SHAMblog

My Tiffany epiphany goes mass-market.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 12:02:00 +0000

And on Black Friday, America's ultimate tribute to frenzied consumption, the Los Angeles Times has seen fit to run my essay on what I dubbed "vanity taxes" in a series of SHAMblog posts a short while back. Incidentally, I'm linking to the main opinion page rather than the piece itself, which is located at the top left; I thought the photo-illustration was neat—and I'm frankly quite surprised that they opted to "name names." Bully for you, L.A. Times!

A few things to be thankful for, if you're me.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Thu, 26 Nov 2009 10:27:00 +0000

...that Britney Spears doesn't follow SHAMblog.
I can't tell you how gratifying it is that this blog is read by exactly the kinds of people I'd always hoped would read the kinds of stuff I like to write. Oh, we have our differences of opinion and can even get a bit snarky with each other now and then. But wouldn't it be boring if we didn't? The main thing is, we run a moron-free zone here, to paraphrase Bill O'Reilly.... And speaking of O'Reilly—I just had to get this in—did anyone else happen to catch his self-described "tough" interviews with Sarah Palin? His questions were on the order of, "Admit it, Sarah: You shouldn't have worn the red dress that one time, you should've gone with blue!" or "Weren't you naive in underestimating the way the horrible liberal media would come after you and try to make you look stupid and unfit to be president? Come on, say it, you were naive...."

...that I don't know anyone who ordered Joe Vitale's blind Russian genie.
Considering self-help's cultural penetration, my family and extended family are remarkably free of guru-obsession. I do know a few people who bought The Secret, mostly out of curiosity. But who wasn't curious about Byrne's Boondoggle? Hell, even I bought The Secret, albeit second-hand. ("Keep your friends close...")

...that I've been able to keep my head (barely) above water in this crazy life called writing for one more year.
It hasn't been easy—my long-suffering wife could tell you chapter and verse about that!—but it's never been anything less than interesting, it's opened more doors and given me entree to more sides of life and living than that fat little kid from Brooklyn ever dreamed of, and for the most part, as Frank put it, I've been able to do it my way.

...that somebody once thought it might be fun to make an organized game out of smacking a ball around with a piece of tree.
My team's championship 2009 season is barely seven weeks behind us and already I can hear my fast-twitch muscle fibers talking excitedly among themselves, looking forward to April 2010. I honestly don't know what I'd do without baseball. God bless Abner Doubleday.

...that my three precious granddaughters are coming to visit today, and will stick to their Grandpa's side the way the stuffing sticks to the bird.
OK, it's a lousy visual, but you get my drift. Grandkids are wonderful, and mine are more wonderful than all others. I can say that because it's my blog.

I have other things to be thankful for as well. But I'll keep my counsel on those.

Happy Turkey Day to all.

Further thoughts on the complexity of human nature, biker justice, and this blog.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 12:06:00 +0000

First of all, there is change in the wind at SHAMblog. I think.

Those of you who've been here a while have accompanied me through several false starts at shutting down the blog. (Does that make them false finishes?) In those cases I either woke up one morning and realized I had more verbiage to inflict on you, or something happened in the SHAMsphere that demanded comment, and the blog—not yet in full rigor—was a handy medium. But lately I've been feeling that I've pretty much said it all...and I've said it 368 times at that.* More to the point, I've become convinced that there must be a better way to serve the modest but loyal audience for this material—or, better still, a way to serve the much, much larger demographic of people who don't know they're an audience for this material but should be. There's only so much cultural traction you can gain by preaching to the choir.

Anyway, I'll have more on this soon. Ideas are always welcome.

=======

Owing to the mass amount of verbiage alluded to above, most of you by now know my rather bizarre thoughts on crime and punishment**, so you've learned to expect the expected from me. Therefore you won't be disappointed by this post.

Went to Walmart yesterday, and found the store in the grips of some mass insurrection on the part of Biker Nation. In the giant parking lot were, conservatively, 2000 bikes and their associated riders of all description. And when I say all description, I mean all description. Everything from authentic Mongol types to your weekend warriors (e.g., Herb-the-urologist, who likes to play at being Marlon Brando on Saturdays, but only the sunny ones, otherwise the wind and rain make his allergies act up, plus he sometimes gets a really, really bad rash). Actually, it turns out that the bikers had convened from far and wide for a colossal toy giveaway sponsored by Walmart partnering with an Allentown shelter.

So I go in the store and my eyes are immediately drawn to this seriously malevolent-looking dude at one of the checkouts. I grant you, appearances can deceive, but between the tats/sleeves, the neo-Nazi haircut and ZZ Top-ish beard, the well-worn leather, the obvious scars, and the overall you-got-a-problem-with-me? look, I'm thinking, If this guy doesn't have a rap sheet longer than John Dillinger's pecker, then I'm your Aunt Jemima. At his side was his honey, and I swear to God, I have to believe she could've kicked the ass of 95% of the other guys in the store, including the rest of the male bikers. I mean to tell you, this was the couple from central casting.

Thing is, under each arm he had a toy. And not just any toy. They were dolls. Nice, pretty dolls with pink dresses. (OK, I know, there are probably all sorts of cynical/nefarious comments about pedophilia that suggest themselves at this point, but humor me.)

So I finish up my shopping—feeling, I might add, somewhat gay in this sea of testosterone, despite my own considerable size—and there he is again, walking out of the store just ahead of me. (Funny thing, too: This is one dude whose receipt the greeter does not ask to see.) I follow him with my eyes as he walks down to the area that's been cordoned off with yellow tape, climbs over the tape, and places the dolls in a sidecar that's already crammed with other toys. Driving out of the lot, I pass right by him and his bike. On the back of the bike is a little license plate-like sign that reads:

BE NICE TO CHILDREN. THEY WON'T FORGET.

People, I don't know what this guy has done so far in his life. It seems a safe bet that he's had a few scrapes here and there. But let's say it's worse than that, much worse. Let's say he's killed a man. Even a couple of men. Let's stipulate to that, for the sake of argument. But let's also say he's serious about this "be nice to children" stuff, and that he goes out of his way to walk the walk. Sure, most of us love kids, but let's say this guy goes totally above and beyond. Maybe he has his reasons, and maybe those reasons have something to do with his own childhood, something he hasn't forgotten. Something that probably wasn't that nice. Regardless, all we know now is that he finds every opportunity to help kids. He raises money—maybe legally, maybe not—for this or that children's cause. He'd give his right arm (or at least a kidney) to help one of those poor waifs at St. Jude's.

I ask you a simple question: Is this man really more of a blight on the species, even with his two homicides, than the kind of self-seeking prick who never quite crosses that fine line—never actually breaks any (written) law—but never lifts a finger for anyone who can't do him some good? The kind of guy who knows all the angles and plays them, always for his own benefit? The kind of guy who not only doesn't give a damn about other people's kids, but mistreats his own? Or even, let's say, the kind of hedonist/sybarite/Luxist-type guy who helped run things at AIG or Goldman Sachs before the fall?

If one of them must be punished...which should it be? Where's the sense of proportion here? I'm just askin', and it's an honest question.

* This is my 872nd post. I mean, geez....
** some of which can be read in this piece I did for Skeptic. This just scratches the surface of my questions/doubts about the system, but it's a good introduction to the topic.

Kids in jail, programs that fail, and other miscellany for a Friday in Fall.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 22:40:00 +0000

As I first mentioned in a comment a while back, the U.S. Supreme Court is now taking up the matter of whether it's cruel and unusual punishment to sentence a juvenile to life in prison for offenses other than murder. If that sounds like something that would be unworthy of the Court's time because it seldom happens anyway, consider that according to the New York Times article linked above, there are now 77 kids so situated in Florida alone. The Times also says we're the only nation on earth that imposes such a sentence on juveniles. Of course, we're also the only free-world nation that kills people in the name of justice (which explains why a number of our European allies refuse to extradite here in cases where the death penalty may apply).

Getting back to the matter at hand... Personally I wouldn't even frame the question in such narrow terms. I want to know why it's not cruel and unusual to hand down a sentence of LWOP* even in cases of murder. One of two case histories at the heart of the Court's current deliberations concerns Joe Sullivan, who received LWOP after being convicted of raping a 72-year-old woman when he was all of 13. I realize that there's much diversity of feeling on the matter; some of that sentiment is very heated in favor of the sternest possible punishment—and I wish I understood why. To me, all arguments rooted in "an eye for an eye," "do the crime, do the time" and similar sloganeering are ultimately beside the point. A 13-year-old is a 13-year-old. We don't allow 13-year-olds to vote, drink, sign binding contracts, join the military, drive cars or (in most municipalities) own firearms. The reason we give in denying them such privileges is simple: They're not responsible enough. They're not responsible for their actions.

