S H A M b l o g

HWJPI? (Or: How Would Jesus Pitch It?)

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 02:38:00 +0000

"AND SO IT WAS written, as the ancients foretold, that the evolution of religion and self-help towards some common ground would continue, rendering unto God that which had previously been found only in the annals of viral marketing, and rendering unto you a new Rolex..."

The conceptual similarities between self-help and today's more "secularized religions" were always striking. We've been tracking the phenomenon for a while on SHAMblog. But even your host didn't realize the degree to which today's religion is being explicitly repackaged in self-help terms. Such at least is the message of this cover story by Scott Bass, which I found in a Virginia alternative weekly.*

The "relevancy movement" in American churchdom is nothing new, and has been most immediately noticeable in the music. Anyone who's listened to gospel music of late (or almost any music emanating from the so-called megachurches) will have a hard time distinguishing it from the genres that have parents screaming at teenagers to "turn that down!" The lyrics are more tasteful and "godly," if you will—but there's no mistaking what the actual music and underlying rhythms owe to R&B, alternative, and even rap. In effect, the pastors (and, increasingly, boards of governors) of these "enlightened" churches are turning weekly services into concerts, hoping to make the experience more tolerable for the younger generation that churches desperately need to attract in order to survive. As one of Bass' sources puts it, in a line with both literal and figurative meaning, "You can't play the old music and get the new folks." Especially in larger, nondenominational houses of worship, services have become multimedia extravaganzas worthy of a Tony Robbins seminar, featuring live performances on-stage (which may include dance routines), and even light-hearted, pre-sermon "warm-ups" by the nation's growing roster of Christian comedians.

But we now seem to have reached that point where many religious leaders are dropping all pretenses, talking openly and unashamedly in a lingo borrowed from consumer marketing. They speak of smart merchandising and brand identity, marketplace differentiation and expanding their franchise; parishioners are consumers of religion. Here's one of the pastors in Bass' piece discussing his church's promotional efforts: "We've done billboards, we've done movie ads…. We believe we have the best product in the world." You listen to that kind of talk and you wonder: Is this dude selling God or a new-and-improved grease remover?

Traditional religion, you see, has a major image problem: It's "fighting 2,000 years of bad marketing," as Bass phrases it. All that fire-and-brimstone stuff doesn't connect very well with today's self-centered, hedonistic audiences, who expect religion—like everything else in life—to meet their needs and speak their language. Today's pastors, in their effort to distance themselves from religion's hell-fire heritage, even try to look different: tres Joe Vitale-like, they're increasingly inclined to wear such get-ups as jeans and Hawaiian shirts. During the worship services, hosannas have yielded to high-fives; a collective chorus of "my bads!", followed by an instant, blanket absolution, is gradually replacing the penitent Hail Marys I remember from the confessions of my youth. Some churches, reports Bass, have even taken their crosses down. Crosses are bad karma, after all. Crosses make people think of suffering. Crosses make people think of obligation. And the only obligation that matters these days is your obligation to yourself.

Behold the church of the here-and-now! "Escapism," writes Bass, "is as much a part of our psyche as capitalism or democracy, freedom and equal rights." Yes, and more so all the time. And what today's, ahem, worshippers mostly want to escape from is any judgment or condemnation from on-high. (This, in the same way that today's highly empowered self-helpers want to escape liability for the harm they cause in the course of their unapologetic pursuit of personal fulfillment.) Hence the most successful churches jettison such off-putting, uncomfortable notions as sin. Or what used to be thought of as sin. To be sure, greed and avarice are totally off the table nowadays as tickets to hell. Preachers even build their aforementioned franchises around an end-user-driven liturgy—what Bass calls a "self-help gospel"—that warmly embraces the pursuit of ostentatious material wealth. We've also talked in this blog about Joel Osteen and his Gospel According to Ralph Lauren. (That's a joke, but it's one of those jokes that's awfully close to the truth.) As Bass writes, Osteen "epitomizes the what-God-can-do-for-you movement. [He] has grown his Houston-based church into the largest in the country, with 47,000 members." Osteen's latest book, Become a Better You: 7 Keys to Improving Your Life Every Day, sounds like something that easily could've been written by a Stephen Covey or a Phil McGraw.

Nor is it just greed that's been air-brushed off the signpost to eternal damnation. I think it's safe to say that divorce by now has been totally destigmatized (and I'm not contending that it shouldn't have been; I'm just saying that for better or worse, religion has grown steadily more forgiving of human foibles than it used to be). Premarital sex is not the taboo it used to be, either, in church or out. Unwed motherhood?** Hey, if it works for you... Even the Episcopal church in my neighborhood (which is hardly in the category of the churches Bass writes about) has no particular stipulations when it comes to the circumstances under which kids are brought into the world, or into "the light of God's love."

Interestingly enough, as religion grows more lenient, self-help becomes more dogmatic. In their own smiling, uplifting ways, the likes of Vitale and Rhonda Byrne can be as demanding of loyalty to their particular "scripture" as the Catholic Church of my boyhood ever was. They'll threaten non-believers with their own versions of Hell, and not just figuratively. We saw the extent of Vitale's quiet wrath in his recent attempts to draw a linkage between positive thinking and whether or not a person's home survived San Diego's wildfires.

If the day comes when religion and self-help are all but indistinguishable...when it doesn't really matter what you worship, as long as you worship something, and it makes you happy...what then?

Something to think about, maybe, over Christmas.

* I've often said that some of the best stories are not found in the august national media like The New York Times, but rather in small-market publications.
** Wait, let me rephrase that in more culturally relevant terms: single parenthood.

Finally, a cleric calls out the Gospel According to Ralph Lauren.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sat, 12 Jul 2025 02:37:00 +0000

I've been waiting for other men/women of the cloth to weigh in on the likes of Joel Osteen (whose cloth is custom-made only), and it's been a long, frustrating and frankly shocking wait. (I guess those evangelical types tend to have each other's designer-clad backs.) Finally, though, my Jobs-like patience has been rewarded via this piece by Pastor Rick Henderson.

For reasons of time and deadlines, I haven't looked into Henderson's background, so I'm going to assume this isn't just a case of some Osteen competitor/wannabe calling the kettle black, so to speak.

Anyway, I especially like the graph that goes:

There is nothing wrong with being wealthy. I love it when Christians are rich. That should mean more money to fund the mission. But there is a line to how much money we as leaders should spend on ourselves. I don't know where the line is, but it is somewhere before the ministry purchasing million dollar homes for us and our kids. That line is somewhere before purchasing us a $10 million private jet. The line is somewhere before the ministry spending $261, 498 for 68 pieces of furniture. That equates to $3,845.56 per item...

Note particularly the way Henderson ties the attainment of great wealth with "more money to fund the mission." Though I'm not crazy about the opening line of the graph, which I think misleads, clearly what he means in context is that there's nothing wrong with becoming wealthy if you then use that wealth for humanitarian purposes. Can a Christian stay wealthy and continue to be a true Christian? I tend to think the answer is no. Scripture isn't my forte, but what about the meek inheriting the Earth and all that? Here I am somewhat reminded of the closing scenes of Schindler's List, where industrialist Otto Schindler is tearfully recounting how many additional lives he might have saved by spending just a few dollars less frivolously here and there. (Play the clip above; it may not fully hit home if you haven't seen the film, but it's worth it for the heartbreaking theme alone.)

So how much money is "enough"? I don't know that either. And I'm not saying that I think people shouldn't be allowed to be wealthy (although I do think that at the upper echelons of American wealth, where right now people are beginning to browse elitist Christmas catalogs in quest of $50,000 espresso makers, the narcissism and general self-indulgence are a bit hard to take). I'm saying I don't understand how a sincere follower of Christ can allow himself or herself to become wealthy. One would think that genuine adherence to one's religious principles would call for, if not exactly a vow of poverty, surely the divestiture of the vast sums that so many wealthy Americans boast.

The bastardization of religion is also visible in the so-called "relevancy" and "felt needs" movements, premised on the notion that if people enjoy doing things at which traditional religion tends to look down its judgmental nose, the obvious course of action is to...redefine the religion so that it now embraces those once-outlying beliefs and/or behaviors.

Once again, see, it's ALL ABOUT YOU!

I guess they expected Barack magic.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 16:13:00 +0000

UPDATE, Saturday, December 12. I invite all those who peevishly blame the president for what's been happening (or not happening) in Washington to take a look at this poll, just out on PollingReport.com. You will recall that Obama, throughout his campaign, advocated a so-called "public option" as part of healthcare reform, and he has continued to fight for it during the tumult of the past several months. The poll linked above shows that just under 60 percent of Americans, overall, favor a public option. Among Democrats—whose elected officials theoretically control the White House as well as both houses of Congress—the figure is 80 percent. Even a full one-third of Republicans favor the plan. And yet we can't seem to get it done in the obstructivist, gamesmanship-dominated, lobbyist-inflected climate within today's Beltway.

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While we're on the subject of politics, major governmental initiatives, political biases and all that, I must say I am astounded, absolutely astounded, by what's been happening to Obama's approval numbers. Understand, I'm not so much astounded by the fact that it's happening. Nothing surprises me anymore, certainly not in politics or government. I'm astounded by what the decline tells me, again, about my fellow Americans, who not only want everything, but apparently want it done yesterday.

