S H A M b l o g

A few words on social diseases. Or, Bard for life?

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sun, 12 Feb 2012 15:54:00 +0000

First I thought I'd link to my latest media appearance, on FOX's KOKH (intriguing call letters) in Oklahoma. They edited my on-air time down to a rebuttal of about 20 seconds in the midst of an otherwise happy-faced piece—which is what I basically suspected would happen. Still, at least I get to make a good point about the unreality of the SHAMland promise. You can play it on full-screen by clicking the tab that appears in the lower righthand corner of the vid screen a few seconds after the page loads.

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Social inadequacy of varying stripes seems to be the generational bugaboo, gaining steam with Jenny McCarthy's misguided crusade on behalf of her son's autism (and its supposed cause), then reaching critical mass a few years back with the publication of aut-savant Daniel Tammet's remarkable memoir, Born on a Blue Day. Alienation is the anthem of this new decade (whispered very softly and without eye contact). I've been doing a lot of reading about the fabric of latter-day society, and I come across the signature terms again and again: social anxiety, social awkwardness, social deficit, panic disorder with agoraphobia, Asperger and so forth. Social malaise gives indications of being to this decade what fibromyalgia and chronic fatigue syndrome were, respectively, to the first decade of the new millennium and, before that, the 1990s. (I know people who claim to be beset by both CFS and fibromyalgia; they acquired each new syndrome as it came to the fore. I suspect that they will declare themselves agoraphobic before long.)

In some ways it's not surprising that the generation now coming of age would indeed experience such maladjustments. They were too often the products of divorce and/or significant family dysfunction; even if Mom and Dad stuck around and tried to make a go of it, the family was nuclear only in the sense that the household featured regular detonations of atomic intensity. In many cases these kids had computers for parents and turned to so-called social media for an ironic, disembodied form of friendship.

Etiology aside, this much is sure: The shrinks and gurus and life coaches will rake in the fees hand over fist, as will the drug companies that brew the various concoctions typically prescribed in such cases.

If I may be permitted to inject my (untutored, unresearched) 2 cents here, in hopes of perhaps settling the mind of just one person who sees himself/herself as a freak ...

We are all socially awkward.

We always have been, too. This is not a new phenomenon. Some of us have just learned to do a better job of faking it or overcompensating in the opposite direction, acting the gregarious fool.

I don't mean to trivialize the plight of the now-and-then person who is truly the odd man or woman out. My point is simply that while the person with social deficit may look and seem more alone or detached than the rest of us, he or she doesn't necessarily feel more alone than the rest of us do. I'm not sure how such things could be measured on a comparative scale with any objectivity/accuracy, but I have confidence in the observation nevertheless.

It's been said many times before, but you can be at a party surrounded by 50 drunken, laughing revelers and feel every bit as alone as the Death Row inmate confined to solitary. Certainly this is true of one's facility as a sexual being. A guy can empty himself into an ever-changing cast of obliging lovelies and end up feeling...well, empty. If you're a young woman, you can end the weekend full of the semen of three different men and...still feel empty.

For those of us who are not clinical cases—which, I'm convinced, is almost all of us—the answer to social awkwardness is to find two or three people who appreciate you for who you truly are. Ideally one of those three should be a mate, and the other two good friends. One good friend may suffice.

The rest of it, as Shakespeare tells us, is sound and fury signifying nothing.

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

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 22:05:00 +0000

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

But the man had pleaded "not guilty."

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

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

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

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sun, 15 Jan 2012 16:50:00 +0000

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

Got all that straight? Need a scorecard?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Just ask Peter Lowe.

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

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sun, 01 Jan 2012 00:18:00 +0000

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

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

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

The mortality rate of Cheez-its.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Tue, 13 Dec 2011 13:13:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

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

No atheists in foxholes or ICUs.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Fri, 02 Dec 2011 00:06:00 +0000

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

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

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

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

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

Poison pill?*

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 10:50:00 +0000

UPDATE, November 3. And apropos of this theme, here's my son's short, comedic cinema verite treatment of the Occupy Movement. Look for his brief "interview" of the guy with the question mark sign. Worth the price of admission alone. ;)

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Apropos of Occupy Wall Street and related themes, I thought I'd remind faithful SHAMbloggers that back in November 2009, I wrote a very controversial piece for Skeptic in which I posited, among other things, that major white-collar criminals are far more deserving of the most serious penalties than, say, murderers. As regulars know, I'm not a huge fan of capital punishment, but if we're going to apply that extreme sanction, it should be based on the magnitude of a crime's overall impact on society. By that standard, a Ken Lay or Bernie Madoff—or any of several execs at Goldman Sachs—would move to the head of the line before even a guy like Charles Manson. And before anyone asks... Yes, I'm really serious, and yes, I truly believe this. The general hierarchy of criminality presented in the likes of the Ten Commandments, then passed on down through the generations in the form of the Judeo-Christian lens on criminal justice, was never all that commonsensical, in my view, and surely is out of touch with the havoc that today's financial crimes can wreak.

Understand, this is not about classism or "pension envy." This is about offenses that tear at the very fabric of society and, indeed, pose a threat of undoing civilization as we know it. A murder, in general, devastates a family or two. Although it is a horrific crime, as a rule the damage is contained. But Enron? Insider trading? The kind of greed-driven corporate shredding that occurred at the late-80s height of KKR-mania?

Something to think about, anyway.

Interesting, incidentally, that Bernie Madoff and his wife (who, of course, knew nothing about her husband's scheming; nothing at all) couldn't even pull off a good suicide.

* Those who don't follow business that closely may be unaware that poison pill is a term used for a particular type of counterattack against a hostile takeover. Such strategies were much in the news at the height of the wheeling and dealing of the aforementioned KKR.