If that's the case, how do we suddenly turn around and declare them "adults" for the purpose of locking them up and throwing away the key?

By the way, if this topic interests you, there's more detail/analysis available in this series of posts from early 2008.

Read Babies and bath water, Part 1.
Read Babies and bath water, Part 2.
Read Babies and bath water. Some final thoughts.

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

Speaking of kids...have you seen this one? I seriously think he's from another planet. (Which may explain why he won't say the Pledge of Allegiance to the U.S. Flag.) But regardless of your feelings on the issue here, the kid is too much.

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

My long-ago items on the Midwest Center for Stress & Anxiety continue to rack up comments: Cumulatively the two main posts, from April 2007 and July 2008, are zeroing in on the 200-comment threshold. Certainly the suicide** of Lucinda Bassett's husband, and the seeming cover-up that ensued, was food for thought for many Center clients, and accelerated debate on this highly specialized corner of the SHAMsphere. Complaints about the Center and its practices are not hard to find on Ripoff Report and elsewhere. Maybe a re-visit is warranted?

* Justice system nomenclature for "life in prison without parole."
** See short item, "Body in Field Ruled a Suicide," on page 2 of linked pdf.

And your host allows himself a point of personal privilege. Or, an open letter to Ken Griffey Junior.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 22:06:00 +0000

Dude...please use this off-season wisely and think about retiring instead of continuing your not-so-triumphal return to Seattle. Wait, let me amend that. Don't just think about retiring...do it. You are laying waste to what was once not only a Hall of Fame career, but a career that would have ranked you among the top 10 ballplayers of all time.

Oh, you'll still make the HoF, no question. Just not based on anything you've done lately. You haven't had a Griffey-esque season since 2005, and that was your only Griffey-esque season of the new millennium. That's right, Junior. With the exception of '05, your last great season was 2000.* (And that's stretching the definition of a Griffey-esque season that you established for yourself between, say, 1993 and 1999.) A whole generation of young fans is growing up watching you whiff on pitches you used to crush, run doubles into singles, and not even bother to run out routine ground balls; they watch all this and they turn to their dads and say, "What's the big deal about this guy?" You haven't batted over .277 in four years...and your last two full years were .249 and .214. With the exception of that .301 in '05, you haven't even visited the .290s since 1997. I haven't done the math, but I'm guessing that you knocked at least a full 10 points off your lifetime batting average over the past decade.

Then there's the never-ending cavalcade of injuries. Needless to say, those injuries had a lot to do with your declining performance. But regardless, come on, Ken. If you couldn't stay healthy in Cincinnati in your early 30s, what are your odds of doing it now at age 40?

I will remember you as having the prettiest, most majestic swing I've ever seen, bar none. Now please hang up the spikes. Do it before no one else remembers you at all.

* Of course, that depends on whether you fix the year 2000 as the final year of the previous century or the first year of the new one. For the purposes of this post, I go with the former definition.

On Sportsthink, Sarah, and life's other great mysteries.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 03:20:00 +0000

Here we have another sterling example of the "you can do it all if you only put your mind to it!" lunacy that suffuses the sports world and has increasingly bled over into the mainstream—the corporate realm in particular. (Regulars know that my umbrella terms for such garbage is "Sportsthink.") A USC running back, Stafon Johnson, dropped a barbell on his neck during a workout and almost died. Now he's in the process of making a step-by-step recovery. And so his doctor, when asked about the limits of that recovery, replies, "Those are only going to be set by Stafon." What nonsense! And how insensitive and insulting is it to the millions of victims of accident or illness who find that they simply can't regain full function, no matter how much they "want it." Folks, some things are just out of our hands.

Hence the artwork at top. Look at it this way: If Johnson had in fact died during that accident, would his doctor say that the only limits to his recovery are those he imposes on himself? It's almost the same thing, and it wouldn't be any sillier.

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

So I saw Sarah Palin stumping for her book on Oprah on Monday. And I realize that what I'm about to say won't be too popular with some of those (OK, many of those) who frequent this blog. Also, one must be cautious in evaluating Sarah Palin; there is ample evidence that she's not someone whose words (or motives) should be taken at face value. Levi Johnston, f'rinstance, ain't too fond of her at the moment. In fact, he says he looks at her "with disgust." But the skepticism of Palin extends far beyond 19-year-old amateur hockey players whose biggest achievements in life to date are (a) impregnating the daughter of a v.p. candidate and (b) landing a nude Playgirl photo spread. Palin's former colleagues at Team McCain dismiss her book as a work of fiction. And the manager of that team, Steve Schmidt, says a Palin run in 2012 would be disastrous for the Republican Party, and has implied that it would be even more disastrous for America if she somehow won.

Nonetheless, I have to admit that the woman acquitted herself nicely on Oprah. I found her likable and engaging. God help me, I didn't even think she sounded all that dumb.

Among other things, Palin gave me a new way of thinking about a number of elements of her life and outlook that received sound-bite-level treatment (and harsh, gut-level responses) back during Campaign '08. Notably, she gave me a new way of thinking about the infamous and widely satirized Katie Couric interview(s). You will recall that Palin's sitdown with Couric was an early nail in her coffin as a viable candidate for v.p. Along with the rest of America, I'd watched with a combination of astonishment and cynicism* as this perky, pretty, constantly smiling unknown—who aspired to be just a heartbeat from the presidency—seemed unable to provide Couric with the name of a single book, newspaper or magazine she had read and learned from.

On Monday, though, Palin supplied a fresh spin for that contretemps. She said she'd sensed immediately that Couric was out to get her. (And let's face it: She was right. I say that as someone who staunchly supported Obama/Biden.) The vibe Palin got was that Couric saw her as some third-rate poseur/bimbo from that vast tundric wasteland to the north. So, Palin explained to Oprah, when Katie pressed her about the books and magazines, she knew she was being patronized, and she wasn't about to play Katie's New York-journalist's game by dignifying the question with a straightforward answer. Palin claims that the rambling, wildly generic answer she did give was meant to say, more or less, "Yes, we even have newspapers and magazines up there—just like you have, Katie, here in New York. Imagine that! We have whole big bunches of magazines." In other words, Palin says she was being sarcastic, or passive-aggressive, or however you want to put it. She also points out that the handful of exchanges shown in that interview—almost all of them embarrassing to her in some way—were just a small portion of the hours' worth of taping she did with Couric. And here again, I can't deny that we journalists do have a tendency to zero in on the quotes that make the case we're out to make in the first place.

Look, I know what many of you are thinking as you read this, and I'm not saying I buy what the woman's selling now, either. No one's gonna write a memoir whose takeaway reduces to, "Yeah, I'm a moron...and here's the evidence to prove it!" Obviously she's going to try to do major CYA in order to rehabilitate her image as much as possible. What's more, Winfrey isn't the tough, savvy interviewer that she clearly thinks she is, based on her self-satisfied demeanor during Monday's show; we'll see how Palin holds up as her book tour moves along and some of the questions get a bit less polite and more pointed.

Still,I do wonder if I, like much of the rest of America, was a bit quick to judge, and perhaps enjoyed myself a bit too much in doing it.

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

Oh...and about That Cover. There's a lot of outrage going around, and I can see arguments pro and con. You'll have no trouble Googling a representative sample of them, so I needn't repeat them here. But what gets me is a remark I've heard a few times now, most recently from someone on FOX. It's rooted in the familiar allegations of media pro-Left bias, and it goes, "The media would never depict Hillary Clinton like that!" I mean, OK, that may be true...but come on! That's a little bit like saying, "Jason Alexander never gets the leading-man roles that George Clooney gets!" Duh.

* meaning, at the time, cynicism over John McCain's real motives for choosing such a manifestly unqualified running mate.

And another empowering message from your Sisters!

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 21:25:00 +0000

For the first time in my life I feel like I'm getting older. No wonder I feel that men just look through me....
—Opening "hook" from a commercial for a moisturizing product called Hydroxatone. As seen on Lifetime: Television for Women.

Ahh yes, girlfriends, even in this, the era of "real women" and "love the skin you're in," America's $500 billion beauty industry (of which about $60 billion goes towards so-called "luxury cosmetics") continues its relentless assault on women's peace of mind—and your media are only too happy to facilitate that assault by taking the beauty industry's bountiful ad dollars.

Here are some further empowering messages from the latest crop of women's magazines.