I can see how Obama's policies (and, maybe more so, his populist views) wouldn't have won him any converts among the GOP. Fair enough. GOP loyalists are going to hate him a little bit more for every new policy he enacts. But the precipitous decline in the approval ratings—to the point where he could easily slip quite soon to a position where a plurality (if not a majority) of Americans disapprove—says clearly that a fair number of those who voted for the man have jumped ship. Already. Whether you supported him to begin with, as I did, or not, let's review what Barack Obama was up against. No sooner did he take the oath of office than he had to figure out:

what to do about Iraq and the war on terror as a whole
what to do about entire industries on the verge of collapse
what do do about a wider economy and job market that were in free fall
how to prevent millions of Americans from losing their homes
how to unstick a credit market that had slowed to nothing
how to go about ensuring healthcare coverage for all Americans, and
how to restore confidence in the stock market

Those are just the major issues, and I'm pretty sure I must have forgotten at least one or two others. Today, though the economy is hardly humming along, and healthcare remains a partisan (and even internecine) hornet's nest, most of the above-listed problems are no longer at crisis stage.

So do these latest approval numbers really say that at least some of the voters who supported Obama expected him to fix all these problems, once and for all, in 10 months or less? Amid the highly polarized, obstructionist climate that is Washington, D.C.?

I can only shake my head.

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And, for our daily moment of hilarity... As I write this I'm listening to a columnist for the Philadelphia Daily News, Jenice Armstrong, explain why so many black women are especially upset with Tiger Woods. Is it because he's a lying no-good pig? No. Is it because he's reinforcing the negative stereotype of black men that already exists in some precincts? No. Is it because he's a black dude who "made it out," made it big, yet all that success still wasn't enough for him? No.

It's because he picks white women to cheat with.

That's right. Black women are upset, says Armstrong, because Tiger doesn't like to dishonor his marriage with them. Once more I can only fall back on the words of the immortal Dave Barry: I swear, I am not making this up.

Judging Barack by his cover?

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 16:09:00 +0000

OK, so my guy won and I'm thrilled. Let there be no mistake. The observations contained herein have nothing to do with the "buyer's remorse" that several of the pundits on Brit Hume's FOX show kept wishing on entrenched Obama supporters in the final days, when a McCain defeat began to look inevitable.

But now that the election is a done deal, I want to say a few things about what we seek in a candidate and leader. I'm mindful of this primarily because of all the chatter about Sarah Palin's natural ascension to the leadership of the GOP for 2012 (and I can't even believe people are already talking about that at a time when that silly jingle from McCain's TV ads still rings in our ears). Thing is, I have to say it applies, at least somewhat, to Barack, too. We've talked around the edges of this before. I think we need to address it head-on.

What makes someone a good candidate? That he or she "connects with voters"? Has "charisma"? Is "attractive" and "telegenic"? I'm thinking that all of that should be irrelevant, or close to it. Yet evidence suggests that such attributes are increasingly important in determining candidate viability. In fact, that understates the case: They are so important that they dwarf characteristics like intelligence, knowledge, fairness, temperament, experience, etc., which happen to be the characteristics that should matter. (To be accurate, this has been true in varying degrees ever since the telegenic JFK made Richard Nixon look klutzy and vaguely sinister by comparison in those infamous televised debates of 1960. It's just truer than ever today.) Now, I do believe that Obama proved himself over the course of the past year. He showed that there was substance behind the flash; I'm not sure I've ever seen a more impressive public figure. That doesn't take away the question: On the list of reasons, the real reasons, why Barack Obama is our president-elect today, where does competency, or at least the presumption of same, fall? Or was this about him "giving great speech," and being suave and cool and young* and inspirational and black.

To return to Palin: By the end of it all I was sick of hearing apologists like the ubiquitous and virtually interchangeable Buchanan siblings, Pat and Bay, praise everything about Sarah Palin except what really makes someone a good candidate for the nation's second-highest office (and maybe its highest office, on an unscheduled basis, if you're backstopping 72-year-old John McCain). How many times did one of them gush, "The crowds love her!" Are we talking about a presidential candidate here...or Taylor Swift? Then there's the thing about how she has a special-needs child, which was also presented to America as a plus. No offense, but we're looking at personal marginalia like that in a member of a presidential ticket? (And I say that as someone who adores kids and chokes up at the mere sight of a handicapped child; I can't even handle the visuals on the solicitations I get from St. Jude's.) While I'm at it, let me ask: Should a presidential candidate be advocating on behalf of niche causes that touch directly on that candidate's own life? Isn't that what we call, in other settings, a conflict of interest? Or, dare I say, a special interest?

No matter. The Buchanans and a host of others regard** the flirty, effervescent, plain-spoken Palin as a frontrunner for 2012, even though disgruntled McCain aides told reporters the other day that she didn't realize Africa was its own continent. Those early, joking parallels between Palin and that geographically challenged beauty queen don't seem quite as jocular and unfair anymore, eh?

Personally, I've always thought Joe Lieberman was excellent presidential material, and I also applaud Dennis Kucinich for giving it the old college try time and again (although seriously, dude, if you're reading this, you need to stop talking about alien visitors, because it makes people think you are one). On the other side, I think Ron Paul has some great ideas, and often makes a whole lot more sense, if you actually pay attention, than many candidates who are considered electable. But Paul is a good case in point. He comes off as dweebish and way too jittery. He's got that high-pitched, cartoon-character voice, and too often when he stares into the camera, it occurs to me that all we'd need to do is supply a set of antlers and he'd be the classic deer-in-the-headlights. Lieberman is another emigre from Dweebistan, and gets so whiny at times that he sounds like he's doing self-parody.

On the other hand we have the prototype of masculinity and bearing, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Here's a guy whose starring roles in Terminator and other high-profile action flicks gave him an instant following (or "base," in political terms) in California the moment he declared for governor. He even drew upon that in his campaign, famously vowing to "terminate" government waste. (Political observers to this day will refer to him as "the Governator.") Is there any doubt that Schwarzenegger would be a major player in a GOP weathering a serious leadership vacuum, had he simply had the foresight to avoid disqualifying himself from the presidency by being born in Austria? To be fair, most agree that Schwarzenegger has done a credible job as California's governor (though like all Republicans, he's been tainted by his ties to Bush as well as his state's recent financial travails). But I'm not sure that's the point. Or maybe, in a way, it's precisely the point in reverse: that there are lots of supremely qualified people who might do credible jobs—Kucinich? Lieberman? Paul?—who'll never get the chance because they lack the Pizazz Factor. They can excite us with their ideas, but nowadays that's not enough. They're not cute or hot enough. They don't swagger or swish. They haven't perfected their winking skills. Or, just perhaps, their MLK-inflected oratory?

Again, don't get me wrong. I think we got it right this time, for reasons I've enumerated since I first came out for Obama, and that I restated with emphasis in yesterday's post about "healing."

Except...are those the reasons why he actually won? I'm not sure. Not sure at all. And that makes me a little uneasy.

Maybe all of this falls into the bulging category my wife labels "just the way things are." Like a lot of the things we bemoan on this blog. Still....

* Youth is a tricky one. I think it's a valid consideration if it's being viewed through the proper lens: vigor, vitality, resiliency, mental alertness, etc. But if it's being viewed in the sense of the Culture of Youth with which America is obsessed—the hip, celebrity sense that McCain was referencing in those early Paris Hilton—then that gives me pause. And not just because I'm 58.
** At least they're saying they do, at the moment. We'll have to see if that's just a temporary, face-saving position.

Way to go, Barry! Me and Deepak get it on. And other marginalia.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Tue, 13 Aug 2024 16:08:00 +0000

I like Obama's new deficit-reduction plan, as well as his in-your-face way of debuting it. Good for him. The way he was going for a while there, he had everybody mad at him, including his base. If his presidency is destined to go down in flames, he might as well do it being the guy whom some of us elected....

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Had a brief but interesting Twitter-spar with Deepak Chopra over the weekend. Was a little bit surprised that he would "engage," given his sometimes-imperial demeanor and his very vocal unhappiness with me over this piece for The Wall Street Journal; you can read his response here. However, I think I might have caught him with his logic down. Here are the tweets in chronological order:

DEEPAK: "Only life creates life."
ME: "But if only life creates life, then I'm assuming you dispute the validity of evolution/Big Bang etc."

DEEPAK: "I do not dispute big bang , evolution, cosmogenesis—they are all expressions of a living universe."
ME: "OK but at a certain point that becomes sophistry. If everything is alive—i.e the universe itself—then nothing is, either."

DEEPAK: "Biological evolution describes the transformation of life not the origin of life."
ME: "And for that matter, God is not technically 'life,' either—correct?—so the line breaks down there too."

DEEPAK: "There is no observable experimental evidence of how life began—yet."
ME: "OK, I'll grant that. But then how do you reconcile that comment with 'only life creates life'? If we don't know, we don't know."

Anyway, I thought it was interesting.