Sour Apple? My deer wife?

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Thu, 20 Oct 2011 22:10:00 +0000

First of all, brief but still nice (and relevant) mention in HuffPo today. Be sure to read the column if you're a woman and you're feeling...overextended.

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One of our regulars tipped me to the fact that in the new bio on Steve Jobs, which will debut Monday as Amazon's No. 1, his biographer, Walter Isaacson, reports that Jobs passed up early cancer intervention that "might have saved his life" in order to focus his healing energies on, well, healing energies: magical thinking and the rest of it. I guess Jobs was impressed by how well positive thinking worked for Lynn Redgrave and Randy Pausch.

I may have more to say on that score in time.

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Today I am mindful of that Cure Auto TV spot emphasizing that they base their rates on your driving history, not your credit score. I deem that a splendid idea, and though I realize there is probably some established actuarial reason for the widespread insurance-industry practice of linking credit scores and insurance rates (any actuaries out there who want to set the record straight?), I still think there's something inherently unfair about it. I mean, suppose some figures were to come to light suggesting that a certain unusual percentage of people who'd died in house fires also had azaleas in their gardens... Would it be fair for insurance underwriters to canvass suburban neighborhoods, slyly snapping photos of homeowners bent over shovels and bags of mulch in order to reprice their homeowner's and life-insurance policies?

Getting down to cases, the reason I am mindful of the issue today is, I just discovered that my wife's so-called "insurability score" is a dozen-or-so points higher than mine. I can only assume that's because my wife's credit score is a dozen-or-so points higher than mine. Both of our respective credit scores are pretty solid; not absolutely A-1, but solid. (I don't know too many long-time freelance writers whose credit scores have remained pristine and blemish-free through, say, three decades of writing.) But here's the thing: Over the past five years, my wife has done varying degrees of damage to two inorganic objects (a bumper, a fender) as well as permanent and irrevocable damage to one decidedly organic object (a deer, in this incident). She also received a ticket for doing 84 in a 65 while on her way to Syracuse to visit an old friend.

In that same time period, I have had NO accidents and NO tickets.

How is this fair?

'Science shows: You can do anything you're capable of!'

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 12:20:00 +0000

They're at it again.

Like most alumni of The Secret, John Assaraf was laying low for a while after his pal and co-conspirator James Ray parboiled a trio of New Age acolytes in Sedona. Then, and also like the rest of the clan, Assaraf sought to reinvent himself with post-Secret insights. Lately he's been tweeting about this stuff.

I'm not going to get too deep into the particulars of that site, which is premised on the supposedly magical powers of the precuneus and your ability to harness same (with a little ongoing help, that is, from your friends in the New Wage community, as our friend Connie likes to call it). You're fully capable of reading the advertorial for yourself and drawing your own conclusions. But as a general matter, this is what self-help hucksters do: They take a snippet of science (usually so-called "emerging" science), combine it with a pinch of philosophy, a useful aphorism or two from someone with high name recognition, some ever-ready boilerplate about Empowerment and Positivity and blah-blah-blah, and presto...a hot new product line*. It's like the old wedding prescriptive: "Something old, something new, something borrowed, something blue" (to which I would append, "helps them separate your cash from you").

I've said this before, but it's important to expend a few more words from time to time so that some readers who are inclined to dismiss me as a curmudgeon—or worse—fully understand the argument I'm making. I do not dispute that you can make yourself obsess about things that you want, or want to happen. We all know people who do that even without trying. What I dispute is the existence of a push-button link between that level of obsession and the attainment of whatever it is you want, or want to happen.

I do not think that positive mental attitude is irrelevant in life. Such a stance would be ridiculous. When people get down and hopeless, they no longer even try, and it seems logical that more often than not, you must try in order to succeed. (There are, of course, powerful examples of accidental success. See under "Fleming" and "penicillin.") Positivity is all the more important (if not downright essential) in any enterprise that plays out largely in the human heart or mind: like love. If you and your partner are not positive about your love, you will likely not be happy in that love, and the love strikes me as far less likely to last, ipso facto.

But the more important point is that in other real-world enterprises—that is, where we must interact with our environment and, to some degree, conquer it—there's plenty of pointless, useless trying and hoping. Since talk of personal reinvention is all the rage these days, let me stipulate for the record that I would love to reinvent myself as a pitcher/outfielder for the New York Yankees. I really would. And if I thought I had half a chance, I'd be sitting here obsessing and attracting and dispatching positive energy into the ever-obliging universe 24/7. But it ain't gonna happen for me. Not at 61 with two bad knees. In fact—and this is the more pertinent fact—it isn't even gonna happen for the vast majority of 20-somethings who are signed and drafted out of high school or college. These are kids who have obsessed about baseball; they have organized their entire lives around success in the realm. They've hit until their hands bled, worked with the best coaches, attended all the most renowned camps and clinics. It's just that statistically, there isn't room for all of them in major league baseball. End of story, end of dream.

Sorry, folks. PMA is not a bush-putton panacea for what ails you.

The bottom-line problem with the self-help movement is its lack of nuance, its near-total disinclination to parse language in the way that it must be parsed in order to have any real-world relevance. Marketing dictates call for communicating a clear and unambiguous message, thus SHAMland finds it necessary to take highly complex (and individualized) topics like "What are the ingredients of success?" and distill them down to absurdly simplistic bullet points that offer about as much true instruction as my telling you to "go out and enjoy life." (OK, glad we've got that settled.) You cannot get a deal for a realistic book, a book with a title/premise like "Maybe you ought to try harder because it probably increases your odds of success a bit more, though in truth you can't really count on that..."

