'Wow, your butt really does look big in those jeans.'

In postscript to today's earlier blog, I'd like to highlight the following lines from the Obama administration's formal response to the WikiLeaks disclosures, which included countless private communications back and forth among various ground-level diplomats and their Washington overseers:

"By its very nature, field reporting to Washington is candid and often incomplete information. It is not an expression of policy, nor does it shape final policy decisions."

That bears serious contemplation. What Washington is saying is that the cables, emails and other materials released by WikiLeaks contain preliminary brainstorming and "thinking-stage" reactions that should not be confused with, or misinterpreted as, fully formed policy or even actionable intent. And yet those materials are bound to be inflammatory and unhelpful in further diplomatic activities.

As a comparison, I recently watched the riveting film Thirteen Days, a dramatization of the Cuban missile crisis and the Kennedy administration's handling of same. Needless to say, there were many high-level meetings and impromptu tete-a-tetes during that two-week crisis when the viewpoints expressed were along the lines of "Kruschev is an asshole" or "The Soviets are a bunch of sociopaths who deserve to die" or "If we know what's good for us, we'd better bomb the shit out of them before they bomb the shit out of us." Would we want those sentiments to become general knowledge? To be framed as official policy?

Or to put all this in more personal terms: Yeah, we all say that a marriage should be based on openness and honesty ... but ... would you want every fragmentary or momentary thought or feeling you ever have about your mate (or, God help you, about another man or woman) to become known to him or her?

I didn't think so.

If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing...

Not at all sure how I feel about this whole WikiLeaks thing. On the one hand, as we sort through the third mammoth batch of secret documents—whose release U.S. diplomats from Hillary Clinton on down tried feverishly to thwart—it must be said that WikiLeaks stands for free speech. Very, very free speech. (The first two "document dumps," in July and October, consisted of secret files pertaining to U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan.) It must also be said that this bold newish site embodies the kind of enterprise reporting that's all too lacking in a world of celebrity obsession, indolent press-release journalism, and attitude or political agenda dressed up as news. It is also true that governments, ours in particular, often will claim "privilege!" when what they really mean is "dirty little secret!," classifying documents whose release would result more in embarrassment than any grave risks to national security. That seems to be the case with a fair percentage of the material in this latest doc-dump.

On the other hand...is everybody entitled to know everything? State Department legal adviser Harold Koh had warned that this new wave of documents "[endangers] the lives of countless individuals," and now that those documents are out, it's not hard to see why. When your diplomats are functioning at least partly as spies, collecting financial and "biometric" data on their foreign counterparts, the risks to safety are obvious...all the more so when those counterparts are from terrorist nation-states like Iran or North Korea, which are not exactly known for their sympathetic feelings toward dissent and insurgency. Also, as a practical matter, espionage by definition presupposes secrecy. If you can't operate in secret, or if your methods are compromised, then you can no longer conduct espionage. Unless, of course, we want to just throw up our hands as a society and say, "OK, no more spying or any form of secret data collection." And the risks of that in a post-9/11 world should be equally obvious. (This raises the question of whether a government, ours or any, would be within its rights to order a covert-ops strike designed to "take out" WikiLeaks. Does that seem so far beyond the pale, given what's at stake?)

Wikileaks founder Julian Assange clearly sees himself as a hero and a freedom fighter, a self-styled one-man sunshine law. But again, journalism is supposed to be responsible. Is hacking journalism? Is theft of documents journalism? As writer Steve Coll poses at the end of his New Yorker piece, linked above, "[I]f WikiLeaks cannot learn to think efficiently about its publishing choices, it will risk failure, not only because of the governmental opponents it has induced but also because so far it lacks an ethical culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media."

Two questions here. One is, Can we wait for the free market to penalize that lack of an ethical culture? As to the second question, I would direct it to Mr. Coll: Are you freakin' kidding me? An "ethical culture that is consonant with the ideals of free media"? I think maybe Coll needs to step outside the musty, rarefied hallways of The New Yorker and take a clear-eyed look at what's going on around him in today's "free media." What ideals? What ethical culture? The simple facts are, (1) the media suck at policing themselves (I place in evidence MSNBC's handling of the Olbermann mess), and (2) the public, for its part, doesn't want an ethical culture. If it did, we wouldn't have paparazzi feeding mega-circ rags like the National Enquirer, or Glenn Beck making a meteoric ascent to the top of the media pile by ginning up hatred of all-things-Obama in the guise of honest reporting. For that matter, if the public wanted an ethical media culture, an operation like WikiLeaks wouldn't have seen its popularity surge by 168% after its release of secret files pertaining to Afghanistan. In this great land of ours, if someone says he has dirt on someone else, we'll look at it, then we'll heatedly spread the good word, no matter the damage done to a person's reputation or life. In this great land of ours, if a girl goes for a joyride in Daddy's Porsche and ends up splitting her head open against a concrete abutment, we'll look at it. (WARNING: The pictures linked in the previous line are extremely graphic. I debated including them here, but I think they have a "redeeming social value" in the context of this discussion. If you're this far into the post, you didn't come here for gore. Unfortunately, millions of your fellow Americans do seek out such photos, and avidly so, as well as those of shotgun suicides, train accidents, etc. Just as millions of your fellow Americans want to know everything that's said and done behind closed doors in Washington.)

In theory, full disclosure—of everything; by everybody—might seem like a good idea, with the exception of wartime strategies and tactics. (Would we have wanted full disclosure of what was going on in and around Alamogordo back in 1945?) The fly in that ointment is that as a practical matter, free-world nations will be put at a major disadvantage unless and until WikiLeaks operatives are able to gain equivalent access to top-secret files in places like Russia, North Korea and Iran. Which is why in the end I think I come down against outfits like WikiLeaks and the mindset they represent.

If a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, then surely, in these troubled times, a little bit more knowledge can be catastrophic.

(P.S. This is the point at which the late, great Leslie Nielsen would chime in with: "And don't call me Shirley!" He will be missed.)

'BREAKING NEWS: American advertising is one steaming pile of bull! (Film at 11.)'

As if the deck weren't stacked enough against the American consumer, we now have nonsense like this or this or this:* promotions for acai berry weight-loss products that masquerade as news reports. (On my computer, one such ad was locally "datelined," and in another the volunteer dieter just happened to be from my tiny little hometown of 4,000 people here in PA. Amazing what today's marketing software will do.) Here's more detailed background on the scam, which apparently has been ongoing for a while now. Some of the ads include a helpful quote attributed to "Clarissa Garner" of the "American Diet and Fitness Association." A quick Google check yielded no references to Ms. Garner other than those appearing in the acai ads themselves. Nor can I find a listing for any such association under that name.