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

Later, this buffoon* tweeted: "A life without cause is a life without effect."

To which I replied: "Again, a nonsensical platitude. Did Mt. St. Helens have a 'cause'? Did it not have an effect? PEOPLE: Stop the Stupid, Now!"

Dr. Cummins has not replied.

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

Baseball fans will know that the Philadelphia Phillies were the first team to clinch a playoff berth, and then a divisional championship (admirably, their fifth straight). The latter happened on Saturday night. On Sunday, the Phils lost big. The next morning, in a column titled "Phillies appear lifeless in loss to Cards," one of sportswriting's best and brightest, Amanda Housenick—whose columns often unfold in a never-ending series of Sportsthink cliches—framed Sunday's loss like so: "Seven of the Phillies regulars were physically in the lineup, but their regular intensity wasn't.... A day after clinching their fifth consecutive NL East title in record time (150 games), the Phils hit into double plays three times in the first four innings."

This mentality, which is pervasive not just in sports but in the broad culture, reasons backward from an observed result and finds a mental/emotional predisposition to explain it. It's a mindset that implies that everything is responsive to sheer willpower—or, to quote the Socrates of our day, Tommy Lasorda, "The guy who wins is the guy who wants it the most."

That line of (alleged) reasoning is dumb enough big-picture, but it gets especially silly when one does what Housenick did, i.e., using it to explain the countless, often inconsequential component parts of a given outcome. The linkage that Housenick draws between the Phils' lack of "intensity" and their three double-plays is so absurd as to hardly bear comment, but comment I will. Those of you who play baseball or even watch it now and then realize that, first, you normally have to hit a ball pretty hard in order to hit into a DP. So where exactly did the lack of intensity come into play? Is Housenick implying that it was flagging intensity that caused the hitter to—on the one hand—hit the ball hard, but also—on the other hand—hit it right at a fielder? That is not just silly. It is probably insane. After all, if those same balls had been hit a few feet or even inches to one side of the fielder who started the double-play, the result easily could've been a run-scoring hit. Are we saying that a player with more intensity would've somehow "made sure" the balls (a) weren't just hit hard, but (b) found open spots in the infield? ... Please. Spare me.

* Read his page. If you don't laugh your ass off, I'll give you your money back.

'Helping Rhonda'? & is Michael Moore the Left's Glenn Beck?

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 17:35:00 +0000

Rhonda Byrne may have been a tad late getting to her own party, but the positive-review-athon for The Pow-errrrr appears finally to have kicked in with a vengeance (no doubt with Amazon looking studiously the other way, if not actively participating in the conspiracy). All three of what we used to call "spotlight reviews" for the book are now glowing 5-stars, as are all 10 of the most recent reviews featured in the sidebar.

My negative review has been kicked down the stairs to the cellar...along with a thoughtful and quite-literary take from Kathryn Price that once held sway among the spotlights with a helpful rating of over 70 percent but can no longer compete with the recent slew of 100-percent-helpful 5-stars.

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Speaking of unwarranted hype, last week I finally saw Michael Moore's highly engrossing logical quagmire, Bowling for Columbine. As far as I can tell, here is Moore's thesis:

The words racism and violence have almost the same number of letters, give or take, so draw your own conclusions... Not a single black person ever shot anyone in Detroit before the slave ships began arriving in the 1600s... If rich insensitive white folk didn't like fudge as much as they do, little black kids wouldn't have to take guns to school and shoot their classmates... If you use hairspray, you are probably not a sincere person. (ED. NOTE: On the other hand, if you wear a baseball cap...) The problem is that there are way too many guns around, except in Canada, where there are plenty of guns but the late Charlton Heston never owned a home, so there!... Poverty, meanwhile, is much, much worse when you don't have a lot of money....

Wow. And this film has not only been hailed as "brilliant," but boasts an enviable 96% approval rating on Rotten Tomatoes?

Hey, how come you don't see Jon Stewart and Bill Maher ripping Moore to shreds? Maybe I just missed it....

'The Only Self-Help Book You'll Ever Need—The Sequel.' By Rhonda Byrne.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 17:35:00 +0000

Let's start, boys and girls, with a disclaimer/confession: I have not read Rhonda Byrne's new book, The Pow-errrrr. (And can't you imagine the phrase being uttered just that way, in breathy tones that drip with a practiced air of mysterioso? The Pow-errrrr... One almost hears distant nighttime thunder and gusty winds rustling through trees in the background. Whooooossshhhhh....) That said, I ask you to read her publisher's own product description, as appearing on Amazon, and experience for yourself the utter contempt for the collective intelligence of her target market:

The Secret revealed the law of attraction. Now Rhonda Byrne reveals the greatest power in the universe—The Power to have anything you want.

In this book you will come to understand that all it takes is just one thing to change your relationships, money, health, happiness, career, and your entire life.

Every discovery, invention, and human creation comes from The Power. Perfect health, incredible relationships, a career you love, a life filled with happiness, and the money you need to be, do, and have everything you want, all come from The Power.

The life of your dreams has always been closer to you than you realized, because The Power—to have everything good in your life—is inside you.

To create anything, to change anything, all it takes is just one thing…THE POWER.

(Wait! I'm hearing it again now: Whooooosssshhhhh....)

Then we have the "about the author" section:

Rhonda Byrne's intention is to bring joy to billions. She began her journey with The Secret film, viewed by millions. She followed with The Secret book, a worldwide bestseller now available in 46 languages. Now, with The Power, Rhonda Byrne reveals the single greatest force in our Universe.

OK. A few thoughts. In my own book, SHAM—which, honesty also compels me to confess, was not a bestseller and is not available in 46 languages, in part, I'm sure, because my goal wasn't to "bring joy to billions" but rather to bring sanity to as many as were willing to listen—I discuss the concept of repurposing. As described on page 6, I learned about repurposing during my 16-month stint at Rodale: It consisted of "reusing chunks of our copyrighted material in product after product under different names, sometimes even by different authors."

Byrne, at least, repurposes her material under her own name; I'll give her that. But folks—really now—well, here are a few lines from an interview she gave early in the viral-marketing stage of The Secret:

"With the knowledge from The Secret there is not anything any human cannot be, do or have...not a single thing. No limits whatsoever. It doesn't matter where anybody is now—it doesn't matter if they're sleeping in a park, if they're totally broke, it doesn't matter if they're not well, it doesn't matter if their relationships are a mess. It doesn't matter where they are, when they gain this knowledge and when they apply and use The Secret in their life, their lives will totally change."

Or let's revisit the product description of The Secret that appears on Amazon to this day:

In this book, you'll learn how to use The Secret in every aspect of your life—money, health, relationships, happiness, and in every interaction you have in the world. You'll begin to understand the hidden, untapped power that's within you, and this revelation can bring joy to every aspect of your life.

Starting to sound familiar at all? Think some small portion of that same stuff, artfully repurposed (or not), might now be in The Pow-errrrr?

More to the point, if The Secret was the only thing you needed in order to be one with the Universe...why the hell do we need a second book? Maybe it's just me, but if you're framing The Pow-errrrr as the key to success, isn't that a repudiation of The Secret? An admission of failure? So why should anyone believe Byrne now?

Of course, maybe our gal Rhonda has just grown weary of watching various Secret alumni, including James "Sweat Lodge" Ray, cash in with spin-off products that sought to explain why the original Secret failed to usher in an era of universal (pun intended) prosperity. In fact, if there's one silver lining in the financial meltdown of recent years, it's that the economy went to hell in a hand basket within months after Byrne came along, telling us all how to have anything we wanted in life.

Not that any amount of commonsensical thinking will prevent The Pow-errrrr from taking its un-rightful place alongside Byrne's previous tome in the annals of New Age marketing. I'm betting that Byrne is already at work on the third book in the trilogy: I Still Can't Believe People Buy This Shit!

Election afermath: Score one for The Secret.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 17:34:00 +0000

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..."?)

Would you buy a complete metaphysical system from this woman? ... Byron Katie, Part 2.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 17:32:00 +0000

In our last episode, we met Byron Katie and were introduced to her Four Questions, which supposedly will take you to a new level of peace, happiness and fulfillment. And, in fairness, you'll have no trouble finding legions of online fans.

But...you'll also find legions of people who swear by oxycontin, at least in terms of the narcotic's propensity for making life seem rosier and less anxious (till you run out of the drug). Which raises, in my mind, a Fifth Question: Is what Katie espouses really a valid metaphysical system? Or is it just the New Agey equivalent of oxy...a convenient, seductive-sounding way of rationalizing all the bad stuff (and generating enormous revenues for Katie, or so we're led to believe)?

Once again, we'll let Katie set the tone in her own words. This is from her site:

"The Work of Byron Katie is a way of identifying and questioning the thoughts that cause all the anger, fear, depression, addiction, and violence in the world. Experience the happiness of undoing those thoughts through The Work, and allow your mind to return to its true, awakened, peaceful, creative nature.

On another page appears this quote from Katie herself:

"I discovered that when I believed my thoughts, I suffered, but that when I didn't believe them, I didn't suffer, and that this is true for every human being."