At least that's what my precuneus is making me conscious of, this morning.

* Translation: scam.

"Johnny, that was a most excellent 'fuck-you'...!"

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sun, 09 Oct 2011 15:03:00 +0000

In my local paper is a story about the Allentown School District's latest bright idea for improving attendance, test scores and general morale among the district's notoriously troublesome and unmotivated high school population. (As background, also in the paper is a separate story about how Allentown has the highest percentage of high-school dropouts in the Lehigh Valley, the umbrella region in which I live.) Apparently in the old unenlightened days, teachers faced with a student who told that teacher to "fuck off!" might have have sent said student to the principal's office, where he might be likely to receive a suspension. But that would cause the student to miss work, which, in the end, just further handicapped the student in his [non]effort to get a good education. (See the reasoning here? The penalty caused the student to miss work. Not the offense.)

The new Allentown policy, says the article, is an outgrowth of a national scholastic movement known as "School-wide Positive Behavior Intervention and Supports, which began in the special education realm more than two decades ago and spread to all sectors of public education." The article goes on to outline the thinking behind the initiative:

The theory is that if educators collectively and enthusiastically set up and enforce a schoolwide system of recognizing and rewarding students for good behavior, they will change into law-abiding pupils with better grades. Students' good behavior is tracked through a point system, and at the end of a week or month students get some sort of prize if they reach certain goals that show constant or improved behavior....

Sound eerily familiar? Like a repackaging of the same, tired "self-esteem-based" model of learning, except this time adapted for a student body that likes to carry guns to school? The net result is that in practice, teachers have effectively ended up rewarding kids for negative behavior, as the code is difficult to understand and even more difficult to apply. Hell, I found even the newspaper article confusing and inconsistent.

Anyway, the piece continues:

But almost all studies on whether the positive-behavior method works are done at the elementary level... Little or no research exists on its effect in high schools, especially in urban settings....

That should ring a bell, too, especially to anyone who's read SHAM. These new experiments in positivity, like the self-esteem movement as a whole, were conjured and embraced based on...well, nothing. Someone with a PhD got a bright idea rooted in a vague, touchy-feely notion of how the world ought to work, began selling that idea to his colleagues, and the rest is history. Nary a thought was given to pragmatics, the wider social implications, the law of unintended consequences, etc.

Although the early Victimization movement, as described in my book, has mostly given way to self-help's Empowerment wing in our post-Oprah/post-Secret culture, some of these "reinforce-my-victimhood" ideologies are tough to root out, notably in education. (It bears noting that policy infected with self-esteem-based flaws has now found its way to American colleges. That was, of course, predictable: How else were colleges going to handle this influx of poorly prepared freshmen?) No, we don't want to just write off "urban" students. And I do believe that rewarding positive behavior and achievement is a very, very good thing. But if in practice it means that we look the other way when kids mouth off, act the fool, set a horrible example or even potentially endanger their fellow students, that just undermines the educational mission as a whole, and heightens the odds that another generation of hooligans will be unleashed on society after graduation, if they make it that far.

Playboy gets clubbed.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Wed, 05 Oct 2011 11:36:00 +0000

You heard it here last: Your host will pat himself on the back for predicting (to himself) that NBC's much-promoted new show, The Playboy Club, would fall on its bunny tail and become road kill. The show was axed after just three episodes. As you might imagine, feminists and boycotting Christian groups took credit for its demise, but I really think that what killed this particular period piece (and why does that phrase sound funny/tacky in this connection?) was not moral outrage but rather something closer to moral ennui—which, and not coincidentally, is the same thing that's killing Hef's beloved magazine. In an era of sexting, booty calls, libidinous lady teachers and rampant hooking up (my kids tell me the latter phrase is somewhat passe by now)—in an era when even stuffy SEC staffers are sitting at their desks watching internet porn (instead of watching out that Goldman Sachs isn't stealing its investors blind)—nobody finds the idea of gals running around in bunny costumes that scandalous or even titillating (which is another word that sounds funny in this connection). Here in my neck-o'-the-woods, which is probably not that different from yours, kids are trading naked pics of themselves like we of my generation once traded baseball cards. And grown-ups who want glitz and/or glamor and/or sex can simply download any rapper's latest vid from iTunes or sign into YouTube and see what's trending in the adult section.

So who was going to watch this show?

(Pictured, btw, is prototypical feminist Gloria Steinem during her bunny days.)

'Steve knew that NCCAM had wasted an awful lot of taxpayer money...'

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 14:54:00 +0000

As regular readers are aware, this is the kind of stuff that makes me positively apoplectic. And since the word apoplectic, in its most literal sense, has to do with the occurrence or causation of a stroke, it is not a very good thing when (so-called) health information would put you in that state.

So far as I've been able to determine, my local paper, The Morning Call, is not presenting this material as a "special advertising section." Nor is it designated as "opinion writing." Nor does it includes meaningful disclaimers. In short, the reader is being asked to accept this material, "Healing Mind, Body, Spirit"—which has been given a special section all its own—as straight news, or honest-to-goodness health reporting. Even though you can read for yourself, I'm going to quote the lede here, so you can readily perceive the nature of my gripe:

When Connie Konnick was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2004, she knew she would need more than surgery and radiation to heal.

The disease affected her in ways that transcended the body. It shook her emotions, influenced her thoughts and forced her to confront her mortality. She had faith that her doctors would do everything in their power to wipe out the tumors, but the rest was up to her.

A Tai Chi practitioner, Konnick was aware of the connection between mind, body and spirit. She believed that if she nourished her body, monitored her emotions and kept her mind thinking positive thoughts, she would be more likely to defeat this aggressive disease. So she attended all of her Tai Chi classes, especially during those weeks when she underwent radiation treatments five days in a row....