This level of over-the-top b.s. constitutes a perfect rebuttal to the arguments from those who believe in unfettered caveat emptor and a basically hands-off government policy toward the free market. Should an advertiser be permitted to launch a campaign that's clearly designed to hoodwink consumers into thinking they're reading honest journalism? Should an advertiser be permitted to invent phony spokespeople and the organizations for which those spokespeople allegedly speak? Should it be permissible for the same exact "investigative report" to appear under Julia Miller's byline on one site and under Beverly Williams' byline on another?

This is also why the emotive cinema verite testimonials that anchor even many of today's "respectable" ads make me so uncomfortable: It's dirty pool for an advertiser to conjure up a composite character who purports to be an actual satisfied customer voicing actual, heartfelt sentiments; this is all the more the case when we're talking about the likes of, say, cancer treatment. A viewer who's a cancer patient or a family member of one is apt to be in a highly suggestible state of mind; therefore, the emotional/visceral impact of such ads on that target consumer is way out of proportion to the testimonial's actual probative value, if you will. (In a court of law, such testimony would be banned as "prejudicial.")

The only difference here is that the acai berry ads are just a few yards farther down that same slippery slope.

* the second one, at least, says "advertorial" at the top. And by the way, where does the "torial" come in? How 'bout just advertisement?

Sometimes fiction is more accurate than truth.

Don't know how many of you are devotees of Family Guy—and if you're not, you may be puzzled by certain thematic elements of the show—but regardless, you owe it to yourself to revel in FG creator Seth MacFarlane's achingly canny take on self-help books, the writing and promoting of same, and the publishing and cultural climates responsible for all the foregoing. The episode ran this past weekend. Say what you will of some of the asides, the SHAM-related conceit is hilarious, and it says everything it took me 263 pages to say in my book (plus the ensuing five years on this blog). Special appearance by Bill Maher—live action, not cartoon, a very cleverly done segment—who nicely articulates the downside to the SHAMscape.

Trust me, you will laugh your ass off. And probably become a fan of the show, if you aren't already.

And Koppel nails it.

In further addendum to last week's addendum, this is Ted Koppel's wonderful—which is to say, in truth, achingly sad—dissection of the news business in this, the era of market share.

Want more of Joe's thoughts on integrity? Why not book a ride-along!

I can't even begin to know what to make of this piece, which is, first, a tribute to advertising legend Bruce Barton and, second, a treatise on the importance of integrity in marketing. So far so good. Barton, cofounder of the legendary BBDO agency and thus a revered figure from Madison Avenue's halcyon days, was known for his highly humanized, emotionally evocative ads. The article quotes one of his most famous ad lines, used in a 1935 campaign for U.S. Steel: Barton wrote of immigrant-cum-magnate Andrew Carnegie, "He came to a land of wooden towns...and left a nation of steel." Today, the billion-dollar agency that Barton helped launch shapes the public personas of AT&T, Bank of America, P&G and Campbell, among other notables.

The problem is that the author here, Marilyn Much, anchors her piece in the wisdom of our boy Joe Vitale, clearly setting him up as an unimpeachable authority on integrity in marketing. As Bill Clinton might once have put it, I shit you not. ... Joe Vitale, of the $5000 Rolls ride-alongs? ("There are people who think I should charge a lot more than that," he told ABC's Dan Harris) ... Joe Vitale, who promised buyers untold riches in The Secret and then, when the Universe responded by crashing the economy, belatedly offered to sell us the missing secret from The Secret? ... Joe Vitale, who hyped the Law of Attraction, then his pet moneymaker, by implying that a lack of positivity was what cost some San Diegans their homes in the terrible wildfires of '07? ... Joe Vitale, who gave the world such unforgettables as h'onoponogonorrhea and the $39 "make-a-wish" sticker? ... That Joe Vitale? ...

Somehow I think that Barton, who died in 1967, would not especially appreciate being featured in this context. Interestingly enough, the author herself ends the piece as follows:

Barton wrote in a 1925 essay: "I believe the public has a sixth sense for detecting insincerity, and we run a tremendous risk if we try to make other people believe in something we don't believe in. Somehow our sin will find us out."

Those of us who've been fighting the good fight against the lords of SHAM can only hope and pray.

============================

Speaking of integrity in advertising, or the lack of same.... We appear to have a large contingent of tekkies among the SHAMblog faithful, so you folks are probably aware of this already—but just in case, here's an article on why "4G," that term bandied ubiquitously in today's cell phone ads, basically means nothing. By the way, gotta love the writer's name: Wailin Wong.

'I'm...too sexy for my job...'

I'll be following this case with interest. Amy-Erin Blakely claims that she was fired from her job at the Devereaux Foundation, which provides mental-health services to children, for not heeding warnings to deemphasize her overly large breasts. She also alleges that she'd been denied career advancement at Devereaux because—I'm quoting from the HuffPo's account here—she was "too sensual to be promoted." It's the second such high-profile case to emerge this year, the first involving Debrahlee Lorenzana, who claimed that Citibank fired her, in essence, for being too hot. It does not come as a shock that feminist attorney Gloria Allred is handling the litigation in both cases.

I have known women with large breasts and surreally provocative figures who—how shall we put this?—got perhaps a bit too much satisfaction out of being provocative, but only provocative. There's a derogatory term, most often voiced by teenage boys, that I find generally despicable and I'll not use here, but I do think there are women for whom it sort of applies. In Lorenzana's case in particular, it appears that all may not be as it seems, and in multiple senses.

On the other hand, a woman with big breasts, or the folkloric "great ass" of which Pacino spoke so eloquently in Heat, or whatever other physical attribute one wants to catalog, is, in my view, under no obligation, zero, either morally or professionally, to "dress down." And I think it's important to state the obvious here, which is that in no way is this a male-on-female crime, at least not exclusively. I've heard women say snidely of female coworkers (I bet you have, too), "She's too big 'up there' to wear a top like that," which implies that certain styles or cuts of clothing are "legally" reserved for less amply endowed women. I do not believe that. (Another classically catty putdown: "Who does she think she is, coming in here dressed like that?") Beyond meeting certain standards of professionalism in terms of the general nature of the clothing itself,* a woman, any woman, is entitled to wear what she damn pleases. And the rest of us just have to grow up and deal with it. It strikes me as horribly unfair to tell a voluptuous woman that she must come to work in the sartorial equivalent of a potato sack lest her male colleagues be unable to control themselves and either mount her or begin touching themselves during staff meetings.