The premise of Katie's system, then, as I understand it, is that very little in life is objectively true. It's just a matter of how we see things. And since so many of us harbor thoughts, feelings and beliefs that are unduly dark—i.e., like looking at the world through the antithesis of rose-colored glasses—we need to learn to try to see life for what it really is, stripped of our own overlay of fear, diffidence, etc.

OK then, since we're operating in the realm of questions, let me ask another: If, as Katie suggests, there's no such thing as objective truth...then why would we question only the negative human interpretations of that higher, unreachable truth? Suppose my abiding view of my life is, "I am happy and safe here. I feel confident and whole." If I subscribe to that thought, am I supposed to subject it to the scrutiny of the Four Questions? (Or do I just leave that one alone.) And if not, why not? What kind of "philosophy of life" is it that applies only to thoughts you don't want to have or facts you'd rather not know?

Similarly, take a look at Katie's emotions list, to be used as a guide in answering the "How do you feel" question. It presupposes that when you take this course, your emotions are negative, and thus the turnaround will provide positive answers. This makes no sense to me on its face. Why are we questioning the legitimacy of the thoughts that breed anger, fear and depression, and not the legitimacy of the thoughts that cause peace, happiness, elation? After all, who's to say that the natural state of your mind is to be peaceful and creative? (OK, well, Katie says it. But who the hell is she?)

Like recovery theory, which posited that "it's never your fault," blaming all dysfunction either on genetics (over which we're powerless) or upbringing (again, you don't pick your parents), Katie's Work is an escape hatch—a mechanism not for finding truth, but for avoiding it.

To get down to cases: In this piece from Oprah.com, a woman with cancer uses The Work to question her medical status and thus feel freer, better. She finally comes to an epiphany of sorts where she concedes she doesn't literally know that she has cancer; that's just the diagnose she was given. Thinking that way makes her feel better. As she writes:

"The thought that I had cancer made me feel terrified and immobilized. Without that thought, I was free—I was just myself, sitting on my bed with the windows open, completely alive and enjoying the breeze."

So let's turn that around. In my case, I haven't been given a diagnosis that I have cancer. But how do I know that I don't have it? Doesn't The Work also contemplate my way of thinking? While I'm sitting here in my home office with the window open, enjoying the breeze, there might be cancer afoot somewhere in my body, alongside the stroke I already had (or maybe I didn't have it; the bastards could have lied). Or maybe there's a strain of airborne Ebola wafting in through the open window...

But seriously, even if the woman above is correct in posing that she doesn't know that she objectively, factually has cancer, her diagnosticians, with all their years of training and accumulated expertise, surely would be closer to ascertaining the objective truth of the matter than she is in denying it.

And don't we absolutely need to consider probabilities in everyday decision-making? "No, I don't know that the gun I'm putting in my mouth is loaded. I don't even know that it's a real gun (And what is a gun, anyway?) So I guess I'll just pull this trigger here and..."

I wonder: Is Bryon Katie the kind of person who just plows right on through red lights because she doesn't know there's cross-traffic racing through the intersection?

If a philosophical system is valid, then it is always valid, for all people in all settings. Any system of though that "works" only when you use it to make yourself feel better is not a metaphysical system.... It's a crutch. That's why I have to give Rhonda Byrne props for being philosophically consistent (if for little else): If you're going to argue that projecting happy thoughts into the Universe can bring vast riches into your life, then you have to concede the possibility that negative projections can attracts the likes hurricanes, terrorist hijackers and other gross misfortunes.

In the end it would seem that for all its New Age flair, The Work reduces to little more than an over-intellectualized entreaty to "Just feel better about life, dammit! ... Accentuate the positive!" Why does anyone need Byron Katie for that?

Next time we get down to Business...

'And if you need to fill your bank account, write a book loaded with empty thoughts...'

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 17:32:00 +0000

UPDATE, Tuesday, Aug. 24. Now that my take (scroll down) on Rhonda Byrne's The Pow-errrrr has indeed made it to "spotlight" status, there is apparently a massive counterattack underway from the other side. In just the past few hours, my review has accumulated at least 10 "not helpful" votes. Wonder how long I'll be able to "hang"....

And let me add that this isn't some sly effort on my part to "sell a few more copies of SHAM," as some have alleged. My being dour about The Pow-errrrr, as it were, is not going to sell many (if any) copies of my book...as evidenced by the fact that at this writing, SHAM lolls at No. 529,411, down markedly in the past few days despite my sudden visibility on Rhonda's high-traffic page. I feel safe in proposing that there's virtually zero overlap between her target market and my own.

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

UPDATE, Monday, Aug. 23. I've never done this, folks, and I really don't believe in it philosophically. But I just want to see if we can shame Amazon into being honest in its policy on reviews...or, alternatively, get them to reveal their agenda and/or susceptibility to the PR heavy-hitters who engineer the roll-outs for major books like Rhonda's latest. So, I'm asking readers of this blog to check out my review of Rhonda's new book, The Pow-errrrr, and if you agree with what I say, give it a thumbs-up. Right now I've got 29 "helpful" votes (out of 47 total), which I'd think would already be enough to earn me a slot among the spotlight reviews. Amazon sees it differently. Let's see if we can force their hand?

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

UPDATE, Saturday morning, 8:15 a.m.: Re one contributor's question about Amazon and its policies: As I write this on Saturday morning the three so-called "spotlight reviews" for The Pow-errrrr are all 5-star gush factories by (a) obvious New Age fanatics or (b) outright Byrne shills/partisans. Even though these reviews are bracketed as "most helpful," they boast only four votes total, and the middle review, so far as I can determine, has not yet received a single vote yea or nay.

Meanwhile, the 1-star review from yours truly, which has received 13 votes, 9 of them positive, lolls in obscurity on the sidebar.

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

SO HERE IS OUR generation's very own Jean-Jacques Rousseau, otherwise known as Rhonda Byrne, philosophizing on the unique symbiotic relationship between love and money in her new bestseller, The Pow-errrrr:

"Love is the attracting force that brings money, and love is also the power that makes money stick. You have to give love and feel good about money to bring it to you and make it stick. If you lack money, and your credit card debt is increasing, you have no sticking power and you are repelling money."

How's that again? I find it hilarious that nowadays you can write things that don't make a damn bit of sense by any commonly accepted standards of meaning and/or logic, yet those very things will be cited by some of the folks who propel your book to its lofty status...in Byrne's case, No. 5 on Amazon this morning. (One such folk: reviewer Connor Dejesus, whose 5-star plug currently sits atop Byrne's "most helpful" list.) The cynic in me also can't help noticing the way Byrne is pandering to her largely female audience with this ostensible connection between love and money. (Doesn't the above passage sound oh-so-Oprah-esque?) Much like the demonically staring Suze Orman, Byrne seems to feel (with some justification, at least based on the observable landscape of the marketplace) that you can't talk to women about money for too long in terms of, uh, money, but must broaden and "romanticize" the subject in order for your advice to resonate (except that in Orman's case, she has some actual financial know-how to share. I'm not her biggest fan, as readers of SHAM know, but if America is going to take financial lessons from just one prophet, and that prophet has to be either (a) Suze Orman or (b) Rhonda Byrne, the lesser of the two evils is clear).

Among other things, Byrne also observes that if you want new clothes, just hang a bunch of empty hangers in your closet. Apparently the ever-obedient Universe will notice its glaring oversight and move to remedy the situation. Of course, if she wants new clothes in her closet, all she has to do is slap together a book like The Pow-errrrr.

Here, by the way, is a very nice (meaning not-so-nice) review of Byrne's book from my new best friends at ABC News.

Life lessons from my Kenmore. Part 1.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 17:31:00 +0000

This morning I was emptying the dishwasher, and I started, as I always do, with the dinner plates. That is my ritual: dinner plates, smaller plates, cereal bowls, silverware (I hate that facet of the job for some reason; I'd love to subcontract out the silverware component, certainly the part where you're putting all the like items in their respective places in that damn plastic tray), miscellaneous geegaws (strainers, salad mixers and such), and then I finish up with glasses. When I reached the glasses today I realized I'd missed a dinner plate. It was standing right there in the front of the bin and I hadn't noticed it. If you'd asked me up to that moment whether there could be a dinner plate left in that dishwasher, I would've sworn that there wasn't; couldn't be. Yet there it was, in all its dinner-platey glory.

This is a surprisingly common foible in the close personal relationship between me and my dishwasher: I'll think I've put away one entire category of items, then later, usually only towards the very end, do I realize that I missed one. Sometimes two. How does this happen? Especially when you're making a conscious effort to locate and organize items by category and you're working in a confined space like a dishwasher bin, how do you miss things that would seem...unmissable? (It ain't exactly like an Easter egg hunt out on the White House lawn, yanno?)