She "knew" she "would need more than surgery and radiation"? The doctors "would do everything in their power," but "the rest" was up to her? She was "aware of the connection between mind, body and spirit"? What I'm asking you to notice here is the total lack of objective distance between writer and subject. When a journalist writes that a person "knew" she would need more than surgery, or that "the rest" was up to her, that writer is tacitly vouching for the information. It's exactly as if I wrote, "Joe knew that the Earth is round, so he decided..." In a journalistic setting, when I write that, I am also writing that I know the Earth is round, and that you, the reader, should know it too.

Only in one instance in his lede—where the writer, Milton D. Carrero, has Connie "believing" that her positive thoughts would help her beat cancer—is there any journalistic lens between Carrero and Connie Konnick. But by that time, it's already too late. The spin is established. We've met Mr. Carrero before, by the way, and in a similar connection. So I'm not surprised that the paper gave him the job here.

What I've highlighted above is a very small portion of a six-page section that features quotes like, "If you have positive energy, that's going to help you heal everything" (also quoted uncritically, as if we're to accept it on faith). I don't want to belabor the point because I've already written ad nauseam about alternative medicine; I devoted an entire chapter to alt-med in SHAM. But maybe the simplest and most telling rebuttal is this: Despite well over $1 billion dollars in budget authority, and 20 years spent trying*, the National Center for Complementary and Alternative Medicine (NCCAM) hasn't been able to clinically validate a single alternative/New Age methodology. Not one. (Read especially the tenth paragraph of my controversial Wall Street Journal piece on the subject.)

So why the hell do we continue writing (and lecturing) about this stuff as if we all "know" it works, or even helps? (And why is it considered so horribly impolitic to say otherwise?)

Look, if you're saying it makes you feel better to meditate or get hypnotized (two of the alternative "treatments" suggested in the section), then by all means go for it. We all want to feel better...even when we're not challenged by cancer. But for God's sake, don't present it as a "treatment model" or imply that it's not just helping you feel better but is actually healing you in the medical sense of the term! And for those who face serious health challenges, or have faced them in the past, I'd like to ask you this: If it came down to a choice, would you rather see a health professional who treated you with utmost care and sensitivity but didn't fix the problem? Or a doctor who's a complete SOB, such that you leave his office every week in tears, feeling hopeless...but also manages to cure you?

Speaking of "curing you," here's the most interesting line in the entire section, to me. It appears as almost a throwaway phrase four short paragraphs from the end of Carrero's very long piece:

Keeping up her with Tai Chi practice helped Konnick after she developed breast cancer again in 2009.

So wait, let me get this straight: She "developed breast cancer again"?

Is the writer really saying that maybe Connie Konnick never got rid of her cancer the first time around? Despite all that healthful, mind-body energy she applied? What a shocker!

* I'm including the early activities of NCCAM's previous incarnation, the Office of Alternative Medicine (1991-1997).

Stressed-out over the Center?

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Fri, 30 Sep 2011 11:23:00 +0000

A listener and previous "guest blogger" from Germany writes, of the Midwest Center:

I tried to click into the forums they established on their "stress center" homepage; I used to read and write there a few years ago. And I couldn't find it anymore! They changed the whole layout, and now there are no more forums, no hint or button, nothing. They also used to have free information there about all kinds of mental/psychological problems, which was quite helpful, but they took that out, too. Very weird. What is left now is just THE PROGRAM, advertisement and information and users' testimonies and how to purchase, but that's all. Or maybe I couldn't find it anymore because of my poor computer skills...!? However, this is suspicious to me. Although I found the program quite helpful then, this confirms what other commenters on your blog assumed: that THE PROGRAM has become just some kind of money machine... Do you have any information about this phenomenon?

A thought occurs in postscript: The program has become a money machine...? Which is why I'd direct interested readers to this site, which I find amusing and very much on-point, especially since it quotes from my SHAMblog "tribute" to the late David Bassett.

The missing forum is, in fact, here, under the "support" tab. But I ran this comment anyway because I'd be interested to hear from some new voices with regard to The Center. Anyone? Bueuuuller...?

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

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Tue, 20 Sep 2011 11:20:00 +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....

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

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.

Chicken soup ... reheated?

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Tue, 13 Sep 2011 10:51:00 +0000

Yesterday somebody sent me a link to the accompanying vid, along with the gleeful zinger, "You got your ass kicked here, buddy!"

To be honest, that's kind of what I thought, too, when I first "watched it back" after doing the show live on November 22, 2005. You can read chapter and verse of my feelings on the experience by chasing the link in the previous line, but I'm curious about how you folks see it, now, watching it through the clarifying lens of history. Remember that at the time, James Ray hadn't yet parboiled his disciples in Sedona; in fact, the world was still more than a year away from Ray's mentor, Rhonda Byrne and The Secret. Hell, I hadn't even commenced my obsession with Dr. Phil's Love Smart, or more specifically, the Amazon reviews thereof. (I think I've recovered, though I still go in for an occasional counseling session, just in case.)

Regardless, one thing hasn't changed: Mark Victor Hansen remains, in my view, a snake. I invite you to read the series of posts I wrote in the wake of the Anderson Cooper gig; they're as revelatory of the SHAMscape as anything I've done on this blog.

'I can have all the followers I want!'

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Mon, 12 Sep 2011 15:50:00 +0000

For some reason I cannot explain, my Twitter following has expanded dramatically of late. At this writing I'm all the way up to 241. Though that's a laughably puny number in the grand scheme of things (no threat to Tony Robbins' 1.9 million), it's worlds better than the 100-something at which I lolled for my first full year of residence in the tweet-o-sphere.

