SHAMblog

Flocking to the polls.

2008-07-16T18:02:00.013-04:00

(DISCLAIMER: I'm writing this "in one take," from Vegas, no less, so I apologize for any errors in computing or manipulating numbers that the reader may find herein. Please feel free to point them out. Broad-brush, however, I do believe that my case is sound.)

I must be either the dumbest or—giving myself the benefit of the doubt—the most naive person in America. I say that because I was actually shocked by the results of a poll question on AOL today that sought to take the temperature of public sentiment on race's role in the forthcoming election. The poll had four questions. One asked whether the nation was ready for a black president, and I'm not sure we can deduce any meaningful insights from the dispiriting results; a "no" answer could simply be a sign of fatalism from a well-meaning person who whiffs a good deal of closet racism in the air. I'd even imagine that quite a few who support Obama answered "no" to that question.

But the next query was direct, and telling: "Are you personally ready for a black president?" This was the stunner, to me: 47 percent of the roughly 200,000 respondents (at this writing) answered "no."

In a subsequent question that plumbed the racial breakdown of poll participants, 77 percent self-identified as white and only 9 percent as black. Making the reasonable (though not ironclad) assumption that the same demographics hold for the responses to all questions*, one must conclude that at least 36 percent of the whites (i.e., 77 percent of the 47 percent who answered "no," they weren't ready) are confessing that they wouldn't vote for a black candidate. Now, AOL polls hardly can be said to carry scientific weight. But I'm floored nonetheless. Truly, and sadly. (I'm also left wondering: Who are the rest of the 47 percent? Did all the Hispanics and Asians say they wouldn't "vote black"? I know, I know: I'm assuming that almost no blacks weren't ready for a black president. Read on.)

At the same time, I'm troubled by the conventional wisdom on what such stats "tell us about today's America." The springboard for the AOL poll was in fact a New York Times piece on a similar (and more scientific) survey, which found a similar racial divide. But again, in its calculus of American bigotry, the Times had no particular comment on the 83 percent of blacks who said they lean towards Obama. Eighty-three percent. You're telling me that's just coincidence? Seems to me that that level of approval rating has to have racial underpinnings, too. (Nowadays it's hard enough to get 83 percent of any given constituency to agree on the spelling of the word agree.) Put another way: Many black voters probably like the guy because he's black and he's viable, and/or they figure he'll support "black causes." This, by the way, echoes the findings in exit polls from primaries, especially as the spring wore on and Obama's viability was certified. So I return to another question that I've asked a half-dozen times on this blog:

Why is the fact that four of five black voters favor Obama somehow more benign (and/or better news for race relations) than the fact that at least a third of whites reject him? Is not bigotry—pro or con—still bigotry?

* Not all respondents answered all questions. The question on demographics garnered the lowest number of total responses.

An unconvincing 'mallrat'-ionale?

2008-07-11T17:35:00.002-04:00

Once again, to underscore how selective we can be in deciding whom we discriminate against: A major shopping venue in my region, Delaware's Christiana Mall, has decreed that henceforth, after 5 p.m., shoppers under 18 no longer will be welcome unless accompanied by parents or other adults. The rationale is simple: Teens cause trouble. They're loud, they're obnoxious, they start fights. They drink illegally, then come into the mall and curse and carouse, or cruise the parking lot with their 500-watt stereos blaring profane hip-hop. Even when they're not wreaking havoc, these swarms of so-called mallrats indulge in embarrassing PDA sessions with their BFs/GFs. So the mall is drawing a line in the marble. This is actually part of a trend. In fact, there are malls that have banned teenagers, period, after certain hours. And, of course, there are many downtown areas (and some entire cities) that have established curfews for underage citizens. In such cases, the message to teens is blunt and unflinching: You're either home by a certain hour or we arrest you.

As targets of discrimination, you see, teenagers are "safe." They can't vote until they're almost done being teens, and they're often apolitical anyway; it's hard to be too political when you're constantly texting Heather to, like, find out who Josh hooked up with last night*. We don't see teens as a legitimate constituency. Basically, everyone past the age of 20 thinks of teenagers as airheads whose rights aren't worthy of consideration. So when a mall steps forward and announces a policy like the one described above, we don't force the mall to justify its actions. We don't demand proof that teens, by and large, are unruly. We know how we feel about teens, and that's good enough for us. Therefore, even though the mall may be curtailing the freedom of all teens based on the transgressions of a relative few, we nod and say, "Yeah, that makes sense. And it's about damn time, too!"