There are, of course, more mystical/metaphysical interpretations having to do with trees and forests. How do I really know that the dinner plate was there before I saw it? Maybe it had just...appeared? We'll leave such alternate explanations in abeyance for now, or maybe entrust them to the Rhonda Byrne's of the world. You wonder, or at least I do, how many other areas of life there are where this same phenomenon applies. You think you've got a situation pegged—you'd swear you'd taken into account every variable, weighed all the facts there are to be weighed—but in truth you've missed something, perhaps even something big and relatively important: the macro version of a dinner plate in a dishwasher. (Remember those tedious analogies from the SATs? "A dinner plate is to service for eight like _____ is to life.") And here's the thing: In the case of a dishwasher, the error is going to be discovered in time, likely quite soon. The appliance isn't going anywhere. You'd assume that at worst, when it got to the point where the plate was the very last thing in the machine, I'd notice it then. And even if I didn't, maybe Kathy would open the dishwasher to put in some dishes from breakfast and say, "There's a dinner plate in here. Is it clean or dirty?"

But what about situations that are transient, evolutionary, mercurial, mobile? Situations that come and go? If some deep-thinking repairman/philosopher intent on making a grand cosmic point had snuck into my kitchen this morning and removed that dishwasher before I made my discovery, then bet me $10,000 about the existence of a renegade plate, I would've made the bet. And if that repairman smiled and told me I was wrong, I'd insist he was lying. I simply would not believe it. There were no more dinner plates in that damned dishwasher! Uh-huh. ...To be continued...

My Secret confession.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sat, 02 Dec 2023 17:29:00 +0000

A regular reader, Case, gently chastises me as follows: "Since The Secret crowd was on Oprah last week, I've been waiting for a SHAM post on the topic." He also observes, "Isn't The Secret the anti-determinism?", and, helpfully, "FYI, the movie is now free on the web at [this site] that aggregates YouTube videos."

Case...you got me dead to rights. The last few weeks have been crazed, so rather than watch Oprah's Secret-fest live (which I'm not sure I could've stomached anyway; I'd need several stiff drinks, and I can't start that early in the day), I TiVo'd it for later replay. Alas, the gods of technology decided to have a little fun with me: It didn't "take," for whatever reason. Maybe the Secretmeisters, in their state of profound cosmic contempt for me and my ilk, managed to dispatch some sort of curse into the ethers, and it later came to rest in my video equipment. Or maybe it's a "law of attraction"-type phenomenon: I brought the malfunction on myself through my inveterate pessimism. In any case, I missed out. Which is probably for the best, since alcohol gives me horrific migraines anyway. For a nicely tart take on the affair, try this, from one of Rhonda Byrne's compatriots. (Rhonda is the eerie-looking presence at right, btw.)

Oh, and to answer the question Case poses: Yes, The Secret might be described as "the anti-determinism" in its inflection: the idea that you can simply throw off the shackles of whatever life you presently lead and begin another life tomorrow (or hell, why wait? What's wrong with right now....?) However, I need to point out that determinism even encompasses and explains the beliefs of those who reject it. There is no paradox there...no more than, say, when a democratic nation decides, democratically, to vote a Fascist leader into power.* (I can hear the cynics now: "We already have that, Steve....")

* It's not exactly parallel, but you get the idea.

Placebo: how a sugar pill became a poison pill. Part 9 of a contintuing saga...

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Tue, 02 May 2023 13:45:00 +0000

Read Part 8.

In 1921, amid the early tumult of prohibition, a remarkable study took shape in Palo Alto, California. Stanford psychologist Lewis Madison Terman—as serious-looking a man as one is apt to find, with his specs, upright bearing and unsmiling mien—would one day be remembered mostly for designing and publishing the final accepted version of the Stanford-Binet IQ test.

In '21, however, Terman began work on another project that may have more lasting import for humankind, despite being known today to just a small circle of “longevity wonks.” Terman proposed to track the lives of 1528 American children from that point on. His subjects, encountered in the course of his study of intelligence, were all 10 years old. Terman himself was 44; he would follow them and their families for the rest of his life, and he obtained from his younger associates a pledge to do the same after he was gone. The goal was to note what kind of longevity the 10-year-olds achieved, and try to deduce the reasons why.

Terman recognized that scientists of that era—doctors in particular—associated longevity first with healthcare, then with nutrition and other environmental factors. Given his background, Terman understandably wondered how certain other factors might come into play: If a person is happy, does that bode for greater longevity? What about marriage? A stable circle of friends? Religious faith? Job satisfaction?

Although Terman died in 1956, his project went on to enjoy enviable longevity in its own right. Over the ensuing five decades, the Terman Life Cycle Study grew richer and more nuanced, piquing the interest of some of America's foremost psychologists, epidemiologists and gerontologists. Their conclusions about the so-called Terman Cohort challenge many popular beliefs about longevity. For intance, the workaholics in the sample often lived longer than the slackers; neurotic men in particular outlived their more laid-back counterparts. Unhappy individuals logged about as many years as the happy ones—and downright cheerful people could expect to end up on the wrong side of the longevity curve.

The notion that longevity has more to do with who we are than how we take care of ourselves is also legible in new research suggesting that lifespan may all be in the cards—or the genes. A controversial 2010 study reported in Science poses that in lesser species, genes determine variations in longevity both from species to species and within any given species. The study's authors inferred that by fully cracking the genetic code of a species or a representative individual, they could predict longevity with an accuracy of 77 percent.

Despite more objections from the AMA—rooted, one supposes, in the way the study implicitly marginalizes their members' efforts—the National Institute on Aging has agreed to fund this avenue of inquiry going forward. Wouldn't it be something if, among all factors that bode for long life, medicine turns out to be relatively unimportant....

In the meantime, and for all the progress since Hippocrates, human longevity remains a riddle, a moving target full of butterfly effects, unintended consequences and environmental variables that can't always be predicted, accounted for, or separated out. This much we do know: While people in 2011 may be dying of different things than people in 1911—whooping cough then, pancreatic cancer now—a lot of them are dying at the same approximate ages. “Over the past two thousand years there's been a lot of snake oil, a lot of claims made without any real impact on human lifespan,” says San Francisco biochemist Simon Melov, one of America's leading authorities on anti-aging. “Hygiene has changed tremendously, infant mortality has changed tremendously—but intervention in the basic aging process? It hasn't really changed all that much in two millennia.”

None of which stops the Franz Humers and Denton Cooleys (whom we met in earlier installments of this series) from selling their visions of perpetual life through chemistry or surgery. They realize that they make a mockery of the scientific method when they spin their syrupy vignettes about the nursing home Nana who's sitting in front of a cake with 100 candles on it thanks to some pill or procedure. They realize that a few cases here and there do not a trend-line or truism make; that there were plenty of instances of exceptional longevity centuries before CNN was on-hand to cover them. For if CNN had existed back in, say, 1635, surely some ancestral Anderson Cooper would've been camped out at Westminster Abbey to cover the big news that November: the demise of a man who'd attributed his stunning longevity not to regular visits with Elizabethan-era physicians, but to a regimen of “green cheese, onions, coarse bread, buttermilk or mild ale (cider on special occasions) and no smoking.” So said one Thomas Parr, buried at the Abbey by order of England's King Charles I upon Parr's death at age 152.*

To be continued...

* It must be said that some consider the story of "Old Tom Parr" as apocryphal: one of Mankind's earliest urban legends. Nonetheless, there are also respected sources who swear by it. In any case, it makes an anecdotal point that is increasingly borne out by more substantial data. And it was good enough for the whiskey manufacturers who decided to name their aged blend in tribute to him.

Adrift in the parkways of our minds?

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Wed, 16 Feb 2022 15:19:00 +0000

Not far from where I write this is a very nice park, a true urban oasis: one of those elongated greenbelts that, together with the sweeping peripheral roads on either side, particularly lends itself to the description "parkway." For the past quarter-century, the park has been inhabited by a gentleman named Earl. It follows that this gentleman, now nearing 70, bears the whimsical/romantic label "Earl of the Parkway." Earl's exploits have been much-chronicled, such that he is today something of a folk hero, albeit a melancholic one, among those who live in areas adjacent to the park.

Strictly speaking, Earl doesn't have to live in the park. He has options. Many would thus say he chooses to live there. (Or, if we prefer not to use terminology that evokes issues of free will vs. determinism, we could posit simply and neutrally that Earl continues to live there, regardless of whether alternatives objectively exist.) You might say that based on that decision alone, Earl is, ipso facto, nuts. And if a man is nuts, then you can't expect him to avoid doing the things that nutty people do. Things like, say, live in parks. The reasoning is circular but apt.

Therefore, it would seem that it falls to those of us who aren't nuts to protect Earl from himself, if we possibly can. At least we must try. Many locals bring food, clothes, etc., to the monument that generally serves as Earl's home base.

By now you know where I'm going with this. There are millions of incipient Earls out there. By that, I don't just mean that there are millions of people on the verge of homelessness, though that is certainly true nowadays. I mean that there are millions of people, perhaps tens of millions, perhaps more, who are equally trapped by who and what they are.* They are all a little nuts, stumbling through life as best they can, hostage to their flaws and foibles, and standing far closer than they'd ever admit to the precipice of utter self-destruction.

Is it not up to the rest of us—those of us who, relatively speaking, "have our act together" and are better equipped for life—to try to protect all these lesser Earls from themselves?

If not, tell me why not.