"When He's Turned Off By Your Body in Bed." From the cover of the October 2009 Elle.

"SHED ONE SIZE!" (In caps as shown.) From the cover of the November Women's Health.

"7 Things that Age Skin Most." From the cover of the October Allure. (And by the way, what is that in the "before" above? A mug shot?)

"Bad Girl Issue: For Sexy Bitches Only." From the cover of the November Cosmo. (OK, maybe it is, in a sense, "empowering." But come on. That's how we celebrate womanhood??)

Now, we gotta give some props to Glamour, which chips in with "Relax! 7 Reasons Guys Love You Just the Way You Are." But am I being too cynical in proposing that Glamour's editors gave that story play because the magazine has the rather ordinary Michelle Obama on its cover? (And come to think of it, why are we encouraging women to define themselves and rate their level of contentment based on whether a man "loves them just they way they are"?) Similarly, a recent cover treatment on Harper's Bazaar, "Fabulous at Every Age," sounds like a terrific theme, and could even be read with a straight face if the magazine didn't splash the headline over the face and form of model Gisele Bundchen, who next summer will attain the ripe old age of 30.

And while I'm on the subject, if these publications are committed to empowering women...then why are there no articles like "7 Steps to Greater Brainpower"* or, at the very least, "How to Bowl Him Over With Your Grasp of Politics." (You can stop laughing any time now.) Point being, again and again these magazines focus on two elements: surface characteristics (the whole beauty thing) and emotional health. You get very little sense that women are fully capable, thinking human beings who just might crave intellectual stimulation as well.

Almost needless to say, all of these magazines, in their interior pages, feature models with figures that are either (a) impossibly perfect or (b) border on outright caricature. Check out, for example, Kim Kardashian on the Cosmo cover aforementioned.

Love the skin you're in, huh? Yeah, right. As long as your skin resembles Kim's.

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

By the way, do you remember what was one of my first points about SHAMland and its gurus? That in order to "build you up," they first have to break you down and make you feel like crap? It applies here. It's much harder to sell beauty products to a woman who already feels beautiful and at peace.

* and no, I am not implying that women are dumb and need remediation in that area.

My dog Skip? Or, welcome to your host's tortured psyche.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 11:22:00 +0000

This post is apropos of nothing*, but for the past week or so I've been having a series of dreams in which the creature shown at right—a capybara, which might best be described as a 100-pound South American guinea pig—always plays a central role of some sort. The "plots" of my dreams differ but my pal Cap is always in it, somewhere. Last night, for instance, I was being chased through the American Southwest by a Carvel truck (which is weird enough already, if you think about it), and the giant rodent was in the passenger's seat, just looking on absently. He seemed amused.

Never had such dreams before the past few weeks...and yet I've been having 'em almost every night since. Anybody got any ideas? Anybody see the (truly eerie) film, The Mothman Prophecies? Ya think...?

(Oh, to answer your probable question: There was a period of my life when I was fascinated by obscure species of animals. That's how I got to know what a capybara is in the first place.)

By the way, here's an interesting vid I found of someone who owns a capy as a pet. Even if you don't watch the whole thing, you owe it to yourself to fast-forward to the 5:15 point and check it out. Simply hilarious.

* Detractors might say that about a lot of what appears on SHAMblog.

The basset-hound theory for opposing universal healthcare?

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Fri, 13 Nov 2009 13:46:00 +0000

I can understand that some (if not many) people oppose government-run healthcare. But I continue to be amazed at the justifications you'll hear for that opposition.

One currently popular line of reasoning goes, "There's nothing in the Constitution that entitles people to free health care." And another: "It's going to come out of my paycheck, and I have a right to object to the idea of my tax money going towards someone else's healthcare." Yes, you have that right*...and no, there's nothing in the Constitution that specifically guarantees healthcare coverage. But people, please hear yourself and think about the overtones of what you're saying. Does the word callous not come to mind? And while we're talking about hearing and thinking and being callous, the other night I heard FOX's overnight sensation, Glenn Beck—recently dubbed "the Oprah" of right-wing TV for his influence over the fortunes of books he picks—say on O'Reilly's show that this whole "47 million uninsureds" thing is a canard anyway, because, Beck opined, "They'll simply go to the emergency room if They need medical treatment, and no one is going to turn Them away."** First of all, I'm not at all sure the latter half of that statement is true, at least in the sort of blanket sense that it's used by right-wing demagogues like Beck. But even if the statement were true in its entirety, one thing on which all healthcare analysts agree is that using the emergency room as your family doctor is by far the most wasteful, inefficient and ultimately unhealthy slant on healthcare. A crisis-based approach to medicine ignores today's entire emphasis on preventive healthcare, which, lo and behold, can actually (a) keep people out of the emergency room and (b) help them live longer, better, fuller lives. At lower cost to society. In the case of most major ailments, a few office-visits' worth of prevention can avert thousands upon thousands of dollars' worth of emergency cures.

Now, I guess I can see how people talk about the Constitution and tax money. But geez-Louise...how do they do so in good conscience? I'm pretty sure the Constitution doesn't address the subject of whether you can beat your basset hound, either, but what kind of person would take a stand on that "right"? As for not wanting one dime of your precious tax dollars to go towards some poor schnook's health care...exactly how self-centered are we prepared to be in this society? And to confront a subordinate argument of the above, so what if the government might make a mess of healthcare? We'd rather have millions of our fellow Americans go uninsured than have them be able to take advantage of a haphazardly administered program?

Answer me that, someone. I really want to understand.

And a final, tangentially related comment on health: Watch out for yours today on this, the third and last Friday-the-13th of 2009.

* To be clear: You have the right to dislike the idea. You do not, under the current system of government, have the right to micromanage the specific allocation of your tax dollars.
** Feel free to supply your own rationale for my decision to give these pronouns the emphasis I did.

It's good to see them sweat.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Thu, 12 Nov 2009 11:34:00 +0000

As the lawsuits pursuant to James Ray's debacle-in-the-desert begin to pile up higher than the bodies themselves, I won't deny feeling a certain vindication. For years now—decades—these gurus have run their domain with impunity. They've held all the cards in an environment of their own design, where every aspect was rigged for maximum benefit—theirs—and where the consequences, if any, have been few and far between. No hint of a downside, just a seemingly limitless upside. They've traipsed merrily through life, worrying about little more than what might make an ideal tropical venue for their next mega-seminar, pulling the programs to be taught at those seminars out of thin air, making it all up as they go along, issuing extravagant promises rooted in nothing, dispensing life-changing advice they had no business giving, whipping audiences into an emotional frenzy then sending them charging into battle without a plan, not giving a damn about what happens to all those desperate, pathetic little people* who trusted in them. The guru took their money, their hope, sometimes their very soul. Now a guru has taken a few lives.

Consider the uniqueness of the charmed circumstances in which America's freelance gurus have always operated. Doctors, after all, face the constant prospect of malpractice claims, as do formally trained psychotherapists. Teachers toil under the ever-watchful eye of school administrators as well as suspicious parents; even though in some union settings it is nigh impossible to fire a teacher as long as the infraction doesn't involve impregnating a student, that doesn't prevent reprisals when they're deemed necessary. Even your local auto mechanic must worry about the ramifications of giving your car back to you in an unsafe (or just unfixed) condition.

But historically, the self-help guru has been impervious to risk.

For the New Age crowd in particular, it's as if they inhabited a parallel legal universe as well as a spiritual one, exempt from civil and criminal liability in the same way that, say, pro sports are exempt from the usual laws governing assault and battery. A pitcher can intentionally throw at a batter's head—surely assault with a deadly weapon by every legal yardstick, if not attempted murder—yet no charges will be filed. The hitter, having been thrown at, can then charge the mound and flail at a pitcher's face and nothing will come of that, either, outside the lines of the ball field. Hockey is worse: You can't high-stick an opponent anymore, but other than that, players are free to pummel each other into bloody pulps. Football players can go on national TV and spew menacing words about what they plan to do to an opposing team or even a particular player; there will no arrests for "terroristic threats." It's all just "part of the game."

And so the gurus, too, have been allowed their "game." They partner with Oprah, the unquestioned ringleader in this grand circus, implying that you can succeed in life by simply immersing yourself in your personal Now, opting out of objective reality and all distractions past or present. They go on Larry King Live, pitching their amazing, foolproof "thought systems" that conceive the universe as a giant mail-order catalog, where all items can be had for the mere price of earnest intentions; in so doing they persuade millions of us to order their books and DVDs, wherein we'll presumably learn how to put this failsafe Utopian philosophy to work for us. Is that consumer fraud? If it isn't, you tell me why.