But suppose we replace the word "teens" with the word "Hispanics" (or even, say, "Hispanic teens"). Suppose mall management had asked its security people for an assessment of who was causing the most trouble, and the security people replied, "That's easy: It's the Latinos." Regardless of whether the security team's perceptions were valid—let's say there were stats showing that Hispanics had accounted for 78 percent of all crimes committed in the mall during the past five years—would a mall be permitted to enact a policy that banned Hispanics only (or even "just" Hispanic teens) from the premises? If a mall tried to do that, would the media report the event uncritically, as my local ABC affiliate reported Christiana's decision vis-a-vis teens as a class? Or would the reporting sound a distinct note of outrage and indignation?

For the benefit of those who periodically accuse me of being a closet bigot: I'm not suggesting that malls ban Hispanics. Nor is this my "clever" way of saying that if malls really want to get rid of the problem, they should ban Hispanic teens specifically, not all teens. I'm saying that there are some forms of bias that we're allowed to have based merely on general impressions—e.g. that teens are a pain in the ass—while there are other forms of bias that we're not even permitted to contemplate, regardless of whether we have hard data to back up those impressions. In much the same vein, we are permitted to have (and espouse) positive bias rooted in nothing more than anecdotal inference—"women excel at teamwork"—but not negative bias rooted in anecdotal inference—"women make lousy bosses." We wouldn't be allowed to say that last one even if we had reams of statistical data supporting it.

For the 153rd time, I ask: Will someone explain this to me?

* and in making that remark, I hereby show evidence of my own biases.

Criminal (in)justice.

2008-07-09T08:50:00.077-04:00

I've been watching a lot of true-crime lately. It's not hard to do; true-crime is the staple content nowadays of TV newsmagazines like 48 Hours, Dateline, and Primetime: Crime. (Seems like every show on television is either a reality series, a drama set in a hospital or police precinct, or a true-crime newsmagazine.) Invariably as such shows rouse to a finish with the obligatory guilty verdict, thus providing closure to hard-line viewers who otherwise would've felt cheated, I end up leaping to my feet and screaming NO! at the television (which, oddly, does not reply or even acknowledge me). I do this not because I think the defendant is a nice person, or even that he or she is innocent, necessarily; most of the time it seems likely that the cops got the right guy (or gal). But—call me crazy—I always thought guilt actually had to be proved beyond a reasonable doubt (and to a moral certainty, the oft-forgotten part of the admonition given to juries*). In nine out of 10 of these shows, unless whole portions of the prosecution's case unaccountably got left on the cutting-room floor, guilt goes sorely un-proved, at least from my POV. Not only that, but when the reporter convenes jurors after-the-fact to question them on their thinking, it becomes clear that the jury rendered its verdict based on factors that had no business even being included in the case. Again, IMHO.

Ergo, I hereby take the liberty of presenting a few recommended changes to a criminal-justice system that—if these shows are any indication—is seriously broken:

1. PLEASE: No so-called evidence rooted in the defendant's demeanor upon learning of the crime.
I don't want to hear testimony from cops (or a post-mortem from a juror) that goes, "I was immediately suspicious because he didn't react the way you'd expect people to, when they just found out their wife is dead...." Human beings are different and react differently to things. I know people who fly into a blind rage when confronted with the slightest speck of adversity, and I know people who just sort of swallow and do/say nothing even when faced with major setbacks. "Unexpected reactions" are not evidence of anything, have no direct relevance to the commission of a crime, and should never be admissible at trial. Related to this:

1a. PLEASE: No so-called evidence that suggests that the defendant was happy the victim was dead.
I don't care if the defendant started laughing or burst into applause when informed that her husband or former business partner had just been found decapitated and on fire. Maybe she hated the man and wished him dead. That has nothing to do (legally) with whether she killed him.

2. PLEASE: No so-called evidence based on commonplace things the defendant did, or didn't do, or would've normally been expected to do (or not do), in the days following the crime.
Look, it's one thing if the defendant was observed out in his yard throwing guns, knives and body parts into a giant vat filled with sulfuric acid on the night his wife disappeared. But I don't want to hear vague evidence about how so-and-so "never called the cops to check on the progress of the case" or "seemed perfectly fine to me" or began screwing the neighbor-lady up the street the day of the funeral. (Nor, for that matter, do I want to hear about how he'd been screwing the neighbor-lady up the street for the past two years. That has nothing to do with what happened the night of the killing.) Once again, people are different, and people in a high-stress situation may act strangely. That's not evidence of anything, has no relevance to the commission of the crime, and should not be admissible at trial.