These are the kinds of things I think when I read the angry, tea-stained letters about how "health care isn't a basic human right!" and how "I shouldn't have to pay my hard-earned money to support some jagoff who's too lazy to work!" I know these aren't easy issues, but I can't help thinking: If a man is lazy...well, the man is lazy. Just as the barroom brawler constantly sabotages himself by getting caught up in barroom brawls. Some people aren't very good at negotiating life. Whatever they can do, even if it is legitimately their best, isn't good enough. They may not exactly be square pegs, but their existence unfolds as an unending struggle to find compartments in which they fit neatly. In any case, they're not going to do a very good job of looking out for themselves or their families. Doesn't someone have to?

As I see it, the ambitious, hard-driving person can no more choose to be lazy than the lazy good-for-nothing can choose to be ambitious and hard-driving. Though at opposite poles in the spectrum, they are, like Earl, equally ruled by their essential natures. Can they be changed? Can the slacker be taught to be more diligent about life? Perhaps he can. But until he changes, he's not there yet.

A final point. My mother-in-law, who lives with us these days, is quite short, so she frequently needs my help to reach things. As we didn't pick our respective heights, she doesn't deserve criticism for being short; no more than I deserve praise for being 6-4. That doesn't change the bottom-line: I can reach things that she can't. So when she needs help, I help her.

Wouldn't it be cruel for me not to? S

* And again, if we appraise this through a strictly deterministic lens, that description—"trapped by who and what we are"—applies to each and every one of us.

What we should expect from our news.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Tue, 03 Dec 2019 20:11:00 +0000

From time to time since February 2008, when my long article on journalism and the news media first appeared in the online version of Skeptic*, people have asked me for more specifics on what I regard as the building blocks of valid, serious-minded news coverage. This is going to be a lengthy post, so I'll dive right in without further preamble.

The News must be apolitical.
This line of thought reached critical mass in 2001 with the controversy over Bernie Goldberg and his muck-raking book, Bias**, which savaged the mainstream media for its strong (and unapologetic) leftward tilt. It's a familiar argument by now and there's no need to go into it at any great length. I think we'd get a fairly universal buy-in—at least in principle—on the idea that the News should never have a specific political agenda, Left or Right. That consensus is likely to crumble a bit when you get to a more pointed discussion of implementation. For example, we'd have no trouble finding a large group of people who think The New York Times reports the news "straight," as well as another large group who think FOX News really is "fair and balanced" in its reportage. In truth, neither the Times nor FOX comes anywhere close to objectivity; and if there are large groups of partisans who think they do, it's only because the tenor of the respective reporting coincides with their own, well, biases.

The News should not have a nationality.
Agreement here would be less widespread and/or vigorous, especially from conservatives, self-described "patriots," and others who, for example, still chafe at the multinational*** tone of Peter Arnett's coverage during Desert Storm. A "borderless" approach to news delivery has profound and far-reaching implications. It means, most conspicuously, that even an epochal event like 9/11 should not be reported as an absolute and inarguable tragedy, because it would not be received as such everywhere. After all, upon hearing of the terror attacks, citizens partied in the streets of Damascus, Tripoli and Tehran—just as Americans might party in the streets if we popped all of Al Qaeda leadership in one big whack-out. To paraphrase and extend Eugene O'Neill's savvy observation about the (deterministic) continuum of life, no event takes place solely in the present moment, but rather is a composite of all that has gone before. As in the case of a revenge killing over an ancient grievance, there is always a history that has shaped what is happening today, even if that history is generally unknown (or even unknowable). Which means that 9/11 did not begin or end on 9/11. Nor is it the journalist's job to report that history; that would be contextualizing, which journalists should never attempt unless they can be sure of doing a comprehensive job. And because that's impossible—even Mike Wallace wasn't around when the earth cooled, ineluctably setting in motion next week's playoff between the Eagles and Cards—it should never be attempted.

It is simply bad journalism to cover an explosion that kills 10 American GIs outside Tikrit differently from a raid on an Afghanistan cave that results in the death of 10 of the world's most fearsome anti-U.S. terrorists. Besides—as a practical matter—even if journalism upholds "Americanism"...whose would it be? The Left's? The Right's? Should journalism revere what America is now? What America aspires to be? According to whom? The problems are evident.

Just report what happened and where.

The News cannot and should not use existing law as the basis for its take on a story, because laws are transient, malleable and often arbitrary.
Journalism should never cover man's law as if it were eternal law (assuming any such thing exists), framing illegal activities as if they're objectively wrong or framing legal activities as if they're objectively right. (Lest we forget, Rosa Parks broke the law when she refused to give up her seat.) Historically, in fact, many might argue that journalism has proved to be most valuable when its reporting took a contrarian bent, opposing existing laws and policies. (I don't favor that, either, because journalism isn't supposed to take an active side in things, pro or con. Any changes that occur should occur "by accident," as a result of the public's response to what it hears and sees in the News. Journalists are simply conduits, providing information to a citizenry that will do what it believes needs doing with that information.)

The very foundation of American democracy, the U.S. Constitution, is itself elastic, open to interpretation and subject to amendment. And even the loftiest of ideals embedded in the Constitution and other founding documents are unproven. "All men are created equal"? It's a nice thought, and an uplifting premise for a culture...but its scientific validity remains moot.

Which brings us, finally, to:

The News should be amoral.
If by now our consensus on the aims of journalism has become somewhat fragile, this is where it really fractures. A lot of people have trouble with the proposition that journalism should not stand for good or evil, right or wrong. (Which, of course, means that journalism should not have causes.) Realize, for starters, that most political agendas are premised on notions of right or wrong; thus, morally tinged reporting too easily lends itself to political purposes. But it goes beyond that. To filter the news through a moral lens is to presume to know unerringly what the "correct" moral values are in the first place. Perhaps worse, in practical terms, news rooted in "social norms" inevitably tends to promote the notion that majority means validity. A news organization that builds its ethos around the values embraced by "most right-thinking people" is doomed from the start.

"Well wait just a damned second now!" you exclaim. [Hence the exclamation point.] "At the very least, journalism can safely uphold life over death! 'Thou shalt not kill' and all!" To which I would reply: You're kidding, right? We can't even agree as a society on whether "life" is the ultimate value. Think: abortion, capital punishment, right-to-die issues, wars. (We view the wars that we decide to wage as "just" and the loss of life that results as a "necessary evil" or "collateral damage." We forget that bin Laden felt similarly justified in attacking the World Trade Center.)

Clearly all loss of life is not equally tragic to all journalists, all everyday Americans, all Afghani warlords, all practicing physicians (who must make so-called "end life decisions") or anyone else. Thus we are left with the problem of deciding which deaths are "objectively" tragic and which aren't. Those are value judgments, and the media have no business making them. As soon as the journalist starts rationalizing, qualifying, parsing, hair-splitting or performing other ethical gymnastics in order to force-fit some types of death into this moral framework (but not others), he has abandoned objectivity and devolved into the realm of partisan politics and/or religion.

Or let's take homelessness. We look around us and sigh, "There should not be millions of homeless people in America." We may agree on that as private citizens. The news cannot project that ideal, however, because it is but a short step from "there should not be homeless" to "we need to do something about homelessness," and the latter is, of course, a political agenda. And journalism, as we've said, has no business "going there."

The objective newsperson must start from the premise that there is no absolute right or wrong, at least that we can all know and agree on. In the journalist's world, there is no justice or injustice. There are only events. From my point of view, it is never the media's job to tell us how to think or feel about a story, and it certainly isn't the media's job to "reflect traditional values." Slavery once was a traditional value. So was homophobia. So was the internment of Japanese citizens during World War II. And on and on. And I'm not saying those things should be recognized as objectively wrong now. I'm saying that it's not the media's job to weigh in. In the end, the only workable approach is for the news media to project no values at all.

Nor can we turn to "God" for answers here, because the existence and nature of God are controversies unto themselves. Besides…whose God? Osama's? Jerry Falwell's? Joel Osteen's?

In the end, the media must learn to embrace, in practice, the catchy ethic that FOX news disingenuously preaches: We report, you decide. That's all there is to it.

Published originally in 2011.

* The piece was then republished in the print version, with slight alterations.
** Interestingly, or maybe sadly, enough, Goldberg then took a job as a FOX analyst and forswore any further pretense to objectivity. That doesn't necessarily taint his book, which was an outgrowth of a highly courageous column he wrote for The Wall Street Journal while still employed at network (CBS), and which I think stands on its merits. It just depresses me to see him trumpeting the party line night after night on O'Reilly or wherever. How does he not feel hypocritical?
*** Some prefer the word traitorous, and have never let Arnett (or his bosses) forget it. Here's a typical example.

Innocent till jurors start to really dislike you?