Which is why I'd really like to know, more specifically, what they mean in saying that Blakely's appearance was "a distraction." What cataclysmic chain of events did her bodaciousness set in motion? Were the company bean-counters suddenly unable to count beans? Did the window washers outside the building, transfixed by her cleavage, fall off their scaffolds?

Or—just maybe—was Blakely's appearance mostly "distracting" to the other gals in the office?

* meaning, if you're supposed to wear suits, don't show up in jeans.

'Dammit, now where is that ringing coming from...?'

Another positively shocking finding from our academic friends who are obsessed with the study of happiness: People report themselves as "happiest" when they're actually having sex. The data were compiled via a special iPhone app called trackyourhappiness.

Gotta love this quote from the Times piece:

"The researchers are not sure how many of them stopped to pick up the phone and how many waited until afterward to respond. Nor, unfortunately, is there any way to gauge what thoughts—happy, unhappy, murderous—went through their partners' minds when they tried to resume."

One of the lead researchers here, by the way, is Harvard's Dan Gilbert, author of Stumbling on Happiness; Gilbert and his book figure prominently in my current Skeptic cover piece on contemporary Happyism.

'Oh yeah? Well, tell me something I already know!'

As an addendum to recent posts on free speech and my profession, I want to belabor the obvious by noting that the modern social climate is especially onerous to journalists and would-be authors who are trying to "play it straight." Today's polarized, serve*-the-audience marketplace has an inherent tendency to curtail the free expression of ideas, as editors will not publish (and often will go out of their way to marginalize, if not suppress) content that they think their readers don't want to read. Try to sell Parents magazine an article about how the tiny inadvertent things we do in raising children may damage them forevermore. I'm not saying that that's true or that I believe it to be true; it's just a hypothetical. Ergo, let's suppose for the sake of argument that there's new research strongly suggesting that it's true—or maybe that you've written a personal essay about mistakes you made in raising your own kids that, decades later, still haunt you or show up as crippling personality defects in the kids themselves. No such article will ever see the light of day in Parents. If anything, the magazine will mobilize to counter and/or debunk that research, perhaps in part by publishing another essay that showcases a less pessimistic, more "uplifting" view.

Similarly, try to get an article in Ms. showing that, in truth, women now have the upper hand over men in terms of career advancement. Won't happen. Even if it's true, it's not allowed to be. Or try to get an article in Esquire or Playboy that has a decidedly anti-male lens on divorce, date rape or some other social currency. The editors will laugh at you, right before they purge your name from their database. Again, they're simply not going to confront or offend their audiences in such a manner.

Of course, the larger point is that we're no longer willing to be offended. By and large, we will not read or seriously consider material that challenges our respective assumptions, world-views, and narcissistic conceptions of our place in that world. Earlier and earlier nowadays, we think we've got it all figured out. We don't want the "two sides" that supposedly exist with any story. We just want the side that confirms our beliefs. And we want it again and again.

Example 1: Let's assume one believes that a nation, especially a relatively well-off one like the U.S., has a formal obligation to care for its poor. That's a basically Leftist argument. At the same time, it also seems true that if you take care of people, to some inevitable degree you make them lazy and dependent; that's just human nature, and it brings us back into Republican territory. So the issue becomes something of a catch-22 whose solution requires a skillful balancing act, not shouted sloganeering.

Example 2: A determinist lens on life (like, say, mine) presupposes that none of us can help the things we do, which obviously absolves even the worst criminal offenders of any kind of personal blame. That's an argument for greater leniency, or at least less judgment, and is more of a fit with the "bleeding-heart liberal" mindset. Yet there's also no denying that even in a determinist framework, corrective action becomes a large part of what impels people to change, to become rehabilitated (or at least to stop committing antisocial acts, if only for fear of further punishment). That's more of a get-tough-on-crime argument and is clearly a better fit with the right-wing agenda.

How many of us are receptive to hearing (and fairly considering) both arguments in these examples?

This is also why I get apoplectic about TV pundits like Glenn Beck and Keith Olbermann, who are opposite sides of the same coin. To listen to Beck, nothing good ever happens in liberal America; if Obama were to donate his entire personal fortune to charity, Beck would speculate that he's using counterfeit money. Olbermann is just as bad, if not worse, for he couches his remarks in a kind of smarmy, clannish intellectualism, implying that "really smart people" cannot help but see life through a Leftist lens. Bill Maher—and I love the guy, at least from an entertainment standpoint—does the same thing.

For all of these reasons, there are fewer and fewer opportunities for writers to examine issues thoroughly (and/or get paid well for it). In other words, there are fewer and fewer opportunities to perpetrate what we used to call, in college, "critical thinking." And that's a damn shame.

* which is to say, pander to.

Real people don't need self-help books.

When I see books like this one, just out last month, I am so tempted to follow through on my oft-made threat to write a parody: maybe something like Escaping Yourself: Your Journey Away From the Irredeemable Schmuck That You Are. Although in a sense, that's already the implied topic of just about every other self-help book. The funny part is, if I went ahead and did it, that would probably be a best-seller! (a la 1982's Real Men Don't Eat Quiche, which, for those who don't know, had its genesis in a column its author, Bruce Feirstein, did for Playboy).

Jesus H. Christ, is there no end to the people who "want in" here...?

A tribute to my sister Ginny.

As the graphic says, this photo was taken on the occasion of my mother's second marriage, to the man we all came to call "St. Marty" (you had to know Mom to appreciate this). At far left is my oldest sister, Barbara, then Ginny, then Marty, then my mother, then the guy with the crazy perm. Only Barbara and I remain. My father died in 1978...an entire lifetime ago.*

FOR SOME TIME NOW, I've wanted to write something about Ginny, who passed away suddenly on July 14 of this year: four months ago today. After many false starts, I've decided that the best way to honor my sister is simply to reproduce here the eulogy I gave at her memorial service (mildly edited in recognition of the fact this is being read by people who never knew Ginny and wouldn't get some of the references). The memorial took place on July 26, which would have been her 68th birthday.

This, by the way, is another one of those things I do from time to time "mostly for me." But maybe you can find some relevance in it for your relationship with your own family. I've heard from one or two people who say they try to do a better job of "keeping in touch" with loved ones, now, after hearing this.

