their services; those services include hanging on some gray-haired CEO's arm as he shops, laughing at his stupid jokes during dinner, being seen with him in the first few rows of Wayne Newton’s holiday extravaganza, etc. Heavy on the etc.
*** Sadly, the traditional slot machine that accepted and dispensed actual coins is fast going the way of the push-mower. Nowadays almost all slots operate on vouchers that you insert and then—assuming you’ve won something—redeem at ATM-like machines distributed throughout the casino. Gone is that delightfully frenetic plinking sound that I used to hear around me when other gamblers hit the four red 7s. Damn them...

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INCIDENTALLY, the piece on life-coaching for which I gave an extended interview to Maclean's (Canada's answer to Time or Newsweek) is finally out this week. I'm not especially overjoyed with what the writer chose to quote, out of all the material I gave her to work with. But then, neither was Selina Glater. You see, Selina? It happens to us all....