3. PLEASE: No so-called evidence based on the defendant's behavior/comportment at trial or during testimony.
I don't want to hear jurors say things like, "I was watching him as he sat there during the testimony, and he just seemed so arrogant to me" or "I didn't see any emotion in him at all when they talked about the night of his wife's death...." That's not evidence of anything, has no relevance to the commission of the crime, and should not be admissible at trial. Moreover, if the defendant chooses to testify, I don't want to hear jurors later say things like, "I just didn't believe him. He wasn't credible to me." Jurors shouldn't be permitted to simply discount sworn testimony on the basis that "I just didn't buy it." Now let me be clear: Jurors can make that determination if they catch the defendant in a lie, or spot contradictions/inconsistencies in his or her testimony. But no juror should be allowed to disregard otherwise consistent testimony simply because that juror "didn't like the guy's manner" or "didn't find him credible." If the defendant testifies under oath, that testimony must be given proper weight. Not only that, but in the absence of refuting evidence, that testimony must prevail.

4. PLEASE: No cases built entirely on circumstantial evidence.
I know, this is a really controversial one that would have prosecutors nationwide screaming bloody murder. But people, I've had bizarre things happen to me in life. In all likelihood, you have, too. There are times when things that just don't happen...suddenly happen. Ergo, you cannot, I repeat, cannot send someone to jail for life (or, god forbid, to the gas chamber!) because a series of bizarre coincidences suggest that s/he committed homicide. If there are no witnesses and there is no direct/physical evidence, there is no case. Period.

5. PLEASE: No cases built primarily on the fact that prosecutors couldn't seem to find anyone else around who would've/could've done the deed.
This, to me, is prosecution "by default," and shouldn't even require further comment.

Though most of my gripes are with the prosecution, I do have some quibbles with the defense as well. And so:

6. Defense attorneys should not be permitted to advance "alternative theories of the crime" that they know are fictitious.
If the defendant has confessed to his attorney, then the attorney's defense of his client must be limited to highlighting the reasonable doubt in the prosecution's case. No attorney should be permitted to put on an affirmative defense that suggests the involvement of other people he already knows had nothing to do with the case. That is fraud. And if laws (and even constitutional protections) need to be changed to effect this, so be it.

Reckoning guilt or innocence should be based on a balance sheet. As much as possible, we should seek to remove the "human factor." I'll have more on this as time permits.

* though that phrase has now come under fire.

Cut-throat marketing.

2008-07-07T09:57:00.107-04:00

Perhaps you've wondered, as I have, where the end-game may be in the loopy and ongoing bout of one-upmanship that holds razor manufacturers in its vice-grip. (I do not claim to be the first to wonder. See what Gizmodo had to say, riffing on an article in The Economist.) How many blades is enough? Too many? First we had the twin-blade revolution (Trac II), then we marched on to three blades (Mach-3 etc.), then four (Quattro etc.)...and now some of these gizmos look like embryonic miniblinds. (Here's a little background on Gillette's product progression.) As it is, I can't imagine what a man of my father's generation would make of all this—and yet the trend shows no signs of abating. These days, if you shave your face with a single-bladed razor, you feel like that vaguely ominous-looking old guy in the small cottage just outside town who still does his front lawn with a push mower.

The real kicker is, we've reached the point in shaving evolution where function takes a back seat to form. If you're a man who likes his face smooth and clean-shaven (or whose honey does), you know what I'm talking about. The bigger and bulkier today's "shaving systems" become, the more unwieldy they are to maneuver around the angles of one's facial contours. For example, 'round about the time Gillette trotted out Mach-3 (and my ever-helpful wife began buying them for me), I began to notice how much more difficult it got to effectively shave the tiny mustache hairs directly below my nose. You just couldn't get the damn contraption in there anymore and still leave yourself room for the distance of travel necessary to cut the uppermost hairs; I had to keep a single-blade razor around for such tasks. Similarly, I defy anyone to execute a nice, straight, one-pass sideburn cut using a razor above the two-blade level. You usually end up cutting about a half-inch's worth of hair north of where you intended to. And unevenly at that.