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sun, 23 Sep 2018 03:43:00 +0000

Here's yet another case, tragic in countless senses, where overzealous prosecutors jumped the gun and focused on the wrong suspect—the father, who spent eight months in jail—before learning six years later that someone else, in this instance a convicted sex offender, had done the grisly deed. The remarkable work of The Innocence Project teaches us that these episodes are hardly a rarity. All told, as of this writing, Scheck, Neufeld et al have freed 254 convicts who were wrongly (and, too often, wrongfully) convicted.
This is why I've said many times that the standards of evidence, or what we call evidence, are way too lenient. (See particularly here and here. If you're a glutton for punishment [no pun intended], you might also want to read my long September '09 piece for Skeptic, "Criminal Injustice.") I am gravitating more and more to the position that if there isn't verifiable physical evidence linking someone to a crime scene, no charges should be filed. Among other things, this would ameliorate the justice system's racial inequities. It would eliminate convictions based on circumstantial evidence. And it certainly would rule out verdicts that flow from jurors' impressions of a defendant's demeanor at trial: As I've also said on several occasions, that sort of vague, inferential "fact"-finding, rooted in nothing more than a defendant's Q-score and/or wildly fallacious assumptions about "how people ought to behave" in such circumstances*, is so arbitrary, subjective and prejudicial that it has no place anywhere near a court of law. Its specific exclusion should be part of a judge's instructions to the jury.

Would this result in at least some guilty parties going free? Yes. But I go by that old saw about how "it's better that 10 guilty men go free than that one innocent man is convicted." After all, you can't exonerate someone who has already been executed.

* which of course is itself largely rooted in jurors' perceptions of how they would behave, which has zero bearing on the matter at hand.

The folly of forensics: lessons from my egg roll.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Fri, 10 Aug 2018 14:00:00 +0000

If you made it all the way through my very long Skeptic article on the criminal-justice system, you know that eyewitness identifications—once viewed as the gold standard of guilt in criminal cases, especially rapes—are now being revealed as the shaky evidentiary tool that law-enforcement officials always privately knew them to be. In fully 75% of the DNA-based exonerations wrought by the Innocence Project, there had been a positive ID at trial.

Tonight I got a lesson from my egg roll in why so-called "forensics science" should probably be the next to go out the window.

Some background. Sunday night after dinner I swept and vacuumed, and this morning my wife and I were both out of the house early without eating breakfast. In other words, nothing took place on the kitchen table all day until dinner. I was the first to arrive home, and in fact, when I walked into the house at about 4:30, with the sun streaming through the blinds and across the hardwood floors of the dining room and kitchen, I remember being pleased at how sleek and spotless the rooms looked; like a nice photo from one of those "modern home" magazines. Anyway, my wife arrived moments later with Chinese food. As I set out plates, she placed the bag containing the food on one end of the long dining-room table, the end where we always sit. All of the food was removed on that side of the table, a good six feet from the table's other end, where no one sat. Since she'd also brought glasses and drinks to the table after setting the food down, and I'd brought napkins, neither of us found it necessary to get up for anything from the moment the bag was opened until the moment the meal was finished. What's more, the air conditioning was on, which means the windows were closed, which means there were no breezes to deal with.

And yet when I got up to put the plates in the sink a half-hour later, the first thing I noticed was a spray of crumbs at the far end of the table, beneath a chair upon which no one had sat. I went over to check it out. They were tiny pieces of an egg roll.

My point? How many episodes of 48 Hours or Dateline have you watched where a defendant was convicted based on testimony that sought to reconstruct the crime scene and thereby explain why the crime could've only happened a certain way? (That is, when a defendant isn't convicted because jurors "didn't like his demeanor at trial" or similar peripheral nonsense.) How many times have you heard "expert" testimony explaining why blood found in a certain place, or in a certain pattern, had to mean such-and-such?

My kitchen was not a crime scene tonight, thankfully. And yet I can guarantee you that a forensics expert who came to the house to "reconstruct" our dinner would've stated with certainty that someone ate at the far end of the table. "Otherwise," he or she might pose, rhetorically and with a knowing smirk, "how did those crumbs get there? Did they just walk across the floor to the place where they came to rest?"

Things happen all the time that no one can explain. You are positive, absolutely positive, that you left your keys on the counter...but you find them under the sofa cushion. There is no reason for them to be under the sofa cushion; you weren't even on the sofa! But there they are. You shrug off those puzzling episodes because they're inconsequential in the larger scheme of things. Then one day you're arrested for something and suddenly cops and criminologists are finding all sorts of ominous, incriminating significance in life's inexplicable little mysteries.

I find it frightening.

Why real news is, indeed, fake.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Fri, 22 Dec 2017 06:01:00 +0000

I've taken three lengthy Uber trips in the past month. All of the drivers got around to asking what I did for a living. When I replied, “I teach journalism,” two of the three exclaimed, “Ahh, fake news!” It took the third driver a few extra lines of conversation, but she eventually got there too.

For those of us engaged in showing young people how the media are supposed to work, there is no escaping the sturm und drang over fake news. Needless to say, the term has itself acquired a patina of inauthenticity, given its most celebrated user's tendency to invoke it to mean, “This news makes me look bad...ergo it's fake.” (Though I doubt that Trump uses, or even knows, the word ergo.)

In fairness, however, those of us who deal in the foundations of journalism understand that the fake-news meme cannot be dismissed simply as red meat that a pathologically insecure president tosses into his supporters' den with discomfiting regularity. Actually, fakery is endemic to the genre. Consider the famous news-radio slogan, “You give us 22 minutes, we'll give you the world.”

It's a lie. Genuine news is rooted in anomaly: Man bites dog. It follows that what the news business is really giving us—with its unending parade of crime, corruption, ugliness and general depravity—is unreality.

I wrote the guts of this paragraph for a relatively famous (if I do say so myself) piece for the Los Angeles Times back in 2006, but it has lost none of its relevance. For here, in a minute, I give you your actual world*: Each day, 23,911 out of 23,911 scheduled commercial flights take off and land safely. Almost none of us are murdered, and almost no one who is unarmed, of any race, is killed by a cop. The murder rate in much-maligned Chicago is lower than that of cities where we splurge huge sums to vacation. Roughly 100 percent of collegians survive hazing rituals. The employment rate is above 95 percent, and the average family living in federally defined poverty has a car, air conditioning, two TVs and an Xbox. Plagues do not emerge from third-world caves to blight the landscape. The republic slogs on despite the diverting shenanigans of the figureheads at the top; even the current helmsman hasn't undone us and probably won't. Probably.

This is not some Panglossian delusion. It is day-to-day life for almost everyone. So yes, the nightly news is real. These things did happen. But by every meaningful statistical yardstick, they are margin notes to reality. (Big-time journalists, of course, don't like to see themselves as people who trade in trivia, so they imbue their margin notes with near-apocalyptic resonance.) By definition, then, what you see on the news is a negative image of your world, in both the photographic and tonal senses. It's real, but it conjures a wholly fake impression of life.

The news also comprises extensive reporting on events that are “sort of happening” but whose resolution and meaning are far from certain. We see this in the case of Trump's Russia woes or the hyperventilating coverage of hurricanes that still loll hundreds of miles off-shore. There may be collusion with Russia; or there may not be. If there is, Trump may be impeached; or he may not be. The hurricane may ravage coastal cities...or may fizzle out or miss the mainland altogether (which is usually the case). So why obsessively cover such quasi-events in terms of what might happen...but hasn't, really, yet?

Which begs another question: Of all those margin notes that vie for elevation to media melodrama, which do journalists choose to highlight each day? The answer to that question is governed by a process known as news judgment, wherein media gatekeepers apply their own criteria in deciding what’s vital for the public to know. Though there's often unanimity on the lead stories, various news outlets will have different slants on the composition of the rest of the day’s must-know news. So these events are not only (a) anomalous, but (b) cherry-picked from a large orchard of anomalous stories based on subjective criteria. There is no overstating the importance of this simple truth, for this is where the canonical McLuhanism about media and message comes into play: If it's on the news, we figure it's newsworthy, ipso facto. And yet what was important enough to appear on to MSNBC last night may very have been ignored by Fox. And vice versa.

Even in the case of the top stories, journalists will decide what other facts to drag in to contextualize them. This shaping process (often called narrative) may give the lead story a meaning that isn't inherent in the raw facts. What, after all, is the overarching significance of a single unarmed black man shot by a cop? For that matter, in any given year, what is the significance of a dozen unarmed black men shot by cops? Yes, it could be what epidemiologists call a cluster, indicating that “something is going on.” Or it could be a simple aberration of the laws of chance, into which we've injected extraneous meaning.

Similarly, is every newly discovered contact between a Trump campaign official and someone with a Russian-sounding surname further evidence of collusion—or a distraction whose importance pales by comparison to the economy's steady hum? Is the “campus rape crisis” more about women being exploited, or men being deprived of due process? Is #TakeAKnee another tear in the social fabric...or is it symbolic of the inalienable rights upon which the social fabric depends? The media contextualization will suggest how we're supposed to feel. But that's hardly the same as Ultimate Truth. Would you agree?

Outside of a Hurricane Harvey or a 9/11, you see, only hindsight can tell us when a given piece of news was destined to transcend randomness and move into the realm of enduring consequence. No one can know this as it's happening—no, not even Wolf Blitzer. Even my Uber drivers could tell you that...