***************************

I could talk about my sister in generalities. I could talk about the fact that she was active in the church—especially back in the day before her body seemed to declare war on her, one bone or joint at a time. I could talk in generalities about how Ginny was a good person who tried to do the right things for the right reasons. I could talk about my sister's sense of charity—that she felt she had enjoyed some good fortune in life and ought to give back. I could talk about the fact that my sister had a spectacular sense of gallows humor. Most people wouldn't know this, because Ginny didn't share that with most people.

There were a lot of things she didn't share with most people. My sister was a private person who didn't look to be the center of attention and would frequently fade into the woodwork at her own parties. I'm sure that a day like today—being the focus of things—would delight and yet also embarrass her.

But those, as I say, are generalities. None of that has much to do with what my sister meant to me, personally. So I'm going to take a few moments to give you a brother's perspective of what it means to be loved by a sister like Ginny.

See, we all know what happens in families over time. We drift, and to some degree we lose touch.

We say we'll get together...and we don't, at least not as often as we could.

We say we'll call...and we won't, at least not as often as we should.

After a while, we can become pretty far removed from the day-to-day realities of people's lives. But of course you still love those people...and you count on the fact that those people are still there. That bond transcends the miles and the space and the time. And in some corner of yourself, you kid yourself into believing that they'll always be there, even though intellectually you know they won't.

I probably had more reason than most people to feel that way about my sister, Ginny.

It's awkward eulogizing one sister while the other is sitting there listening. So I have to say truthfully that I was blessed to have two wonderful sisters, both of whom showed me nothing but love, especially after my mother took a job and they were stuck with caring for me during the day. Now, it's also true that one of them would send me to the school bus with no socks and two pairs of underwear—I'm not mentioning any names (Barbara)—but it's fair to say I did not grow up deprived of love.

I was a weird kid: bookish, reclusive, socially awkward. I always felt that Ginny tried to look out for me. She would check on me, stop by my room—where I spent about 92.7 percent of my time back then—and ask me how I was doing, if I'd read anything interesting, if I wanted to talk. I think she sensed that we shared a common bond.

Certainly she and I were more alike temperamentally than Barbara and I. Barbara inherited the Yo-Yo gene for social interaction—"Yo-Yo" being everyone's pet name for my mother, whose given name was Yolanda. But Ginny was private, shy, and tended to keep people at arm's length. So she identified.

If she sensed that I was down for some reason, she'd do things like ask me to get in the car and take a drive to Junior's, a famous cafeteria-type restaurant in Brooklyn. We'd sit there at the counter and she'd buy me cheesecake and a chocolate malted. From a dietary standpoint, I grant you, it wasn't the most inspired menu. What's more, she didn't have to do that. I'm sure there were times when she was tired after school or, later, work. As a young woman, Ginny was a very ambitious person with a full day. But she knew it would put a smile on my face, and that's all that mattered.

It was much the same after her long-time employer, Columbia Gas, transferred her to Delaware. I remember the day she invited me down to show me around. We must have driven on every arterial road within a 50-mile radius of Wilmington. Surprisingly little was said, but the words themselves were superfluous. She drove with a small smile on her face that I can still see to this day—occasionally pointing out a landmark or whatever—and I sat in the passenger seat with a smile on my face.

That was our visit. A couple of loving loners sharing quality time.

Except this time we ended up at Popeye's Fried Chicken instead of Junior's.

I got the sense from my sister that she loved me unconditionally, warts and all. As I got older I tested that love, often. Ginny knew more about my warts than most people did, and when it was just between us, she'd let me hear about it—her version of tough-love. To outsiders, though, she always made me feel that she was proud of me. The joy and excitement in her voice whenever I would manage to achieve some little insignificant something was palpable and sincere.

As many of you also know, Kathy and the kids and I lived in California for a time. For the most part, it was a 13-year struggle to stay afloat interrupted by just a few charmed years. Still, Ginny would unfailingly introduce me to people as "my brother, the writer"—she knew it sounded glamorous and exotic—even if her brother, the writer, had been short on the rent that month and needed to come to her for help. She wanted people to see me at my best.

In these last few years we talked more on the phone than we had in a while, and I'm grateful for that. I'd hear the pain or weariness in her soft voice and I'd feel terrible but try to make some stupid joke that, in my mind, cheered her up for a few minutes. Still, with all that she was going through, she'd put the emphasis on other things—usually what I was doing, what I was working on, how were the kids, how was my baseball team doing. To the end, she was that same Ginny that I grew up with.

I said before that the bond between families, at its best, transcends miles and space. Today—as we assemble here on what would have been her 68th birthday—I need to think that it also transcends death.

* The links will take you to pieces I've written about my family. Please, please don't feel obliged to read them or comment on them! (Or on this post, either, for that matter.) The links are just there because, well, the pieces exist. There was a time in my life when about 75% of my writing was of the "first-person memoir" variety.

SHOCKING weight-loss breakthrough! ... Or, dieting a la Rube Goldberg?

Relatively speaking, I haven't spent much time on the weight-loss business—in retrospect that was an unfortunate omission in my book—but these sorts of "insights" are what's so infuriating to some of us who track the SHAMscape and related enterprises. Why is this, seemingly, major news? Why do we have to try everything else first before settling on the astounding realization that you lose weight by consuming fewer calories than you expend? OK, my friends from the fitness realm might interject, "Now hold on there, cowboy, it ain't quite that simple." (For the life of me, I don't know why they all talk like that; very odd.) Maybe it's true that there's some nuance to it, that you can favorably tweak the proportion of muscle to fat by applying cutting-edge nutritional science, combined with enlightened workout regimens.

Still, most of us will go to almost any lengths, and I mean any, to avoid facing the obvious truism italicized above. We'll ingest Brazilian tree bark, we'll have our ears stapled, we'll gulp mystery-formula pills by the handful, we'll embrace genuinely bizarre food fads (or leave out this or that food group altogether, and dangerously so) before we just bite the bullet (instead of everything around us that's edible) and say: You know what? Maybe I should stop eating so much. Or exercise more. Or, ideally, both. Nutritionist Mark Haub proved the wisdom of that approach in colorful and ironic fashion recently when he dropped 27 pounds by eating nothing but Twinkies. Although Twinkies are much-maligned as the quintessential junk food, and according to some can even cause you to go berserk and kill gay municipal employees, Haub proved that the basic equation still holds: Consume fewer calories in Twinkies than you burn in the course of your daily activities and you'll lose weight. As assuredly as if you ate nothing but carrots and sprouts.