The Economist hit the blade right on the edge when it noted, "It took a leisurely 70 years after King Gillette invented the safety razor for someone to come up with the idea that twin blades might be—or, at least sell—better" (emphasis added). This phenomenon is sales-driven, not functionality-driven. As is true of more than a few products on the market today, five-blade razors exist because people will buy them. What such devices add in utility (if anything) is far less important than what they offer in "cachet," or the buyer's belief that the products are simply the Clear Next Step In Shaving and thus a necessary component of any proper gentleman's personal-hygiene arsenal.

This may sound innocent enough, especially when you're talking about products that top out at $10 or $12. But think about it: Why should there be products that, in essence, exist solely to create a marketplace niche for which there was no preexisting need? If a single-blade razor shaves as well as (or better than) its five-blade counterpart—for less than half the price—then why should anyone even consider buying the five-blade razor? Ergo, why should there be a five-blade razor? Nor does the discussion end there, because an interesting thing happens along the way: Typically, the mere existence of the "better" product exerts an incremental upward force on the prices of many or all of the products beneath it. It does this by creating an artificial ceiling from which "lesser" versions of that same product are discounted. Look at it this way: If there were no Cadillacs, then who would willingly pay $35,000 for a Buick? But because GM has conditioned many status-minded buyers (especially older ones) to think of a Buick as "almost a Caddy," people pay almost-Caddy prices for a car that is, in every meaningful aspect, just a glorified Chevy.

Of course, so is the Caddy itself, in many important respects. But because that requires some amplification, and I'm already at risk of going pretty far afield here, it's a good place to stop. I'll just leave you with an exhortation to think about such things when you make your consuming decisions. Yeah, it's a pain. Only, if more of us took those pains, lots of things would cost a whole lot less. Including gasoline.

An outlook that fits me to a tea?

2008-07-01T14:22:00.005-04:00

True baseball fans will remember Jim Abbott. Even those just casually acquainted with the sports world will recall hearing something about "that one-armed pitcher" who became a Major League sensation for a time. In reality Abbott was one-handed, which is to say, his right arm ended just below the wrist. He pitched successfully for a decade, 1989-1999, after devising a brisk and efficient way of transferring his glove from his right stump to his (left) throwing hand after delivering each pitch.* He even tossed a no-hitter in 1993. Just as impressive, perhaps, Abbott collected two hits of his own during his swan-song year with the National League's Milwaukee Brewers. He'd spent the rest of his career in the American League, where pitchers generally don't bat.

This morning I was reading an article about Abbott and what he's up to these days, and I was at first dismayed to learn that what Abbott is up to is motivational speaking. That's not to say I was surprised. If you think about it, who better personifies the standard Sportsthink mantra—"It's all up to you! You can do anything if you really put your mind to it!"—than a one-armed ballplayer?** Well, I'm here to tell you that I was pleasantly surprised by what I actually heard from Abbott (or at least what was quoted in the newspaper. For all I know, his seminar audiences may be treated to an hour's worth of Lasorda-style magical (sports)thinking). Abbott points out that in the game just prior to his no-hitter, he'd had a terrible outing, so bad that he wondered how he was going to right the ship and become a successful pitcher again. And what does he conclude from this astonishing game-to-game turnabout? "You might be down now but you don't know what's going to happen tomorrow." Or—to paraphrase—if things went from good to bad, they can go from bad to good again.

Now that's a terrific motivational message—not just because it's uplifting, but because it's likely true in most settings. Also notice what Abbott doesn't say, at least in this passage. He doesn't try to blur the distinction between the possible and the probable. He doesn't lapse into Byrne-ese and start blabbering about how, if you believe it, it will happen. He just says, in essence, that you shouldn't give up too soon. Point is, we don't know what's going to happen next. Ergo—if I may be permitted to supply my own expansion on Abbott's thoughts—while there's no reason to expect life to suddenly shower us with abundance, there's no reason to expect life to keep kicking us in the ass, either. But if you don't at least strive for greatness, then you're probably going to get a lesser result than someone who tries really hard.** So just go out and keep striving and maybe, just maybe, you'll be rewarded.

File that under "What Steve's self-help book would sound like, if he wrote one, Chapter 5...."

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

And then, at the other pole of the vast attitudinal continuum (I would say "on the other hand," but I don't want to be accused of having some tasteless fun at Jim Abbott's expense), there's my youngest son. This morning he phones his mother from Vegas, where he lives these days, quite upset about the fact that Wendy's doesn't offer iced tea (at least not at 8:12 a.m. his time). I'm not overstating. He was indeed quite upset over this, my wife reports. I think the message here is this: If you're the kind of person who gets "quite upset" because there's no iced tea at your local fast-food joint—upset enough to phone home at 8:12 a.m. specifically to complain about it—you could probably use an attitude adjustment. Hell, maybe even a one-on-one with Tommy Lasorda.