___________________
* or at least your actual America.

Our American Demeritocracy

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Mon, 05 Jun 2017 21:18:00 +0000

Preamble: You're going to be inclined at first to think this is mean-spirited. As is often the case, I urge you to set aside any kneejerk reactions and think about what I'm saying here.
_________________________________

After batting practice one afternoon I took my 16-year-old grandson to Burger King, where we encountered a queue of cars that stretched well back beyond the drive-through, clogging the entrance to the adjacent strip mall. This struck me odd, as it was 2:45, not normally a peak time in the land of fast food. The reason became clear, however, once we'd inched our way to that familiar first window where the money changes hands. The young man in charge of the transaction stuttered so badly that it took him fully five minutes to confirm our order—one burger, fries—and narrate the exchange of funds. He spent an eternity on the word “bacon” alone. (It was not unlike that classic scene in My Cousin Vinny, where the alternate defense attorney struggles to get through his opening statement, faltering on every consonant.) But there was no mirth in this, even to my normally lighthearted grandson, whose brows just knitted in confusion. Behind us, more cars joined the procession. I wondered if the lad ever worked the dinner shift.

My answer came the following week, on a day when my grandson and I got a later start. We swung by at 5 and the line was twice as long, the same young man clearly recognizable at his post. "So, you want to try Taco Bell?" asked my grandson.

One perceives the wholesome motivations that result in such ill-advised pairings between job and job-holder, but to me, this largess suffers from at least two major flaws. The first is an arbitrariness in our distinctions between disability and inability. Burger King would not likely keep on an employee who spoke flawlessly but dispensed money in a seemingly random manner. To the afflicted, though, a math impairment can be as palpable a hindrance in life as a stutter. We are all limited by our limitations. Indeed, suppose the boy who stutters is a natural at calculus—unlike millions of kids, my grandson included, who require extensive tutelage. Although I don't think anyone would propose granting my grandson special admission to MIT in accommodation of his math struggles, we will fill customer-service slots with employees who cannot deliver adequate customer service (and may even send patrons to competitors). It seems illogical to privilege one deficiency over another simply because it has a name and formal diagnosis.

The larger point is that my drive-through experience is a minor but memorable indication of a meritocracy that has lost its way. Amid our national obsession with "equity" and “inclusionary” thinking and “being respectful to all,” we are abrogating our duty to uphold and reward excellence as a way of life. Once, excellence was what we were supposed to seek and admire—vocationally, behaviorally, in every sense. America was never a perfect meritocracy, as there was always too much advantage accorded certain classes of people. But at least we had a consensus understanding of which attributes were “optimal” in any given setting, and we incentivized and reinforced such attributes. No longer.

The damage goes far beyond the world of the drive-through. Teachers at all levels face enormous pressure not to fail students (nor merely assign the mediocre grades many earn). This applies even in college, where I teach. The rationale is that we don't want to ding their GPAs for resumé purposes. Few colleges want a reputation for being institutions where students are graded severely (that is, honestly). Grade schools are disinclined to suspend or even discipline the unruly student, lest they be accused of compassion deficit and/or stigmatizing children.

Hence, too: social promotion, diversity-mania, trophies for winners and losers. HR policies are rewritten to enable unmotivated millennials to remain unmotivated and hold their jobs.

In setting after setting, we rethink obvious explanations for dysfunction in order to wash away the stain of failure or worse. The mass-incarceration trope inverts the traditional view of crime by putting the onus on society. Pop culture celebrates out-of-wedlock pregnancies and other infelicitous circumstances that predispose a non-excellent life for most everyday folks outside zip code 90210. The more than one-third of Americans who are clinically obese are exhorted to “love your body,” no matter their weight's impact on their health or the health system itself.

This is why there's much to be said for the Darwinism of pro sports. If you are the best at what you do, you get a job. I hear no call to place short people in the NBA just to be fair, and shortness of stature—unlike stuttering—isn't fixable. If your dream is to play in the NBA and you are 5-foot-3 and not named Muggsy Bogues, you are effectively disabled.

In our zeal to help people like the boy with the speech impediment, we're being unhelpful not only to the folks in line, but to other job seekers who might enable the business to run more like the well-oiled machine Coolidge envisioned in his timeless line, “The business of America is business.” I do not champion a society without compassion. I'm saying that each of us needs to pursue excellence in our individual way, based on the skill set we were given. I would urge a more objective, dispassionate lens on abilities and disabilities in the broadest sense, with no “approved” categories of disability beyond those needed as a safety net for those simply incapable of excellence.

We are all uniquely abled and disabled. The key is to figure out where each person's mix best fits, thus promoting maximum benefit to the individual and society.

The gift of perspective: the sequel.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sun, 08 Jan 2017 23:45:00 +0000

The second Sunday of 2017 strikes me as the perfect day for wading even more deeply into the waters of moral controversy than in my last post. So let me lay this one on you:

Pets and children do not understand the concept of "a necessary evil" or "for your own good." Therefore, from the vantage point of the pet or child, getting a vaccination or a nail trim may well be the same as, say, being sodomized with a pencil. We are the only ones in the scenario who are confident in the propriety of one act vs. the other.

If you've ever seen a large recalcitrant dog getting its nails trimmed with a dremel, you know the phenomenon of which I speak. It is traumatizing for both the animal and the (uninitiated) observer; the dog will howl and bark and strain against any confinement as might another dog being frankly tortured (except in the case of a nail trim the animal has no recourse; if it's awake for the procedure, it's usually muzzled and held or tied down). Veterinary pros grow inured to the histrionics and shrug them off...just as I suppose serial pedophiles get used to the whimpers and/or screams of their young victims.

The same applies in the case of the severely vaccination-phobic child who's dragged kicking and screaming into the pediatrician's office.

This would be a good place to reiterate that we are talking from the point of view of the pet or child only. In no way does this post even begin to imply that those of us on the outside should regard pedophilia or torture as no more sinister than nail trimming or vaccinating. I'm speaking only of how your pet or child likely interprets those experiences.

So no, I am not proposing some bizarre false equivalence between pet groomers and/or pediatricians and pedophiles. I am saying that to the pet or child, the abuse is the same: Pain and terror are being inflicted while the people they trust most in life, Mommy and/or Daddy, are standing by and letting it happen. And it doesn't matter that the vet or pediatrician is speaking in consoling tones. Child molesters often do that too.

Think about it. And think about the fact that we often say that young victims of pedophiles are scarred for life. Just think about it. As always, that's all I ask here.

This and drat.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Mon, 11 Dec 2006 15:13:00 +0000

...The speaking gig, which was in Tulsa, went very, very well. Lots of enthusiastic feedback, both during my presentation and in informal meet-n-greets afterwards. Which meant more in this case than it might otherwise, since I was talking (for two hours, remember) to a room full of shrinks—folks, in other words, who know the terrain. I missed no opportunity to remind them that the self-appointed gods of SHAMdom are eating their lunch: i.e., practicing psychotherapy without a license. Heads nodded and murmuring erupted in various corners of the hotel ballroom every time I made a related comment.... Oh, and good steamship round, too.

...Interesting feedback from one attendee arrived in a lengthy email yesterday. I made this same point in SHAM, but he anchors it in his own clinical experience, writing, in part, "It occurred to me that buying help is sometimes a way to delay change. I had that happen early in my career. People would sometimes come to me for help and say that they were depressed because they didn't have a job. But they wouldn't do the things they needed to do to get a job, even if I assigned them things to do as homework in the therapy. It seemed to me that they were justifying not doing the things they needed to do by saying, 'See, I am doing something, I'm in therapy.' So if I go buy a $10,000 course, I may be giving myself a reason for optimism and at the same time also delaying any real change.... So we hire magical people, shamans, who we can pay to swing the incense and do it for us, or teach us the secret mysteries that we need to know to be successful. When it is generally agreed that one shaman doesn't know what he is talking about, we go to another." He concludes, "There is an old saying about placebos: Use them quickly before they lose their effectiveness."

...My first night in Oklahoma I caught part of Larry King's long-awaited gab-fest with a half-dozen of the foremost champions of positive thinking, as featured in The Secret. (The geniuses behind this stunning viral marketing coup had related content ready to go as soon as the show's closing credits rolled.) Among the sources of the motivational glow surrounding Larry last Thursday were John Assaraf, Bob Proctor, and the surreally weird Dr. Michael Beckwith (shown), who, in dress, speech, mannerisms and overall demeanor looked as if his birth-name might really be Zormak From The Planet Woosabi-6. I was shocked at the extent of Larry's fawning. As tough as he was some weeks ago on Dr. Laura—who has her well-documented faults, but at least says something inherently worthwhile now and then—that's how obsequious Larry became in the presence of these platinum-plated jokers. And that's not the worst of it: There's actually a Part 2, skedded for November 16. The guest list this time will include our friend Joe "H'onoponowonogonomon'obona" Vitale. (But I can't get booked on these shows.... Hence the "drat," above.)

...Insightful and nicely descriptive article by a London Daily Mail writer who decided to dive headlong into the Tony Robbins mystique. Or maybe feet-first is the better phrase, inasmuch as she took one of Tony's famous firewalks. If you read the article, by all means continue on to the comments at the end, which bear all the earmarks of an organised* backlash on the part of the Robbins faithful. One of them shamelessly likens Tony to the "second coming." Check it out.

* Seeing as how we're talking about the U.K.