Yet it's understandable that overweight Americans would brush aside common sense when there's a $60 billion industry filling the airwaves as well as the pages of every women's magazine with nonsense that massively overcomplicates the proposition of weight loss and gives consumers every possible excuse to rationalize away the simple fact that if they really want to lose weight, they can do so at home—sans any complex "weight-loss systems"—via portion control. Aiding and abetting all this you have the bright-eyed hordes from the Cult of Positivity who relentlessly sell the notion that the key ingredient in dieting success is unflagging optimism. "Don't ever admit a negative thought! To be successful at dieting [or anything else, for that matter], you have to persuade yourself that failure is simply unacceptable!"

In truth it appears to be a healthy dose of fatalism that does the trick.

* Many of you young'uns may not have heard of Rube Goldberg, but he was a cartoonist who specialized in devising incredibly, hilariously complicated systems for accomplishing simple things.

All the news that fits your mindset.*

The other day I tweeted about something said to me by an acquiring editor at a fairly large publishing house, to wit:

Books editor just told me, "We can't afford to publish books that people should read. We publish what we know they already like." How sad

That tweet elicited a couple of tart responses on Twitter and in my business inbox. (It has also come up in conversation a few times since.) One response was, "So publishers should publish books that people don't like? Would that make you happy?" The latter question, I can only assume, was a snide, elliptical reference to my current Skeptic cover story on happiness and how difficult it can be to find, especially for those who actively seek it.

But I have an answer. What would make me happy is if publishers now and then felt an obligation to publish (and then promote the hell out of) books about things that people perhaps don't like yet. Or things that people don't yet know enough about to like. Or books containing material that an informed, well-rounded person should know, but doesn't think he cares about. Or maybe even, yes, information that people really, really don't want to hear, and would prefer to avoid at all costs, but need to be confronted with simply because it's true or at least highly plausible. And if any actual publishers are reading this, I'm sure they're laughing their collective ass off right about now, because such a notion could not possibly be more foreign and antithetical to the mentality that drives those fabled top-secret meetings where publishers decide whether to go with a given book and how much to offer for it.

With rare exceptions, none of the types of books following the string of "or's" in the preceding paragraph is getting published nowadays. Publishers, at least the larger ones, are afraid to take the risk. And the more front money they're expected to pay, the more risk-averse they are. When serious cash is at stake, they will bet only on sure things; "sure thing" tends to mean "something that's already a huge mainstream trend or currency of thought with an audience to match." (Fiction writers: This explains why your next story really ought to have a vampire in it, and should mention Lindsay Lohan at least a dozen times regardless of the relevance of same to plot continuity.) While this approach might seem to make sense from the myopic perspective of Big Bidness, it creates a major catch-22 for the serious-minded author tackling provocative, cutting-edge topics, because some of the books that are the most technically demanding to research and write (thus meaning they take the most time and deserve the largest advance, from the writer's vantage point) are also the riskiest and most low-percentage from the publisher's vantage point.

But the larger point is, 'twas not always thus. Once upon a time, publishers took a lot more risks. Once upon a time there was a place for a book that people should read, without any guarantees about whether they would read it.

(As a personal side note, after I wrote the book that led to this blog, an agent got in touch with me and said that whatever I'd gotten for SHAM, he was sure he could get me twice as much, and probably an even higher multiple, to do the obvious, far more "salable" sequel: a book about the kinds of self-help programs that do work. "That," he said, "is what people really want to hear. Not all this negativity." So in effect, he wanted me to follow up SHAM with a self-help book of my own.)

It's not just books, either. Magazine publishing, too, used to be very different from what it is today. An editor took the liberty of scouring the wide wide world of thought and information, then decided, as a kind of benign intellectual despot, what to present to readers based on a gut-level instinct that "they need to know this." No question, when I launched my career in the fall of 1981* magazines showcased a lot more leading-edge, niche and/or against-the-grain material than they do today. At the opinion-leading magazines of yore in particular—not just Harper's, The Atlantic and The New Yorker, but also Life, Look, Time, Esquire, the original Vanity Fair and dozens of others—editors acted in a manner that was true to the term "opinion-leader." They challenged readers, demanded them to stretch, to look at life in unfamiliar, even uncomfortable ways: ways that made readers question their own core assumptions. In short, they asked people to think. There was far less editorial hand-wringing over notions like, "Jesus Christ, if we publish this a lot of our readers are going to throw the damn magazine across the room, then cancel their subscription..." By and large, if the editors thought it was worthy of being known, they ran it. That's because there was a tacit compact between editors and readers wherein the reader agreed not to throw the damn magazine across the room, but rather to keep an open mind and take the material in the spirit in which it was offered.

Readers once read to learn, not just to be entertained or patronized.

Today the ethos has changed from "we're going to give you what we think you ought to know" to "we're going to find out what you want to read and just give you tons of that, again and again, month after month." That's why the so-called "general-interest" magazine is going the way of the Pontiac, and fedoras at ball games; basically there are no more general-interest readers. Very early on in life, most people align themselves with a certain world-view or a select set of interests, and that's that. Game, set, match.

The saddest part is that this same mentality even infects the news. Especially at the local levels, news stations will cover—or not—certain types of stories based on a carefully researched assessment of what viewers do or don't want to see. Think about that: market-driven news coverage. It's a scary proposition, at least to this old fart.

By the way, apropos of all this is a hilarious cartoon that I can't use here for copyright reasons, but it perfectly captures the absurdity of the latter-day conspiracy between booksellers and book buyers.

* For those who not know, this is a corruption of the famous New York Times slogan, "All the news that's fit to print." And today, more than a hundred years after the line's inception, people still debate its meaning.
** The resulting first story, as by now you've been told ad nauseam, appeared in the January 1982 Harper's.

Heteros are people, too.

As veteran SHAMbloggers know, I support gay marriage. To be honest, I don't even understand what the fuss is about. Why is it any of my business (or yours) if the same-sex couple up the street want to get married? And, to our friends in the world of Christian fundamentalism: Butt out. If you subscribe to the sentiments depicted at left, then leave it to God to adjudicate. Or tell ya what, why not head up there a bit early and see how He's handling it, 'K?

But this makes me uneasy. As you can see if you read the story, the city of Allentown, my municipal next-door neighbor, is attempting to enact legislation that would entitle "committed" gay couples to the same health and other benefits as heterosexual marrieds. So far so good. The sticking point for me is that the city wants to specifically exclude committed (but unmarried) heterosexual couples from like benefits.