No matter. They were untouchable. Or so they thought, until now. Maybe now there'll be some accountability.

We shall see.

* I'm writing that from the gurus' perspective, not mine. Incidentally, none of this is intended to excuse the colossal stupidity (and, in some cases, greed) of self-help consumers. That doesn't absolve the gurus of their responsibility for conducting themselves as they do.

A few words on loss, lethal injections and love.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 13:11:00 +0000

It occurs to me that it is often a bad idea to look for closure in things. And it may be an especially bad idea to look for closure in an execution. Sometimes all you do is expose yourself to greater pain.

My perhaps-obvious impetus for writing this occurred last night at 9:05 p.m.—that's when the state of Virginia began pumping a sequence of three lethal chemicals into John Muhammad, the D.C. sniper. He was pronounced dead at 9:11. By now you probably know my stance on executions—I think they're barbaric—so I won't belabor that aspect here. My reason for writing today concerns the family members of Muhammad's ten victims who attended the execution.

I'm sure that, in part, they simply came to see Muhammad die, and thus to derive a certain vengeance-based satisfaction that appropriately bookended the death of their loved ones: the familiar "eye for an eye." But I'm thinking that many of them also hoped for something from Muhammad himself...some statement, maybe a quick, mouthed "I'm sorry" (as others have done in such circumstances), at the very least a sympathetic nod towards the one-way glass behind which family members sat. They got none of it. Muhammad remained quiet and calm—"stoic," in the words of one media witness—throughout. He said nothing, and didn't even so much as acknowledge onlookers. In fact, based on descriptions of the death chamber, it sounds to me as if he remained with his face positioned slightly away from the gallery the whole time, until he just closed his eyes and surrendered to his fate.

And so I'm left wondering what the family members will take away from that. This was supposed to be the final, punctuating memory—the classic closure element—that allows them to move on. Will they see it that way? Or will they always remember it as one last slap in the face, a coup de grace: John Muhammad killed their loved ones, then at the end, he snubbed them, too.

This may sound like a strange and even graceless segue, but I'm reminded of the two times in my life when I have phoned a woman who hurt me, hoping for some explanation, anything to help me put the experience in perspective and let the whole thing go. In both cases something was said (or left unsaid) during that conversation that made things worse—in one case much worse. All I did was open myself up to an even greater sense of disquiet. Because when you put your fragile emotions in the hands of people who didn't have your best interests at heart to begin with—the very people who are responsible for your suffering—you're just asking for more trouble.

Closure is overrated.

Breakthrough at Tiffany's. (Or, my Tiffany epiphany.) Finale.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:31:00 +0000

Read Part 1.
Read Part 2.
Read Part 3.

I'm no economist—I don't even play one on TV—but it strikes me that this curious notion, that value is something altogether apart from function, is bankrupting America; certainly it's a major factor in our latter-day collapse.

To get back on the right track, we need to revert to the idea that the most valuable things are those that have the most significant uses—and making your neighbor green with envy is not a significant use. We ought continually ask ourselves: Does this thing that I'm about to buy actually do anything? Or does it just make me feel good to own? In this framework, a toaster is more valuable than a silver pendant—any silver pendant, even one veritably encrusted with diamonds.

"But Steve...do you want to take away human striving?"

Striving for what? To have a piece of shiny metal dangling from your neck? To drive a car whose capabilities are such that it can only be enjoyed by being driven illegally?

To be clear: This is not an argument for why we should always err on the side of cheap. What I am saying is that we should at least have in mind the sorts of thoughts I'm voicing in this series of posts as we go about our conspicuously consuming lives. Think of everything you bought this past week. How many items or services were there that you would never have bought at all, if considerations extrinsic to function were not at least partly the motive force behind the purchase? This may make some of you want to reach through your internet connection and throttle me, but did you buy the can of Green Giant peas @ 79 cents or your local grocery's house brand @ 39 cents? If you went the Green Giant route, do you realize that's a difference of over 100 percent—and that if we applied the same ratios to car buying, it would be the difference between paying $25,000 and $50,000 for the very same Altima mentioned earlier? Making matters worse, if you really had to have the Green Giant peas, did you buy them at a big-box grocery like Sam's Club? Or do you prefer to sashay down the plant-lined aisles of an upscale retailer like Wegmans, where you'd likely have to tack on an additional 10 cents per can? (On a comparison basis, that puts the cost of our Altima above $57,000.) It's vanity tax on top of vanity tax, right on down the line.

How 'bout you bottled water fans. Did you really need to pay $11 or $12 a gallon—four or five times the cost of gas, which many of us bemoan daily—to drink something that runs freely from your tap? OK, not quite freely, but here's an interesting site that calculates what we might call the "Evian Effect": the annual economics of a preference for bottled water. For that matter, not only do we buy bottled waters, but we make sure to buy "the right" bottled waters, some of them at per-ounce prices more befitting a nice Chateau de Crain. (The photo above depicts Fillico water: $100 a bottle.) We do this despite the fact that (1) there is no meaningful proof that bottled water is superior to tap water, (2) most bottled water companies gravely mislead consumers about the origins of their products, and (3) in spot testing, several brands have been found to contain unacceptable levels of particulate matter as well as benzene and other carcinogens. (Apropos of which, if you're an aquaphile and you've never seen Penn & Teller's take on bottled water—part of their hilarious Showtime series, Bullshit—you need to get hold of a copy. Listen and learn.) Then there's that whole environmental thing.

Here's an interesting exercise: Sit down and take a stab at reckoning how much less you might spend on everything you buy, were it not for the trickle-down effects of these aggregated vanity taxes. Think about what else we might be able to fix—in your own lives; in society—were it not for the sums we spend as described herein. Might that not be a better way of approaching genuine self-help?

Such thoughtful, responsible consumption would pay dividends across the landscape of consumer culture. And they'd help insulate America against the house-of-cards collapses we've witnessed over the past few years. Collectively we'd have more money in the bank. We'd encourage the growth of industries that actually make things, useful things, better things (which is to say, more useful versions of existing things), things that—thanks to the added strength of the U.S. dollar almost sure to result from higher savings and lower credit reliance—could actually be exported successfully. And I submit that we'd be happier in the bargain, less worried about keeping up, more focused on enjoying the best things in life, which have always been, and remain, free.

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

A footnote—and not for the faint of heart. (Women especially be warned.) One other interesting thing about Tiffany is that they charge $100 for a bottle of perfume that, to my nose, smells exactly like the scent-strips they put on sanitary pads to hide the (presumably more objectionable) menstrual odor beneath. Back in the day, this was how I always knew when my two older sisters had their period: I'd smell that telltale fragrance around the house. Today it's how I know when a woman is wearing Tiffany. I kid you not. I've compared notes with other men (of my generation) and found that not a few agree with me; they may not always know the name of the perfume in question, but they'll talk about "that women's cologne that smells like sanitary pads." Horrifying but true, gals. Chew on that a while, as it were.

'Military intelligence'? The joke's Hasan them.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 11:40:00 +0000

So all the discussion over Ft. Hood and Hasan seems to be focusing in on whether the Army "missed any signs." Missed any signs? Are you freakin' kidding me? The guy spoke constantly against U.S. actions in Iraq and Afghanistan (which he viewed as a "war against Islam"), tried repeatedly to get out of the Army, was strongly opposed to his deployment overseas, defended suicide bombings, told people he was "a Muslim first and an American second," gave away his furniture along with copies of the Qur'an right before the incident and, sort of anticlimactically, had received poor performance reviews for his work as a psychiatrist counseling soldiers (!). Now it comes out that he had ties to the same Virginia mosque that the 9/11 hijackers were attending just prior to their tribute to Allah in 2001.

What kind of "sign" did they need, exactly? Would he have had to come to work with dynamite strapped to his back, wearing a sandwich board that said ALL AMERICANS MUST DIE FOR ALLAH?

A Saturday salmagundi.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 15:23:00 +0000

In a society in which blacks, who constitute 12.8 percent of the population, commit 52 percent of the homicides and about a third of the forcible rapes (see, e.g., here and here), you think we'll ever see one of those paranoia-inducing Broadview Security ads with a black perp? I guess the odds are about as good as seeing a TV ad where the husband is the savvy one and the wife is the moron. .... Sorry, folks, I calls 'em as I sees 'em.