My most recent follower is this guy:

Mark Shadan
@CreateWhatUWant San Bruno, Ca
Law of Attraction Coach | Life Coach | There is no limit to what u can be, do or have... Really. Until new site, u can get info here: http://ow.ly/6b2ie
http://ow.ly/6b2ie

So. There is no limit to what u can be, do or have... Really. Really?

We'll leave aside the question of why someone who subscribes to that anthem* would follow me. Maybe he just wants to know what the enemy is up to. But I thought this might be a good time for a refresher course in that peculiar line of insanity that goes, "You can achieve anything you want in life!" Or as the late, not-so-great Randy Pausch put it, "Brick walls are there for other people." Is that so, Randy? Then I guess a diagnosis of stage-4 metastatic pancreatic cancer is there for other people, too, huh? Whoops...

I've said this often, but we used to put people away for insisting that the physical world is responsive to the wishes of the psyche; that external reality arranges itself to conform with whatever you want or believe or, ahem, attract. Really, that's the perverse genius of the New Age: Its hucksters have somehow succeeded in mainstreaming notions that once were identified with schizophrenia and other forms of actual mental pathology.

"You know, Dr. Swanson, if I stare at that Corvette long enough it will come to me and take me to Disneyland! Really, it will. It will..."

"All right, Ms. Tompkins, it's time for your shock treatment now. Oh, and Nurse Jones, remind me that we need to up the dosage of thorazine..."

Over the years I've blogged about the shameless/shameful overselling of positive mental attitude in such areas as health (see here and/or here), the supposed benefits of enthusiasm and self-confidence, the phenomenon I dubbed Sportsthink (too many entries to list, but try this one for starters), etc. Hell, I devoted an entire article to the subject in Skeptic. I've also emphasized the counterintuitive dangers of today's culturally viral PMA in interviews on CNN, MSNBC, FOX, and an hour-long prime-time show I helped develop for ABC. Point being, I don't need to repeat it all here. Many other astute observers have taken up the cause since the publication of my 2005 book, SHAM. In fairness, Wendy Kaminer was touching on this same foible two decades ago in her mordant send-up of self-help's Victimization wing, I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional. And yet this crazy notion that you can "be anything you want in life!" not only won't go away, but continues to be mindlessly reinforced in schools across America each and every day, thereby creating whimsical feelings of entitlement that, to my mind, do far more harm than good.

Let's face it, much of the time we can't even change how we feel about something, let alone change the course of the something itself! I offer a simple experiment to prove it: If you are a parent, stop loving your children. Presto! Go ahead, see if you can do it. I bet you can't. And if you're thinking, But I don't WANT to stop loving my kids, so why should I try?, well, that same internal monologue is constantly running deep inside your psyche with regard to countless other issues that arise throughout the day: But I don't WANT to [fill in the blank] or But I HAVE to [fill in the blank]. Sure, change is possible; it's just not a push-button process, and I'd argue that whatever that process may be is seldom kick-started by anything under our conscious control.

Put simply, we're gonna be what we are, and we're gonna feel what we feel, until something changes for us. And then we're gonna be and feel that, until something else changes again. And that's true regardless of what u say, Mark.

* at least for public consumption.

'Twas brillig, and I are very unhappy with this unhappy situations.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sun, 04 Sep 2011 13:45:00 +0000

I'm juggling quite a writing workload on my new(ish) job these days, so we've found it expedient to engage the services of freelancers to churn out relatively low-priority blurbs pursuant to our ambitious SEO goals.* More exactly, we've engaged the services of a company that specializes, or so it says, in taking on the writing overflow from small-staff firms, like mine, that find themselves temporarily overwhelmed.

I have two primary reactions to this experience, thus far:

1. It's a good thing these blurbs are relatively low-priority, because the general quality of the writing supplied by these freelancers can be summarized as GACK.

2. I would assume that the company to which we outsourced our writing employs people who have in some way documented their fitness to produce verbiage worthy of being read by other actual homo sapiens. Therefore I must also assume that the company believes that the GACK-inspiring writing to which I alluded in (1) should be accepted by my firm as credible professional work, and maybe even paid for. I further assume—though you can't imagine how this pains and even terrifies me, as a lover of writing and a former professor of the genre—that the people churning out this garbage actually graduated from some institution of higher learning with a degree that theoretically certifies their competency to write something.

Is it mean-spirited or overly demanding of me to expect writers not to use phrases like "aware about" (as in, "they are aware about the financial concerns..."), "dedicated in" (as in, "the company is dedicated in teaching consumers how to better handle their finances...") or "translate towards" (as in, "this doesn't always translate towards a better opportunity")? Is it unrealistic to ask people who call themselves Writers to avoid writing sentences that begin, "For the average person who struggle to fix their finances to make sure it works for them" or "With the economy presently in its current state of economic instability..." Jesus H. Christ!

What are they teaching people in English classes nowadays??

* Some of you may be wondering, How do you reconcile "low-priority blurbs" with "ambitious" SEO goals? I'm told that in SEO, which is quite far from my area of specialization, the point is merely to repeat the key names and phrases as often as possible in as many different online settings as possible. So the core objective is just to get the material out there, almost regardless of how it reads. Still...if you're going to write something...yanno?

Performing major surgery...on our wallets. To be continued.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 01:14:00 +0000

This will be something of a teaser post, assuming anyone cares enough about this to feel teased, but it concerns an "explanation of benefits" I received yesterday in connection with my mother-in-law's recent hospital stay. Dreamboat, as we call her (it's a long story), resides in an assisted-living facility up the road, after five years of staying with us, but my wife sees her daily and, these days, basically manages her affairs. Hence the "explanation" came here.