I see several problems here, both practical and ethical in nature. First of all, committed is committed. The logic of the legislation seems to assume that if you're heterosexual, and you're really that committed, well, you stop wasting time and get married. When did marriage become an obligation, not just a choice? Also, as you know from my stance on affirmative action (I staunchly oppose it), I think it's a bad idea when you start parsing language and jury-rigging laws to benefit one specific group while leaving out others. To quote from the article above:

"The amendment to the city's human relations code before council would make clear that it's not discriminatory for an employer to provide benefits to same-sex partners that also are not provided to unmarried heterosexual partners."

It would? How? Simply by say-so? "This law is officially not discriminatory, even though it discriminates." Oh, OK. Thanks for clearing that up.

I understand the rebuttal: "Look, gays generally can't get married. If they can't get married, and you want them to have access to the financial benefits of domestic partnership, you need a law like this." Fine. Then give the same benefits to all "committed" couples, regardless of sexual orientation. What's that you say? But a "regular unmarried couple" can separate any time they please? Well what's to stop a committed gay couple from separating? (For that matter, what's to stop a married couple from separating?) Or are we going to require that a gay couple, having declared itself committed, must remain together for life?

I'll tell you what the city says: "We can't afford to give partnership benefits to all couples. It's only affordable if we limit it to gays." Another terrible reason. Something is either morally right, and logically sound, or it isn't. If the concept of commitment means anything, then all couples deserve the benefits. You don't split hairs over money.

Of course, the real solution here—going back to where we started in this post—is to allow gays to marry. Let's do that, shall we? Forthwith. Let gays marry, ditch don't-ask-don't-tell once and for all, and move on as a society. Just let's not muck things up with half-measures that are themselves discriminatory. It's not right, and it sends a bad message.

Can't we be inclusive to gays without passing laws that are anti-straight?

More Sportsthink genius...

...courtesy of my local newspaper: Today's sports section implies that the Dallas Cowboys are a surprising* 1-and-6 not because of a talent shortfall or key injuries, or because they're simply underperforming, but because they "seem to have given up." Is there tangible evidence for this accusation? I'd like to hear it. (Can there be tangible evidence? And see, that's the whole point: We make up this crap because it's sexy and provocative and generates conversation, yet it dwells in a realm that defies proof.)

Remember the danger here: If every time somebody fails to meet expectations we instinctively reason backwards and ascribe that failure to a character flaw rather than a contextual variable or "just one of those things," we end up constantly judging people, blaming them for setbacks in which they may play no role whatsoever. They're just innocent bystanders.

This is tragic and unfair in all walks of life (it is, of course, sickeningly prevalent in today's business world), but particularly so when applied to young athletes, who are led to believe, for example, that they lost a game because they "didn't want it enough."

It's total bullshit, and somebody at an elite level of sports needs to step forward and say so.

* indeed, shocking, based on preseason picks.

Wheel of missed-fortune?

Every now and then it occurs to me that it might be nice to bid a (basically) fond farewell to the monthly grind of freelance writing. After all, I've been at this on and off since the fall of 1981, and continuously since the fall of 2001, when Rodale decided I was no longer integral to its plans. I'm getting a bit long of tooth for it. Long of tooth, short of drive. I used to be indefatigable, routinely pulling all-nighters. This was particularly true back when we first moved to San Diego ('85). I'd start in on something after dinner, my wife would put that last cup of coffee in front of me before going to bed at around 10, and I wouldn't even realize how many hours I was logging at the keyboard till I became vaguely aware that birds had begun chirping and I saw the first tentative rays of sunshine sneaking past my window-blinds. I never do that anymore.

I guess I've become...fatigable.

I can't complain; I haven't done badly for myself in the overall. I can say without false modesty that I've not only achieved but obliterated every artistic* goal I had when I traded in my salesman's sample kit for a typewriter in 1982. Since that first sale to Harper's, I've seen my byline in pretty much every magazine that young writers dream about (or used to dream about, back when craft and literary merit meant a lot more than they do today); at various points in my career I've been a member of the stable at several of the elite, "opinion-leading" journals. In fact, at one time—not so much anymore today—I would've ranked my editorial Rolodex (and there's an antiquated reference!) with anybody's anywhere: The top editors at the top magazines in just about every writing discipline or area of interest knew of my work and took my calls. I've also done books and a TV movie, and for a time had a second movie option in the hopper (though that fizzled when the book on which it was based went unfinished, for reasons we can get into someday if I'm in an especially self-flagellating mood). I've also have had more face-time on network TV than a crazy kid from blue-collar Brooklyn ever could've imagined, growing up. .... All of which raises the timeless question, Why don't I have any money in the bank?

But freelancing is a young person's game. By my age (I can't even type the numbers without wanting to cry), and after this many total years in the business, most writers have either (1) gotten out of the business, (2) gone part-time, finding another way of more reliably ensuring that bills are paid between writing gigs, (3) managed to land a renewable/sustainable contract with a major magazine, web site or other source of ongoing work, or (4) done a blockbuster book that left them set for life. The vast, vast majority—upwards of 80%, I'd guesstimate—fall into categories 1 and 2. Statistically speaking, almost nobody falls into category 4: several hundred or maybe a couple thousand, tops, out of the millions who've tried their hand at the business in the three decades I've been doing it.** And every year like clockwork, liberal-arts programs and journalism schools disgorge tens of thousands of additional bright-eyed wannabes, most of whom have been equipped by their colleges with not a clue about how things actually work in the real world. That is a travesty unto itself—I've written about it for The Writer, but couldn't find the page to link. Another topic for another day.

Anyway, that's my typically overlong way of saying that I occasionally send out a few resumes for this or that. And when I do, I'm forced to confront a sobering truth.

See, I had a charmed life early. Things seemed weighted in my favor, as if the world were one huge craps table and I were a 6-foot-4-inch set of loaded dice. I got every big job that I applied for, even though I was seldom (if ever) technically qualified. The American Legion made me editor and ultimately publisher of its magazine, a post that in turn made me a director of the world's largest veterans' organization, without my being a veteran myself. You cannot appreciate how remarkable that is unless you've worked within the chummy and somewhat paranoid insularity of Legion National Headquarters. It's a little bit like being made head of the AMA without being a doctor. When things went south at the Legion a few years later, I was immediately offered a plum professorship at Indiana University, one of America's foremost journalism schools, despite my mere possession of a lowly BA. In almost all cases, jobs at such elite institutions of higher learning demand a PhD, minimally an MA or MFA. Among the more curious and amusing results of this was that I often ended up mentoring grad students whose academic bona fides dwarfed my own. In 2000, I left the IU job in mid-contract—a departure that I'm sure I'll rank on my deathbed as my greatest misgiving, at least career-wise—in order to accept a six-figure job as head of book editing at Men's Health. I had never previously edited a book.