To be clear: This is from the guy—i.e., me—who has argued repeatedly for the elimination of race-consciousness; click on the "race" tag and check the blog over the past few years. But that means the politically correct kind of race-consciousness, too. You can't tell me that this wasn't discussed at Broadview, and that the company higher-ups didn't conceive these ads (and I've seen four different ones now) with the goal of not "offending" anyone. (Well, not quite anyone; you're always allowed to offend white males.)

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

Here's an article, "Sex Can Trigger Short-Term Amnesia."

Interestingly, short-term amnesia can also trigger sex...as in the case of politicians and baseball analysts who forget they're married*, teens who forget they're not on birth control, and celebs who forgot how many teens look up to them in the first place.

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

So on Tuesday, November 10, barring a last-minute stay, the State of Virginia will execute John Muhammad. Muhammad was convicted of masterminding the sniper spree that terrorized Beltway suburbs as well as, eventually, much of the Northeast back in 2002.

First of all, you can tell just by looking at this guy that he's a mess. A broken person. He's been a broken person for a long time. Which is precisely what his lawyers are arguing in their appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court. I know..."that's no excuse." But it always seemed to me that there should be a bright shining line between atrocities committed by crazy people and atrocities committed with the imprimatur of the State. A group of sane, sober-minded, law-abiding men and women sentenced this man to die, and on Tuesday another group of sane, sober-minded, law-abiding men and women will strap a human being onto a table, run an IV into his arm, and do what you do to hopeless animals. Then they'll head home and eat dinner, turn on the TV, laugh at some sitcom, and maybe end the night by going upstairs and working up a good case of short-term amnesia.

How do they live with that? Anyway, I find it sad. I repeat the quote from former New York Governor Mario Cuomo: "Society should not be in the business of elevating mankind's most base emotions to the status of law."

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

And, in further news from the religion of peace and love...

* and yes, occasionally, authors. I've addressed this before.

Breakthrough at Tiffany's. (Or, my Tiffany epiphany?) Part 3.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Thu, 05 Nov 2009 13:58:00 +0000

What is something worth?

On its face, it's a pretty straightforward question. In a free-market setting, however, it turns out to be a trick question whose only meaningful answer sounds like a wisecrack: Things are worth what people are willing to pay for them. This isn't just true for pork bellies, unloved household items that turn up on eBay, or rare works of art auctioned at Sotheby's. It applies to most of the basic staples of daily living—and it surely applies to what we call "luxuries." If tomorrow America decided en masse that it would buy no further diamond engagement rings until the per-carat price dropped to $79.93 for an absolutely flawless, colorless stone, the price of diamonds would settle at $79.93 per carat. This adjustment might not be painless; dislocations would ensue elsewhere in society. But if the American consumer's priority was to make diamonds cost $79.93 per carat, that is precisely what they would cost. The ultimate power resides with the consumer.

Things get somewhat more complicated when we're talking about highly manufactured items that are tied tightly to America's economic (and labor) infrastructure. Gasoline, for example. Though we all bemoan the price of gas, once again, if Americans decided that gas prices should rewind to $.79 a gallon, that could certainly be made to happen. In this case, of course, there would be serious and possibly devastating consequences throughout society. But if reducing the price of gas to $.79 were the top priority—if nothing else mattered as much—that outcome is within our grasp.

Today we see this phenomenon at work mostly in reverse: Millions of us all but insist on paying a lot of money for things—often useless things that would cost nothing in a world where items were ranked by function. We do this for reasons having to do with a statement we wish to make and/or a certain distance we wish to put between ourselves and mediocrity. (Conspicuous consumption is our preferred, albeit shallow, means of achieving this.) That proclivity either drives the price up or keeps the price up, depending on the item and the retail environment. Perhaps more important, this same phenomenon drives up or props up the retail cost of "lesser" versions of that Something. Like the $374,820 separating the Nissan from the Rolls, the vast monetary gulf between baseline items and their high-line counterparts creates, in any given realm, a silo of marketing opportunity for manufacturers. Within that solo, manufacturers can find price points for their respective products—products intentionally tiered to allow buyers to sort themselves out along the vanity scale. This practice is what adds a vanity tax to almost all goods (and services) in that silo except the ones at the very bottom. And sometimes those, too.

Let's be more specific and take a look at our vanity tax at work.* Suppose a totally functional car can be manufactured for $12,500. An acceptable profit margin for such a car might be 15%, which means the car would retail for right around $15,000. If, however, the manufacturer knows that consumers want to pay $30,000 for such a car, then $30,000 is what that car will end up costing. (Vanity tax: $15,000.) And why would consumers want to pay $30,000 for a $15,000 car? Because there are Rolls Royces and Jaguars and Cadillacs that condition us to do so. Because those cars, at the top of the aforementioned silo, change our slant on the definition of car. Although upper-tier items like Rolls-Royces sell in minute numbers—just 261 were delivered to U.S. buyers last year—they serve as artificial ceilings from which other manufacturers (and consumers) can "discount," thereby vastly expanding the dimensions of the ballpark. Ultimately, every item in that category of product or service will cost more than it needs to.

Put another way, if there were no Cadillacs at $50,000, then Buicks ("near-Caddys") wouldn't cost $35,000. I submit that every Cadillac sold adds maybe $1000 to the price of a Chevy, too.

Now let me be clear, lest the economists and other market-savvy types out there jump all over me. At least where cars are concerned, that extra $15,000 isn't just a huge hunk of gratuitous profit tacked onto the price of the vehicle; the consumer isn't literally being charged $30,000 for a car that was assembled for $12,500. Instead, the car maker elevates the base cost of the car far beyond $12,500 by using more costly components (say, titanium drive shafts and valve lifters) and adding other frills to "justify" the added cost. In today's manufacturing and labor climate, one does not have to try very hard to build a car in such a way that it must sell for $30,000 in order to return a profit: You just keep adding things until you get to the price the market expects to pay. But the fact that buyers are "getting what they pay for" when you tote up the cost of the constituent parts isn't the point. The point is that the car didn't need to be fashioned out of $30,000 worth of materials in order to yield a quality product that gets you from Point A to Point B. The car maker has made a car that is intentionally "too expensive" because it knows that a fair number of buyers will not buy the car if it costs what a car, in its most basic sense, should cost. Buyers are determined to overspend in order to get from Point A to Point B.

That's why I said last time that your neighbor's Mercedes is costing you money. Also costing you money are: your neighbor’s big-screen TV, his closet full of designer-label suits (purchased at the swank men’s store in that stunning new lifestyle mall, thus further inflating the vanity tax for all parties), his multifeatured "shaving system," and on and on. We hear all sorts of complaints about this tax and that tax, but the one tax we're drowning in, as a culture, is the vanity tax.

* * * *

Historically, things acquired value because people wanted them—which is to say, the thing (or at least a desire for the thing, in the raw) preexisted the value. The worth of any given object or item evolved naturally in response to supply and demand. Because people liked the shiny stones with the yellowish hue, gold acquired significant value.

In post-Industrial Revolution America, we began artificially rigging and commodifying the value equation. We began creating things for the specific purpose of being valuable, thereby perverting the entire value equation. Now we confer value by fiat. The entry-level Manolo Blahnik Open-Toe Sandal at $575, having been assigned its cost, becomes desirable and valuable ipso facto. It is valuable because it was created to be thus. It's as if someone held up a lump of clay that no one particularly wanted, announced "This clay costs $50,000!", and suddenly people decided they "had to have it!" for that reason alone.

Having learned to equate (or confuse) status with quality and/or performance, most of us chronically overpay for products and services that provide little or no benefit in anything measurable or perceptible. We go into hock to buy elite, name-brand products that offer few if any real-world advantages for most users. The ultra-high-end camera provides no added benefits that are even likely to be noticed by someone who isn't already shooting film at the Richard Avedon level. The basic Samsung at $90 would do him just fine. The difference between that and whatever he buys at, say, $490, is pure vanity tax. Same with high-end stereo. I'd be willing to bet that less than 1 in 100 people who buy the "home theater" systems showcased in audiophile stores can appreciate or even hear the subtle, esoteric differences in separation and other technological benefits that elevate these systems to their multi-thousand-dollar cost.

It's interesting to me that in times of recession, we talk about recession-proof occupations: nursing, for one. What makes these occupations recession-proof? We need them. We can't do without them, no matter how tough times get. At this juncture in history, till the field of robotics becomes much, much more advanced (and can make robots that are as robotic as many healthcare professionals), we can't do away with skilled healthcare workers. But it never seems to occur to anyone that America might need to make more recession-proof products—which is to say, products that people can't do without. Nor does it seem to occur to people that we should focus our consuming appetites on those products: things that "do stuff," important stuff, for want of a more erudite way of saying it.