Dreamboat was in the hospital for seven consecutive days and part of an eighth. During that time, doctors performed a minor surgical procedure, intended to relieve a bile-duct blockage. Nowadays this is a relatively simple and straightforward proposition in which the surgeon threads a tube down the esophagus; no actual incisions are required. They also gave her some diagnostic tests, including an MRI, and took a few X-rays. The procedure was unsuccessful but her symptoms remitted anyway, so they sent her home and told her to check back with her family doctor in a few weeks.

The final bill came to $76,557.79. For the math-impaired, and/or products of the California educational system, that calculates to about $10,000 a day. Actually a bit more, since she was back in her usual chair in the assisted-living facility by noon of the eighth day. Notable among the subtotaled charges was an entry of $7356.78 for "prescription medicine." (I guess they were giving her pills made of enriched uranium.) Also, under the generic heading of "medical care," there are four separate entries, which total just under $20,000. None of the charges is really explained in this "explanation." There are just a bunch of codes.

My mother-in-law owes nothing on the bill—Medicare and Blue Cross split 100% of the costs. But that's not the point. The point is that something is rotten at Lehigh Valley Hospital Network. The point is that I perceive in Dreamboat's recent hospital stay an object lesson in the way the medical establishment screws Medicare. Meaning you and me.

I'm going to look into this. I'm going to demand a full accounting, day by day, procedure by procedure, pill by pill. I will report back.

And by the way, inasmuch as it's sort of relevant again, if anyone wants to read or re-read my nine-part series on "placebo medicine," click here.

Does that apply to nuclear explosions, too?

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Mon, 29 Aug 2011 00:07:00 +0000

If you've visited this blog at least—well, ever—you know I'm not a fan of empty-headed sloganeering. If I had my way, we'd take all of the pseudo-inspirational platitudes splashed across those cloying posters that today hang on almost every executive's office walls, and we'd build one huge effin bonfire. (I'm referring to the kind of posters they sell, for example, here. Or in that special pullout section in the middle of all inflight catalogs.) To make things even better, ideally we'd start the fire with a coal that's a direct descendant of the ones Tony Robbins used in leading the "firewalk experiences" that launched his nine-figure motivational empire.

By now you're probably wondering what, ahem, inspired this tirade. On in the background is Extreme Makeover Home Edition. Tonight's sob-aganza focuses on a woman whose 30-year-old husband died suddenly of a heart attack the same day she gave birth to their first child. In the course of explaining how she decided not to let this tragedy throw her life into chaos, she says brightly, "You can turn anything into a positive."

Is that so.

To my mind, the death of her husband was bad enough in its own right, but I wonder if she'd still be talking about turning negatives into positives if, say, the baby had been stillborn as well. That's not even the crux of the issue, though. The crux is that you can't "turn anything into a positive." You absolutely cannot. To some degree, you can control how you feel about the negative—if you're equipped with that kind of equanimity and self-discipline. Many of us aren't. The larger point is that changing the way you deal with something is not the same as changing the something itself. Inhabiting a private world of illusion (or delusion) does not fix whatever core problem might drive a person to want to detach from reality. The soldier who returns from Afghanistan minus three limbs, and who decides to go back to college, get a degree and make as much as he can of himself, has not "turned a negative into a positive." He has simply survived. He is still missing those three limbs. And if he tells you that losing those limbs was "the best thing that ever happened to him," he's kidding himself.

I'm not a moron, and I'm not an unfeeling person, either. Quite the contrary. I know what the woman on Extreme Makeover is getting at: that some people, faced with tragedy, give up altogether, which doesn't help matters. I'll buy that. I'd never encourage a person who has experienced some misfortune to fold up his or her tent and wallow in self-pity. I'd hope that such a person would recognize that all is not lost (although in some cases it may be). That's not the same as "turning a negative into a positive." When we denature language—especially when we do it in the service of that hypnotic illusion-world the New Age has foist upon us, in which the Universe will happily do our bidding if we can just learn to be of good cheer all the time—we also devalue the concepts that underlie language. You don't conquer failure by redefining it or wishing it away. You don't undo tragedy by "turning it into a positive." You don't beat cancer by simply "refusing to die of it," a la Lynn Redgrave (who, of course, died of it anyway).

No more than I can hit Aroldis Chapman's 105 mph fastball by telling myself that the pitch is really just lofting in at 60 mph.

People who need to die. Chapter 28.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Thu, 25 Aug 2011 19:56:00 +0000

I figure that anyone who's smart enough to own a home, hold down a job and raise a family is also smart enough to recognize the extraordinary danger—to others as well as himself—of jogging or cycling down a curvy, narrow, rain-slick backwoods road. If your IQ is higher than a dandelion's*, you know that under those conditions, a driver's slightest emergency course correction can set in motion a catastrophic chain of events. So I assume that the problem with the asshole/jogger I encountered this morning in the teeming rain, near a blind curve on exactly such a backwoods road, was not an IQ deficiency; rather, it was a total disregard for his fellow human beings.

I would therefore like to serve notice, not only to this morning's asshole but to his like-minded assholes-in-arms, that if it ever comes down to a choice between (a) swerving into oncoming traffic and (b) turning you into a hood ornament, this particular motorist will not be swerving, thank you very much.

I will, however, send flowers to your widow. Maybe even drop by to console her....

You'd expect nothing less from me, nice guy that I am.

* Giving credit where it's due, this is actually an allusion to a line from Jim Bouton's hilarious baseball tell-all, Ball Four. At one point Bouton quotes a ballplayer who famously said of a coach, "If his IQ were 3 points lower, he'd be a dandelion." That may not be the verbatim quote, but it's close.