The stunning latter-day irony, however, is this: Now that I do have those glossy qualifications and credentials on my resume, I can't even get to the interview stage for lesser jobs. It's as if none of it ever happened and I'm back to square one. I'd have thought SHAM alone would put me at square two.

This could mean nothing. It could just be one of those things. (Would a cynic say it's karmic payback?) But it makes me think that you get a certain number of chances in life—just randomly, by the luck of the draw, whether you deserve them or not—and then that's that. A few glorious and heady times, the cosmic wheel will land on your number, and you'd damned well better make the most of those "hits," because your number may not be coming up again.

* i.e., as distinct from financial.
** And that club is even smaller and more exclusive today than it once was, considering that so much of the most successful writing nowadays is done by non-writers, our pal Sully Sullenberger being a prime example. I'd include Rhonda Byrne in that same group.

If it were a C&W song it might be called: Take this billion and share it...

I know I'm letting myself get detoured from the founding purpose of this blog, but there's just been so much going on with respect to the election and its aftermath that I find it hard right now to worry too much about Deepak Chopra. We shall return, soon, to your regularly scheduled programming.

So, last night on the news a local GOP politico with a longstanding reputation as a cost-cutter, who rode Tuesday's Red Wave to even higher elected office in D.C., was commenting on the need to rein in runaway spending. In the course of his sermonizing, he mentioned as an example the "endless" series of extensions in unemployment benefits that are, of course, funded (or at least supplemented) by federal largess that requires periodic authorizations from Congress. Of which he said, more or less,* "We can't just keep extending these benefits indefinitely. Absolutely it's tragic that people are out of work, and nobody wants anyone to get his house foreclosed, but the solution is to get people back to work. We can't just keep paying them to be unemployed."

My question is: Why not?

Now, I do realize that there is nuance to this argument, that the issue isn't as deceptively simple as it may seem to some "bleeding-heart" types. During the course of his gubernatorial campaign, Republican Tom Corbett, now our gubernor-elect, got himself in a bit of hot water by musing, "The jobs are there. But if we keep extending unemployment, people are just going to sit there." This echoes the most cynical and incendiary sentiments voiced by early opponents of the welfare state and its so-called "welfare queens"; they argued that generational, no-questions-asked welfare provides a strong disincentive for people to go to work and is therefore self-perpetuating ad infinitum. I do think there's something to that, and what's more, the (qualified) success of latter-day, transitional "workfare" programs seems to prove that case. However, in today's economy, with the unemployment rate lolling around 10% (and as high as 15% in Las Vegas, where, naturally, two of my three kids live), and the foreclosure rate as high as it also has been throughout 2010, common sense tell us that a lot of people simply can't find work. I don't care how much merit there is to arguments about "enabling" and "coddling," the U.S. economy flat-out sucks, and there's no way to sugar-coat that.

I am thus bemused by arguments that seem to posit as a given that "well, you know, we can't keep paying for this forever." As if a person is entitled to a certain amount of compassion and that's it, you've reached your lifetime benefit limit. I fail to understand why a nation like the USofA cannot embrace as a core value that no one will go without food, shelter or healthcare—those are priorities 1, 2 and 3—and we will do whatever we must do, even it means moving into crisis mode, tax-wise, in order to uphold that goal. According to Forbes, the U.S. presently has 403 billionaires whose collective net worth is $1.3 trillion. What follows is slice-and-dice economics, and I'm not putting this forward as a serious proposal; it's just a hypothetical, an exercise. But let's say that when the unemployment rate (or homeless rate) reaches a certain threshold, a special tax kicks in that seizes 10% of that money. Or, to phrase it in more genteel fashion, the billionaires agree to "volunteer" the money. Anyway, if my math is correct, that operation yields a cool $130 billion. In one lump sum. And remember, at this point we're still working with only the billionaires, which is a pool of a whole big 400 people. If we extend the program to cover anyone with, say, in excess of $50 million....?

(Reminder: The foregoing "system" is far too offhand and unworkable. And besides, as a practical matter, there's no way the government could just swoop in and take 10% of someone's net worth, a process that almost surely would require liquidating assets—possibly including entire corporations—and other steps that might in themselves have a severe, dislocating impact on the economy. But you see what I'm driving at. Maybe we could devise an alternate formula that mega-taxes current income. Or illegal offshore holdings. Or we can simply confiscate the bribe money normally paid to Saudi princes or Chinese provincial governors for the right to do business there.)

Bottom line, I do not understand why we can't just say, authoritatively and with no parsing, that the most fortunate must kick in more to prevent the least fortunate from having horrific lives and/or suffering irrecoverable losses (like foreclosures). Period. And I do not understand how any billionaire could in good conscience oppose such a plan. What's wrong with the idea? Is it not the moral thing to do? Those aren't rhetoricals, folks. I'm seriously askin'...

* As if often the case with topics suggested by things I see on TV, I'm quoting as accurately as I can; I caught his remarks in-passing as I was leaving the room.

Let the healing begin?

Can't let the opportunity pass to commend this column on post-Election reconciliation by Pulitzer Prize-winning syndicated columnist Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald. Beautifully thought, beautifully rendered.

And, in a further New Age/Conservatism parallel...

A line from one of my editors this morning: "What never ceases to amaze me about the Conservative movement is its ability to con gullible people into voting against their own best interests. It succeeds at this time and again."

I am reminded of the young man in my ABC special, "Mind Games," who was already broke but kept signing up for New Age seminars so he could "attract" the money to pay his bills and, ultimately, find the wealth he has so long coveted.

A very sad phenomenon in both cases: the privileged duping the pliant.

Election afermath: Score one for The Secret.

What a lot of people miss about the New Age is that in philosophy and tone, it is very much aligned with latter-day conservatism and the sorts of things we saw happening, say, at AIG and Goldman-Sachs before the fall. The Secret, after all, is nothing if not wildly, irredeemably, unapologetically aspirational. Along with its philosophical sibling movements in the megachurches—such as that run by our friend Joel ("the gospel according to Vera Wang") Osteen—The Secret legitimizes the idea of endless upward mobility and a reality in which wealth is not zero-sum, but in fact can be attained by everyone everywhere at the same time if "you just want it enough." Secret alum Lisa Nichols says it flat-out in the very title of her CD: "You Deserve It!"