We don't produce enough of these things anymore. The economic infrastructure is anchored in products and services (increasingly the latter) that people want, more than that they need. We have built a house of cards from the collective narcissism of a nation, and it is collapsing around us.

We'll wrap this up next time. I appreciate the forbearance of those who think we should've wrapped this up several posts ago.

Read previous post in this series.

* I grant you that this is an oversimplification. That's why I wanted to write the book. But I'm convinced that my argument holds in the overall.

Breakthrough at Tiffany's. (Or, my Tiffany epiphany?) Part 2.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 17:19:00 +0000

First of all, some of this will sound achingly familiar—"another tiresome diatribe against conspicuous consumption, sigh, yawn"—but I ask you to stay with it. It may develop a new level of traction for you as we move along.

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

I give you a pair of new 2009 vehicles (you can thank me later): a Nissan Altima 3.5 SE and a Rolls Royce Phantom. (The latter, by the way, is the vehicle-of-choice for Joe Vitale's $7500 inspirational ride-alongs.) Both zoom from a standing start to 60 mph in under 6 seconds. (Some so-called "enthusiast sites" claim to be able to bring the Altima in at under 5 seconds. That's downright Ferrari-esque.) Both manage a lateral acceleration of about .8g, meaning that they stay reasonably flat—and comparably flat—in corners. Braking is comparable, too, though the Nissan does appear to shed speed a bit quicker in panic stops.* Both cars seat five passengers comfortably.

One costs $25,180. The other, about $400,000. Plus $5400 for your gas-guzzler tax.

There are some major differences in performance. Notably, the Nissan gets about 30 miles per gallon, highway. Your new Rolls will eke out 15 mpg at best. (Hence the tax.) Make no mistake, the Phantom wins for creature comforts: meticulous hand assembly, a 420-watt stereo system, all that "Connolly leather" that once played such a prominent role in those stuffy Jag-you-are ads from the early '90s, and seemingly a few rainforests' worth of burnished, honest-to-gosh rosewood. The Rolls is also a few decibels quieter than the Nissan at highway speeds.

But...four-hundred-thousand dollars? Versus $25,000? To connect those familiar points, A and B? Do a handful of decibels here and a few slabs of rosewood there justify a tariff that would buy you a veritable fleet of Nissans? (And anyway, a high-output stereo system and a "buttery-soft" leather interior can be had on the Nissan for an additional $1700, total.) And consoling as it might be to enshroud yourself in a leather cocoon while cruising at speeds limited by legal and practical considerations to half of what either car's superfluous horsepower can deliver, what do such extras do for you, anyway? With advantages that intangible, you almost wonder if the name Phantom is the car maker's sly joke on its well-heeled owners. In terms of anything that can actually be measured or quantified and has a direct bearing on transportation efficiency, the cars are equal. Except where the nod goes to the Nissan.

Here's another way of looking at the foregoing: Only the first $25,180 of the Phantom's sticker price goes towards the vehicle's inherent function (i.e. being a car). In strict transportation terms, what "function" is purchased by the other $374,820? There isn't any. The buyer is not paying any of that $374,820 "for a car." He already bought the car with the first $25,180**. So what should we call that added $374,820?

In my pitch last year for a book that apparently will never be written or published***, I proposed to call it a "vanity tax." This vanity tax is the amount we willingly (often eagerly) pay—over and above what we need to pay—in order to obtain the basic functionality we seek in any given product, service or realm. For whole categories of consumer items, the vanity tax is 100 percent, because the products aren't needed. At all. I don't care how bad you think you look in the morning, you don't need mascara. Therefore, the cost of mascara, however nominal you may consider it to be in the overall landscape of your budget, is pure vanity tax. 100 percent.

What's more, the aspiration to Rolls-ian luxury is the rising tide that lifts all cars (or at least their MSRPs) as well as the prices of thousands of other consumer goods and services. Though I'm getting a bit ahead of myself, I think I can do a pretty good job of showing that your neighbor's snazzy new Mercedes is costing you money. We'll walk through that next time. For now I just want to leave that tantalizing thought in your mind: Every time your neighbor buys a fancy car (or stereo system, or tailored suit, etc.), you're paying for part of it. Every time you buy a fancy car or stereo or suit, your neighbor pays for part of it.

Whaddya know! Obama or no Obama, we're a socialist economy already!

A variant of this same phenomenon explains why cars look the way they do. It is no accident that a Ford Focus looks like, well, a Ford Focus. If automakers wanted to make a vehicle that looks more like a Corvette but costs more like a Focus, they could easily do so. It's just sheet metal. But by now we all know what status looks like, so if you want status, you have to pay for it. This is a patent and calculated attempt on the auto industry's part to extract money from consumers in exchange for...nothing. Nothing that actually does anything. Status is the one vehicular component that has the highest resale value to many Americans, and few manufacturers are going to just give it away. Even though in functional terms, that part of the car is totally inert.

Consider, too, women's shoes. We've talked about this before, but those sexy $600 high heels with the red soles are not "better shoes" than the $29 flats available at Payless, if we're using as our benchmark the textbook function of a shoe. As a class, in fact, high-line stilettos and other "fashionable shoes" may rank among the worst shoes. They're often less comfortable to wear, they can cause permanent foot damage, they're less safe in other ways (how fast do you imagine you can run in them, if, say, you're fleeing a would-be rapist?), and you can't even assume that they'll last longer (there are anecdotal reports of much-ballyhooed Jimmy Choo shoes coming apart at the seams in a very short period of time). So the lousy shoe—which is to say, the shoe that does the worst job of being an actual shoe—often costs more. But women fork over $600 so they can cross their legs at work and let their female coworkers ogle the red soles.

Nowadays almost all products cost more than is necessary to fulfill a product's basic function—assuming it has one. (What's the function of a pendant? Even a $39 pendant? It has none.) Whole categories of items and services exist for the sole purpose of enabling buyers to pay more than they'd have to if all they sought was a serviceable car, coat, camera, TV, handbag, vacation, golf lesson, et cetera. Whole industries are happily and profitably engaged in the ongoing business of providing a useless product (again, by our strict definition of "use": Does it do anything? Anything that requires doing?) It is hardly beyond the realm of possibility that the economy would collapse tomorrow (worse than it already has)—a mass implosion of the NYSE, led by many of America’s best-known brands—if consumers today began consuming products based on utility. What a remarkable statement.

Next time, in Part 3: The small picture.

Read Part 1.

* I had trouble pinning down an exact stopping distances figures for the Phantom; perhaps Rolls owners do not trouble themselves with such minutiae. But a variety of Web references make the two cars appear generally comparable, with 60-to-zero distances of between 125 and 130 feet.
**And one could plausibly argue that there's no reason to even spend $25,180 on a car in the first place.
*** It's another one of those long stories.

I'm huge in Australia.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 20:14:00 +0000

Here's a little thing your host did for ABC-Australia radio that just went up on their site. I prattle on at times, and there's one point where I sort of get caught up in my own syntax (which won't surprise any of you who read this blog religiously), but if you're looking for something to fill an hour between the football game and the World Series, you might give it a shot. Although the nominal topic is "envy," there's some interesting banter on women's magazines, men's magazines, body image, the James Ray tragedy, etc.

I've done some nice media work for the Aussies, and they've actually stuck with me and SHAM longer than most of our major markets here, in terms of offering me mass-market exposure. They're probably still guilt-ridden over having unleashed Rhonda Byrne on an unsuspecting world...

If it quacks like a quack...

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sun, 01 Nov 2009 16:20:00 +0000

Perhaps all we need to know about Suzanne Somers' much-hyped new book, Knockout: Interviews with Doctors Who Are Curing Cancer—and How to Prevent Getting It in the First Place, is that the foreword was supplied by one Julian Whitaker, MD. I wrote about Whitaker a while back, when he was claiming that he knew how to permanently cure COPD in two weeks or less.

He has also variously claimed that he:

knew how to cure asthma in four days.
knew how to reverse macular degeneration "instantly."
could get rid of osteoporosis by applying a "special" topical ointment.
was in possession of a mineral that could erase someone's Parkinson's Disease during a 20-minute office visit. And to think, poor Michael J. Fox and Muhammad Ali have suffered needlessly all this time!