"I developed this overwhelming compulsion to put on black-face, drop to my knees and sing Mammy!"

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sun, 21 Aug 2011 10:42:00 +0000

My doctor prescribed a drug called Mobic to help alleviate swelling and tenderness in my knees. Inasmuch as the drug belongs to the highly suspect Vioxx class, I began investigating side effects. Although many of those side effects, albeit not unexpected, are sobering (sudden death due to heart attack would tend to fall in that category), I had to laugh my ass off when I came across the woman who claimed that after taking the drug, she experienced "minstrel issues." Click the link above and scroll down to the comment titled "Barbarasays." It's currently third, as I view the page.

How can a woman reach the age of menstruation and not know how to spell it? Another fine testament to the American educational system...or the American educational ethic...?

We interrupt our regularly scheduled program...

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Tue, 16 Aug 2011 11:22:00 +0000

For music lovers only: This may be the prettiest movie theme I've ever heard. The chord at :37-:38 is genius; it just reaches inside you.

More nonsense from your favorite sports(think)writers...and why even non-sports fans should care.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sun, 14 Aug 2011 09:54:00 +0000

Newcomers to the blog may be unaware that I have a "thing" about Sportsthink,* which to me is as good a mainstream example as there is of the PMA-based silliness that has seized hold of this country.

Here's the latest illustration. Apparently we are to believe that aging Yankee catcher/DH Jorge Posada had a great day yesterday because he was "motivated" to do so. This raises a number of questions in my mind.

So to this point in the season, Posada has not been sufficiently "motivated" to do better than his overall .237 batting average?

So the way to "motivate" players is to sit them down (not play them) for a week?

And the core question of all:

So all it takes to hit a wicked Roy Halladay 94mph 2-seam fastball is motivation? Then why don't the most motivated players just go out and do it? How does Halladay get anybody out? Oh wait...I forgot...he must be even more motivated. I mean, it couldn't possibly be true that the most talented guy wins the battle, most of the time...

The significance of this line of pseudo-thought extends well beyond sports. We are a nation of people who judge other people by their emotional trappings: whether or not they seem successful, or confident or, yes, motivated. We assume that if someone seems (or just expresses the certitude of being) A Doer, he or she can get the job done. This is a staple truism in latter-day politics. We vote for, and rally around, candidates who say or project the right things...even though most of the time, those "right things" have nothing to do with any specific plan of action. They're simply the right things in terms of attitude. Or as I once wrote in a wry piece on PMA for The Wall Street Journal, "In too many cases, we take confidence as proof of having a plan. Far too often, confidence is the plan."

That societal tendency can lead to grave misjudgments. Look at the Obama-phenomenon, for example. Love him or hate him, there's no question that he won because he inspired hope...not through any concrete strategies that he espoused, necessarily, but because he talked constantly about, and seemed personally to embody, hope. Hope and Change. Those are abstractions. (In fact, they reside in the world of emotional memes that are clearly related to what the NLP crowd calls anchoring.) Today, even though I supported and voted for the man, I can see where his detractors might wonder if it was all a diverting illusion. I don't see it that way; I think post-election Obama just ran headlong into the realities of today's Beltway, which isn't very welcoming to Change. Still, I can certainly understand how diehard GOP types would scream that we were taken in, if not "duped."

Amazing where some of us will go based on a simple headline about Jorge Posada, huh...?

* I devote an entire chapter to it in my book, SHAM.

While we're on the subject of customer disservice...

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 10:32:00 +0000

Read yesterday's related post.

Last week I was in Washington, DC on business with my boss and a few other key employees. In the course of our two-day stay, which we spent at one of the city's premier hotels, just down the street from the White House, we encountered no less than five hotel employees who could barely make themselves understood in English. It's hard for me to convey how Kafkaesque and exasperating some of the resulting "conversations" were. Apparently we weren't the only ones who felt that way. At breakfast in the hotel cafe on the morning of our departure, a well-dressed man at the next table grew so irate over the situation that he summoned the maitre d' (whose Spanish accent was only slightly less thick than our server's) and loudly insisted on being served by "an American." Lest he himself be misunderstood, the man added, "someone who speaks actual English."

At first I was a bit embarrassed by the man's demand, which struck me as jingoistic, but the more I thought about it, the more I found it defensible, even reasonable. Anti-discrimination laws or not, no mainstream company would be required (would it?) to hire in a customer-service capacity an individual who literally did not speak English—which is to say, a non-English-speaking person. Just as I can't imagine that EEOC laws meant to protect the obese would be invoked in a case where a 410-pound man applied for a job as a jockey. So what's really the difference? If the person's attempts at English are as faltering and ineffective as what we encountered in DC, how does that materially differ from, say, a Monty Python skit in which a Lithuanian-speaking taxi driver is taking directions from a Mandarin-speaking customer?

The problem is especially acute when the would-be conversation is occurring over the telephone (or the squawk box in the drive-through lane of a fast-food restaurant), where you don't have the benefit of lip-reading, supportive gestures and body language, or other communication enhancers.

So I'd like to hear from our contributors. Where should these lines be drawn? Why in the name of political correctness or social engineering should we be forced to endure situations where each of a succession of questions must be asked and answered a half-dozen times? And even then you can't be sure the proper action will ensue. (Several times, for example, one or more members of our Washington contingent received a menu item we did not order, or failed to receive an item we did order.) Come to think of it, I'm sure we've all had hotel experiences where we attempted to ask a question of the maid making up our room, and she simply shook her head and said, "No speak English" or some such. Not to mention the technical-support lines provided by many firms nowadays, which all seem fiber-optically routed to the same building in Jaipur.