In the world according to Rhonda Byrne and her (pseudo-)philosophical protégés, every man (and woman) is an island, and all of those islands are the Caymans.

Both The Secret and conservatism encourage a detached, delusional mindset in which the sky's the limit, conspicuous consumption is where it's at, and there's no longer any such thing as greed or "too much." Whatever you have is yours; let the next person worry about attracting his or hers. (I would link, here, to Joe Vitale going all gooey over the creature-comforts of his Rolls for the camera crew from my ABC special, but I can't locate the vid at the moment.)

Pop quiz: Which political party would be more inclined to sympathize with everyday folk who got shafted by life? The GOP, with its no-excuses lens on success? Or the Liberals, for whom the twin ideas of Victimization and life's fundamental unfairness are core assumptions? Both The Secret and Conservatism emphasize the core idea that "it's all on you." Although right-wingers don't frame their rhetoric in terms of the Law of Attraction or an obliging Universe, isn't that the essential Conservative message: that success is attainable to all who "really want it"? That if you fail to achieve what you want, it's because of you? Like diehard Secretologists, conservatives don't want to hear about where you grew up, what kind of family you came from, whatever bad breaks you may have gotten. Tough noogies. If you're behind the eight-ball in life, that's your problem and your problem alone. You "own it," as Dr. Phil likes to say. Needless to say, such an attitude justifies (in their mind) their disinclination to share their wealth with you in the form of taxes earmarked for entitlement programs.

Let me emphasize: I'm not necessarily saying that an unadulterated Victimization outlook is a good thing, either; I think I made that clear in SHAM. But I also think about Rhonda Byrne chiding Katrina victims for being in the path of the hurricane or 9/11 victims for failing to ward off hijacked airliners. Over-the-top nonsense though such crap may be, does it not remind of the conservatives who historically have argued that if you're jobless or on welfare or food stamps, it's only because too you're too damn lazy to go out and make something of yourself?

So which party sounds more like today's New Age? There's only one, ahem, right answer.

It may therefore seem odd that a staunch Obama-ist like Oprah Winfrey would shill for such Thought Movements, but here again: Oprah preaches a kind of schizoid ecumenicalism/egalitarianism, a world in which we can all be number one, in the same way the self-esteem movement still has many school principals (or hired guns brought in from outside) implying in regular assemblies that all of the kids can be president. This is in fact the great, paradoxical genius of Oprah: She makes Republican ideals—in the sense of the pursuit and accumulation of fabulous personal wealth—sound positively d/Democratic, conjuring visions of a world in which someday every woman can own choice property everywhere, along with several dozen pair of those cute shoes with the red soles....

("No feet left behind..."?)

Confession from a repentant right-winger.

Today we'll go to the polls (those of us who do) and decide what the Washington political climate looks and sounds like for the balance of Barack Obama's presidency. Obama may or may not get reelected in 2012, but 2012 seems impossibly far off at the moment. Think about the surreal shift in American sentiment just since 2008: Obama was then the candidate of capital-c Change, sweeping in on what appeared to be a mood of broad rethinking and a mandate for reform. Now America wants a different kind of Change and has apparently rethought its earlier rethinking, in the process forgetting completely, it would seem, the way things felt in those last few years under Bush-the-Younger. Pulling back from the specifics and considering the overall tableau, one overarching conclusion suggests itself: We have no idea what the hell we want. And whatever it is that we want (this week), we don't have the patience to see it through.

There was a time when I, Steve Salerno, your current left-wing radical, was a conservative. In fact, I was vocally and vehemently conservative. My conservatism rang out from highly visible media like The Wall Street Journal and The American Enterprise and National Review Online. I bought in, fully, to Reaganomics, with its twin notions of trickle-down prosperity and job-creation-via-business-incentives; I bought into the whole shebang. If I've given up on conservatism in recent years, it's not because I no longer believe that those ideas work, in theory. The ideas themselves, in all likelihood, are sound.

It's We-the-People who have changed.

Just as the Framers of the Second Amendment, whatever their original intent, could not have envisioned a world in which tweener gang members on a testosterone high were riding around in cars with loaded AK-47s across their laps, the evolving American free-market experiment depended on the belief that businesspeople would use the tool of capitalism as it was designed to be used, thereby flooding society with the fruits of individual initiative. There's a metaphor here that actually works equally well with regard to my thoughts on both the Second Amendment and latter-day capitalism: A hammer is a wonderful instrument if you're working with Jimmy Carter and his Habitat crew to assemble a house. But if you have a whole bunch of people running around using hammers to bludgeon their neighbors to death, well, at that point you have to think about the wisdom of having so many hammers in circulation. That has become the way I feel about today's free market. It is not being used for good. So we need to keep it in check.

Although I am as guilty as anyone of misquoting or excessively invoking de Tocqueville, that line of his about how a successful democracy presupposes and absolutely requires the good will of the people—or else it will self-destruct—is truer and more relevant than ever. The free-market system may work well when used as intended, but too many people in positions of power aren't using it as intended. It has become an instrument of greed, a way of creating—instead of jobs—simply more and more wealth for the oligarchy. (And that's leaving aside the incredible boondoggle perpetrated by the lords of derivatives and other high-level financial machinations.) This is clear in figures that show the percentage-wise concentration of wealth over the past half-century. As Bill Maher and others have pointed out, that is the real redistribution: not from the rich to the masses in some socialist sense, but from the masses to the rich. [The above chart is kind of fuzzy. Click on it to enlarge.]

See, we have become too narcissistic as a people. We no longer believe in share-and-share-alike—SHAMland having certainly played a role therein—and therefore, the tools that were originally designed to ensure continued growth and widespread prosperity...don't. They ensure fantastic wealth for a few and inescapable poverty (or at best, lower-middle-class mediocrity) for everyone else. And to be clear, I'm not saying that Joe Poor is any more noble or selfless in his aspirations than Joe Rich. It's just that Joe Poor has no power, and the system as presently constructed guarantees that he will continue having no power. He's trapped. He has little or no access to the nation's almighty financial and political systems. Unless he is very, very lucky, his fate is sealed.

Until all of that changes, until we renounce Me-First-ism and learn to stop being so damned selfish, I will be voting Democrat in the hopes of forcing the collective hand.