I concede that I haven't read Somers' book. And since I also skipped her previous best-seller, Breakthrough, a dissertation on the general topic of health and wellness, I guess I feel obliged to get around to reading this one. In general I try to put off such tasks as long as possible in the interest of safeguarding my own blood pressure. I just find these works so infuriating—all the more so because they tend to become instant best-sellers, as we learned with our friend Kevin Trudeau and his unspeakably venal Natural Cures "They" Don't Want You to Know About.

Why do we prefer to take advice on important medical topics from former sitcom bimbos who then did soft-porn-inflected infomercials for exercise equipment, rather than from own family doctor, or even, say, from a book like this one? Why are there so many people out there in this grand land of ours who seem to feel that the farther information is from the mainstream, the more credible it therefore is? I do not understand that syndrome or that mindset.

Incidentally, if you don't see the parallels between this and the kind of reckless, baseless stuff James Ray was (quite successfully) peddling in the name of emotional growth/health...then you're not looking nearly hard enough.

(Yes, I'm still working on Part 2 of Tiffany Epiphany. And I mention this only because a few of you have asked.)

Breakthrough at Tiffany's. (Or, my Tiffany epiphany?) Part 1.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Thu, 29 Oct 2009 22:33:00 +0000

So I'm in Tiffany & Co. the other day, killing time (it's a long story), when I noticed the pendant shown at left. I asked to see it. Perhaps because I was wearing the same sweatshirt I wear when I'm grading my team's home field after a day of rain, the salesgirl—who was nine feet tall, rail-thin, and so ultra-made-up that I figured she was either about to audition for America's Top Model or running an ad for her personal services on Craigslist—eyed me skeptically. But lacking a legitimate reason to refuse, and perhaps suspecting that she was being mystery-shopped, she agreed to show it to me.

It was a nice pendant. Very shiny. That much I will not deny. It had little diamond chips spaced along the chain.* I did not see a price tag.

"So how much is it?" I asked, thereby (a) violating the old J.P. Morgan dictum about elite-level shopping and (b) resolving any doubts the salesgirl may still have had about my unworthiness.

Keeping her composure, she replied matter-of-factly, "Eleven-hundred-ninety-five dollars."

"No, you misunderstand," I replied. "I don't want the whole display case. Just the one pendant." OK, I didn't really say that. I do have some degree of savoir faire. But I sure thought it as I gingerly handed the thing back to her.

A few hours later I happened to be in Walmart—talk about culture shock!—where I saw lots of other people who looked as if they'd just come from grading ball fields. And just for the hell of it I went over to Jewelry, where I discovered the item shown at right. It had a nice big price tag on it, plain as day. Now this may surprise you, but it wasn't even $1000. Imagine that! Actually it was $39.95. And if you look closely, you'll notice it even has a shiny little "diamond" near the point.

And at that instant a thought struck me: It occurred to me that the $1195 Tiffany pendant has no purpose except to be affordable only to people who can afford things most other people can't. It exists to be overpriced; that is its raison d'etre. It doesn't do anything that the $40 Walmart model can't do. (In fact neither pendant does anything, a separate but related issue that we'll get to next time.) It makes no tangible, measurable contribution to the progress of humankind. To my eye, it isn't even prettier than the cheapo version. Maybe it was a tad shinier, because one gets the feeling the folks in Tiffany's are polishing their jewelry every 18 seconds in order to sustain the chic vibe. I don't think the Walmart personnel worry quite as much about display appeal; I draw this inference based in part on the fact that a 2-for-1 package of drain cleaner that someone had decided not to buy sat prominently on the corner of the Walmart jewelry counter. None of the sales staff seemed to regard its removal as a priority.

Still, I wasn't buying the drain cleaner. I was buying (or at least looking at) the pendant. The ambiance was irrelevant. Wasn't it?

The desire for glitter and gaud, for status in general, is nothing new. But we in America have broadened the practice and elevated it to an art form. We spent the 20th Century fastidiously detaching value from function, a process that continued apace into the 21st century.

That process continued even as the nation's financial infrastructure stood at near-collapse. The two are not, I think, unrelated.

In Part 2: How this is killing America.

* Total weight .21 carat, according to the specs. On a wholesale basis these are very inexpensive, proportionally, compared to large intact diamonds.

Mass will be held in the sweat lodge on Sunday at 9.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Wed, 28 Oct 2009 10:30:00 +0000

Yesterday I received a republication request from the Catholic Education Resource Center, better known (to those who know anything at all about Catholic publications, that is) simply as CERC. CERC wants to reprint my Journal article on the increasingly embattled James Ray. This is actually the second time they've picked up one of my pieces, the first time also being a Journal essay, in that case on happiness.

I'm a little thrown by this new request, however. I gave my OK, of course—you can see the piece here if you care to—but I'm puzzled as to why they'd want to run it to begin with, since I'd think the parallels between (a) the New Age and (b) religious dogmatism of the sort long identified with the Catholic hierarchy might be uncomfortably close for some CERC readers. Blind, unreasoned faith, after all, is blind, unreasoned faith, regardless of the venue, the size of the room, or how many neat hats and robes the people up front are wearing. Also, clearly, the folks at CERC haven't spent much time on SHAMblog, or they would have run across that rant from just a few days ago about my early indoctrination in Catholicism and related unpleasantries.

I have a feeling that the editors at CERC, probably not unlike the leadership of the Church itself, are afflicted with that peculiar myopia that allows people in certain walks of life to be judgmental of people in other walks of life, even when they're doing much the same thing as the people they're judging. I'd imagine that in the aftermath of the Ray debacle, priests are looking at the New Age and its gurus, tsking and thinking, "Now isn't that ridiculous. And so unnecessary! Who could've put their trust in something like that?" I dare say there were probably hundreds of homilies on the topic this past Sunday across America, along with the usual prayers offered up for victims of tragedy.

Kinda like George Bush laughing at someone else's stupidity, or ol' Charlie Manson shaking his head and saying, "Man, that Ted Bundy is batshit crazy, ain't he?"*

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

This is an amazing story, and one of the more stop-you-in-your-tracks visuals I've seen in a long time. I don't know that it signifies what we, in our relentless anthropomorphism, would like it to signify. Or maybe I'm just too full of human hubris to appreciate the moment for what it is. Still...it's quite something.

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

Finally, today, can anyone tell me why Reese Witherspoon has a fragrace? Seriously. Reese Witherspoon? Was there a need for this? Do women actually wake up thinking, "Gee, I wish I smelled more like Reese Witherspoon. Then life would ge good"? What's next? Will Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter get a scent of his own? ... Oh, wait a minute....

* OK, OK, no angry ripostes required here. I know I'm overstating. But you see my point, no?

And in a further sign that the Apocalypse is upon us...

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 21:03:00 +0000

...Dubya has joined the rotating cast of motivators attached to Peter and Tamara Lowe's barnstorming "Get Motivated!" seminars.

Can a black woman be a dumb blonde*? Can a grieving mother totally miss the point? And other pressing questions raised on Larry King.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Tue, 27 Oct 2009 12:33:00 +0000

"I don't care whether the earth is round or flat, I have a child to raise."
—Sherri Shepherd, talk-show cohost and newly minted self-help author, on Larry King Live, referring to her confusion on the point, which she voiced one day on The View.

Sherri, honey, you seem likable enough, but I'm sorry, somewhere in there among raising your child and doing The View and promoting this new book and launching that new Lifetime sitcom of your very own, you need to care about little things like whether the earth is round or flat. The shape of the earth is one of those bits of core knowledge that humankind depends on to ensure the continued survival (and, one hopes, progress) of the species. And yet Shepherd says that when she first blurted the line in utter frustration during a segment of The View, she received tons of supportive feedback from other mothers. How sad. In fact, in discussing her book, she almost makes this self-absorbed, know-nothing approach to life sound like a form of feminism, i.e.: "Our plate is already full enough. Each of us has the right to do what works for us personally, and if I want to be ignorant, I'm entitled. I'm too busy to be expected to know stuff, too."** Shame on you, Sherri. Especially as parents, we need to uphold the importance (and, I dare say, the love) of knowledge, and we need to model that ethic for our children...not write books that imply that raising a child is somehow unrelated to questions of learning, even if we're being at least partly tongue-in-cheek. As it is, American students don't know a damned thing. Their performance in state-by-state competency testing, and especially international testing, where we face off against other industrialized nations, is appalling. If we knew more, maybe we could do more. Maybe we wouldn't make as many stupid mistakes. Which brings us to:

"I was impressed by the way he synthesized all these Western and Eastern concepts."
—Virginia Brown, mother of sweat lodge victim Kirby Brown, also on Larry King Live, explaining her own prior participation in a James Ray "Harmonic Wealth" seminar.