Did the well-dressed man in the hotel cafe have a valid gripe? What do you think?

Adventures in oye-land.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sun, 07 Aug 2011 09:13:00 +0000

Today would've been my father's 93rd birthday. As regular readers may recall, I lost him a long, long time ago—1978!—and I am certain that the narrative of my life has not been the better for it. It also occurred to me the other day as I was memorializing my sister that more of my (original) immediate family is now dead than alive—three of the five of us. For some reason, that realization brought me up short. But rather than devolve into the maudlin remembrances that have become typical for me on such occasions (e.g. this or this), I've decided to pay a different, more offbeat type of tribute to Dad.

See, my father did not complain about a lot of things. He was a stoic sort of fellow who didn't ask or expect much from life—in other words, the antithesis of my generation, which spends most of its time screaming, me, ME, ME! But my father did have one major pet peeve, and that was customer service. Or the lack of same. And it occurs to me that some of the more scathing or satirical musings I've presented on this blog (e.g. this, this or this) really had their genesis in my father's sporadic dinner-time sermons on the insufferable incompetence of the folks at DMV, the phone company, the local Pizza Hut, etc. F'rinstnace, after the phone company had torn up our Brooklyn neighborhood in order to "upgrade" our service, my father nightly bemoaned the constant static that had newly appeared on our line. After a few weeks he called the phone company and said, "I'm requesting that you downgrade my service again so that I can actually make a viable phone call." He was abruptly disconnected.

Anyway, in that spirit I present a conversation I recently had with a perky young CSR from a well-known credit-card company. (Hint: Its name rhymes with Bapital Gun, and its ubiquitous TV spots are always asking me what's in my wallet.) This was pursuant to several voicemails I'd received in regard to my "missing a payment." I returned the woman's call, and the rest is self-explanatory. We're picking things up after the opening pleasantries have been exchanged.
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Her: "You will need to pay $78 to bring your account current through July 16."

Me: "Why are we worrying about July 16? July 16 is a month away. Let's talk about the June statement payment that I supposedly missed."

Her: "Yes, sir. You are one month behind."

Me: "I am? A month behind? Look, I grant you, I misread the May statement. I thought it said $75, which is what I sent. It really asked for $76. So I'm one dollar behind. Not one month."

Her: "Would you like to pay $78 to bring your account current—?"

Me: "Can we look at that statement together?"

Her: "Yes, sir."

Me: "Good. What does it say under 'amount due'?"

Her: "It says $76."

Me: "Correct. And what does it say I paid?"

Her: "$75."

Me: "Correct again. And I paid that by the stipulated due date, is that correct?"

Her: "You made a partial payment by the due date, yes."

Me: "A partial...? [composing myself] So all these phone messages, all this aggravation is over a dollar?"

Her: "If you fail to pay your payment, you are behind."

Me: "Did I fail to pay my payment?"

Her: "You did not pay your payment on time."

Me: "I did not pay my payment on time?"

Her: "You did not pay the correct amount on time."

Me: "I was off by a dollar."

Her: "Yes, which is why I'm asking you if you'd like to pay $78 now to bring your account current."

I pause. I sigh. I regroup.

Me: "If I'd intended to miss a payment, do you really think I'd miss by ONE DOLLAR? If I didn't have the money or was in some sort of financial difficulty that affected my credit-worthiness, would I have sent $75 out of $76?"

Her: "I can't speak for what you were thinking, sir. I deal all day long with customers who get behind in their payments and have different reasons why."

Me: "Are they usually off by a dollar?"

Her: "The amount varies."

Me: "While I'm on the subject, have I ever missed a payment with you folks?"

Her: "That's what we're talking about here today."

Me: "I mean in the past. I've had your card for four, five years now."

Her: "Sir, I don't have that information."

Me: "Oh, but you have my missing dollar from last month underlined in red, huh?"

Her: "It is very important that you keep your account up to date."

Me: "Do you folks not believe in something called customer good will?"

Her: "Sir?"

Me: "I have been an exemplary customer of yours. I have always paid my bill on time. Most months I paid off the entire balance."

Her: "That may very well be true. Until last month. Sometimes when customers begin missing payments, it's the first sign that—"

Me: "When they miss by a dollar? All sorts of alarm bells go off then, do they?"

Her: "By any amount."

Me: "How about this. I'll go online right now and authorize my bank to send a dollar to you. It will go through first-thing tomorrow. Will that settle the matter?"

Her: "I can arrange right now for you to make your $78 payment, and that will bring you current through July 16."

Me: "You're not really saying you don't trust me to make a one-dollar payment through my bank. Are you?"

Her: "I'm merely trying to get this important matter settled."

Me: "This important matter."

Her: "I would assume your credit rating is very important to you, sir."

Me: "It is. Which is why I paid your bill promptly. I just made a minor error on the amount. Is none of this getting through to you?"

Her: "I don't know why your tone should be so sharp with me. I'm not the one who failed to keep up with the terms of my credit contract."

Me [deep breath]: "OK. Here's what I'm going to do. I'm going to go online this very minute, as we're talking, and authorize a payment for $78 through my bank. I think you might've mentioned something about how that would bring me current through July 16. Can I do that? Would that be acceptable to resolve the matter and end this phone call?"

Her: "If that is what you insist on, I will note your account accordingly."

Me: "Excellent! So are we all set, then?"

There is a pause on the line. Then she says, very brightly, "Now, are you sure you wouldn't like to make a telephone payment of $78 to bring your account current through July 16...?"

(At this point, I think my father would've reached through the phone line and torn her throat out.)

Happy birthday in heaven, Dad. This one's for you.