No, Virginia, he doesn't "synthesize" anything. He pulls stuff out of his ass, making it up as he goes along, saying anything and everything he can think of to project cosmic and karmic awareness so that suckers like you (and, tragically, your late daughter) will continue to hand him $9695. I hear lines like that from self-help victims and I think I am almost as angry at them as I am at the James Rays of the world. Brown's point appeared to be in part that Ray had always struck her as being so earnest and intelligent in the past that she was shocked, just shocked, at the recklessness and coldness of his actions (or inaction) out in Sedona. Keep in mind, this is no Sherri Shepherd here; the woman is a clinical psychologist. And so I am extra-angry at you, Virginia. I am angry at your gullibility (and, let's face it, the degree to which you probably encouraged or "enabled" similar gullibility in your daughter). I am angry at your ostensible willingness to trash the teachings and orthodoxies of your own craft in order to subscribe to this mumbo-jumbo. I am angry at your continuing need to alibi, at least somewhat, for alleged belief systems and personal-growth tactics that most of the rest of us would've recognized as asinine and potentially dangerous even before our children died in a sweat lodge.

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

And, in postscript, a thought for the day: If there's any substance at all to The Secret, is it possible that James Arthur Ray is indeed beginning to get back from the Universe what he projects into it?***

* No offense to blondes. Really. I just used the phrase for its headline appeal.
** She didn't say this specifically, but it's the gist of what she said, and, in a sense, the point of her book.
*** That is just a stab at mordant humor. Please don't think for a moment that, just because the "karma has turned," I'm suddenly subscribing to the insanity of it all.

A reader recounts a Landmark moment in his life.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:00:00 +0000

First off, since the publication of my Journal piece, I think it's fair to say there's been an outpouring of tips, observations and personal-experience vignettes regarding assorted self-help programs, scam artists, and low-level James Arthur Ray wannabes at work in our midst. (The general tenor of remarks in the last category is, "How much do you know about such-and-such? Because last year, my sister....") I want to thank all of you for sending these. Keep 'em coming.

Today we have a guest column from one such reader* regarding his experience some years ago with an outfit that is certainly no low-level wannabe: Landmark Forum. I think it's well-written, well-reported, and of course timely. My edits are minimal and for clarity only. To be clear: I do not present this as a fully vetted work of journalism; the writer's characterizations of the notoriously litigious Landmark are his own, though I think in the overall they would withstand any challenge for accuracy. And so:

Thank you for that interesting piece in the WSJ. I found it particularly interesting as a I am one of those business executives (PhD in Engineering btw) who was pushed by well-meaning friends into attending the Landmark Forum.

I attended it with an open mind and the spirit of "well maybe I can learn an idea or two here." Instead what I got was exactly what you described. A concentration camp-type environment with sessions starting at 8am and going until midnight. Aggressive instructors who mixed natural charisma and impressive life stories ("I was a successful MD before I gave it up to spread the Forum") with physically intimidating techniques (e.g. yell at those who dared to stand up and question something by getting within a foot or less of their faces until they backed down).

What was even more disgusting was, mixed with all the mumbo-jumbo of self- actualization (by taking on your past, by confronting everyone you know/love/work with) was the constant set of exercises to sign-up more people to attend an informational session. Every time there was a break, the emphasis seemed to be to sign up as many people as you could. Then there was, by show of hands, public condemnation of those who failed to sign the assigned number of people. The alleged purpose of this was that you cannot change the world without changing those around you so you had to involve them in the 'work' of Landmark Forum. Of course there was relentless plugging of the various levels of instruction, with cautionary tales about how you haven't even begun to progress until you attend these further courses. All these were set as challenges/demonstrations of progress, i.e. if you didn't sign up for the next course you were showing how little you had progressed and had to stand up and defend your choice while being publicly berated. As you mentioned, people who dared get up to use the restroom were immediately put on the spot by the instructor pointedly stopping the lecture to question their need to go, saying they would miss key knowledge that would hamper their development.

Clearly within these groups were a large number of people down on their luck and self-confidence who were highly susceptible to suggestion. It surprised me during some of the "guided visualization" exercises how easily people allowed themselves to be talked into laughing hysterically or sobbing in tears.

Finally, as you probably know, Landmark has a relentless follow-up campaign that is, interestingly, staffed by volunteers. During the courses, they constantly repeat how volunteering to spread the word (mostly by calling on others to sign up for courses) is key to your self-growth. It took some effort to finally get me off that list.

I should say that I did go hoping to get one idea or two worth remembering, and I did. That was simply the concept that it is powerful to think of yourself as being indistinguishable from your word: If you say something, you mean it to be true in the most powerful sense. If you say you will do something then you do everything in your power to make that true. It makes you more careful of what you will commit to and at the same time, it is a powerful self-motivating tool, i.e. if I say it, then I do it. For a while I applied that frame of mind to myself and it was empowering. But as with all such ideas, it soon faded away.

I did this course many years ago and my precise recollection is fading, but the gist of it is well in line with your reporting.

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

Again, I invite others with personal stories to share to get in touch. Maybe we can do a compilation or use them for a follow-up.

* with his permission, of course. Regulars know that I never assume that emails sent to me off-blog are to be considered "for publication" unless I obtain the author's written say-so.

Bad joke: What's the difference between James Earl Ray...

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 20:03:00 +0000

...and James Arthur Ray?

James Earl Ray only killed one person.

(I thought of this because I keep hearing myself say "James Earl Ray" when I mean to talk about the really dangerous guy.)

For James Ray—if not for all of his followers—life goes on.

noreply@blogger.com (Steve Salerno) — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 11:54:00 +0000

I'm amazed at the fact that James Arthur Ray, Spiritual Parbroiler, has made so few concessions to the sweat lodge deaths. By which I mean that the marketing copy on his site remains unchanged, or largely so. And his few attempts at damage control seem poorly conceived indeed. He just sounds so utterly detached from the tragedy, right from the opening line of the main text of his solicitation for new business: While things have appeared to calm down a bit, right now is your perfect chance.... Granted, he's referring to the status of the economy, not to the ongoing inquiry into the Sedona tragedy, which has become a formal criminal investigation. But how do you leave a line like that up on the site, given its callous overtones and the way it's going to be read by at least some people?

Then there's his most recent note (dated October 20) to "those affected by the tragedy in Sedona," which sounds more like a nice little pity party for himself ("people are throwing out accusations and disparaging me and our mission"). He confesses that he has "taken heat" for his business-as-usual demeanor, which has to be one of the most awful and unintentionally gack-worthy word choices on record. (Is no one counseling this man on PR?) He also says of the victims, "I believe the best way to honor their amazing lives and everlasting memory is to continue this important work." That may be true—the man may even be sincere—but again, it sounds terrible. It sounds like something you say when you're looking for a plausible excuse to continue to rake in the profits while people are dying.

That note, by the way, is found on an interior page of the site; you reach it by clicking a small black banner at the top (perhaps meant to be inconspicuous to visitors who somehow haven't heard of the tragedy?) Is it cynical to theorize that he doesn't want to put any lengthy reference to these events on the main page, where it might sour his near-giddy pitch for new business?

In other public statements, Ray has said he's "being tested" by all this, which demonstrates a rather solipsistic lens on a tragedy in which other people weren't just tested, but were killed. And at a Denver event the other day, when a few in the audience admonished him to "tell people the truth, James!", he replied dismissively: "This isn't a press conference." To be fair, one wouldn't necessarily expect him to cancel his speaking schedule and tear up his entire business plan because of what happened. But..."this isn't a press conference"? Something a tad warmer or more understanding of people's frustrations would've been a nice touch. (This, from a man who, like so many of his SHAM brethren, purports to be oh-so-plugged-in to the human psyche.)

And the capper? His pitch for next year's "Spiritual Warrior" retreat, which takes place September 18-23 back in New Agey Sedona, still at "ONLY $9695 per person,"* ends with the inspirational tagline:

There is no sacrifice—only greater and more magnificent results, wealth, adventure and fulfillment.

Oh, I don't know, James. I think some folks might quibble with the "no sacrifice" line. (I also wonder if next year's event will include a sweat lodge.)

By the way, I received an interesting email from a fellow journalist, Nina Rehfeld, who's been looking into Ray's willingness to bastardize and/or trash Native American folkways in the name of profits—or as she calls it, "the shameless rape of the traditions of the Native American people and other cultures." And Ray isn't the only one doing it, of course. I'll have more on that score, and other developing aspects of the Sedona tragedy, in the days ahead.

* emphasis (caps) present in original.