* "Normal" two-handed pitchers, of course, wear the glove on the non-throwing hand, which Abbott was unable to do because he lacked any fingers with which to control the glove. It should be obvious that a pitcher requires a glove not just for defensive purposes—to field the ball as part of his team's overall effort to retire the opposing batters—but also for self-defense, in the case of laser-shots that come back at him at speeds well in excess of 100mph.
** Even though the odds of any given one-armed ballplayer making it to the Major Leagues are probably 5 million to 1, no matter how much he "wants it."
*** though even then, the link between effort and outcome is far from conclusive, especially in a sport like baseball, where totally random events play a key role in separating winners from losers.

Of long-ago loves and loose latter-day lips.

2008-06-30T15:22:00.012-04:00

We'll start with a little trip down memory lane. When I was 17 and still a sweet and trusting young man, I fell head over heels for a Jewish girl named Zandra. (The ethnicity is relevant here.*) I thought we were soul-mates in every respect, from our spooky-similar tastes in jazz and literature right down to the fact that we shared the same date of birth—March 1, 1950. Naturally, this meant that our love couldn't be allowed to last.

Zandra warned me from the outset that there really wasn't anywhere for the relationship to go, given her parents' image of the boy she was "meant" to marry: First and foremost, as well as last and utmost, he would have to be Jewish. But being Steve, I insisted on setting myself up for failure and heartbreak anyway, and we managed to hold our star-crossed** love affair together, in mostly clandestine fashion, for almost a year. In the end, her parents, who were not only Jewish but practicing Orthodox Jews, so abhorred the prospect of their daughter pairing off with a gentile that her dad actually planned and executed a top-secret exodus late in her senior year of high school, spiriting my beloved away to another neighborhood in the dead of night so that we could no longer see or even locate each other. (Note to younger readers: Believe it or not, there was a time before AIM, texting and Facebook.)

In postscript, I should mention that four years later I ran into Zandra one evening in the Brooklyn College cafeteria—she'd recently enrolled to get her Master's at night—and I couldn't help noticing the glittering rock on her left hand. She smiled sheepishly. I smiled back, though I'm not sure my eyes participated. We both kind of shrugged. "It is what it is" wasn't yet in vogue in those days, but it should have been, as it was the perfect expression for the moment.

The thing is, Zandra's parents' objections went beyond religion. She had explained that they harbored deep prejudices against Italians in particular, whom they viewed as being immoral, vaguely subhuman, and frankly dangerous. Whenever Zandra tried to edge into the subject with them, her father would pound his fist and start thundering names like "Capone! Luciano!" It didn't help matters that one of the major New York crime bosses of the era also happened to be named Salerno, as in "Fat Tony."

Apart from the aforementioned heartbreak, I had two levels of reaction to all this. As someone who had long ago rejected race and ethnicity in my own life, I resented being lumped together with the Sons of Italy en masse, especially when it was being done to tar me with the same brush. But on another level, the human level, I understood Zandra's father's fears. Though his attitude seemed unfair and dismissive of my individuality, it did not seem wholly unreasonable in a big-picture/experiential sense, because when you heard Italian names in the news in those days, there was often some sinister Mob connection. Certainly there was no shortage of high-profile hoods whose names ended in vowels. Even in just a local sense, it was clear that too many of the rough-hewn, tee-shirt-wearing Italian kids from Flatbush made a favorite sport out of picking on the docile Jewish boys coming home from Yeshiva. In that context, could I really have expected at least some folks—above all, those with a strong sense of their own ethnicity and shared cultural values—to feel differently about "my people"?

And that's my long-winded anecdotal way of wading into the latest Don Imus flap. No doubt you've heard by now, so I'll treat this in "second-day format" (you can get the particulars here). According to the Authorized View of the matter, Imus once again inserted foot firmly in mouth, then arguably made things worse the next day by offering an explanation that not a few observers considered pretty bogus. And yet I find myself wondering—applying the same standards of judgment that my teenage sweetheart's dad employed in critiquing Italians—what was so cosmically unforgivable about what Imus said in the first place, even if he made no subsequent effort at CYA? What is the color of many of the professional athletes who break the law, after all? And wasn't it the Rev. Jesse Jackson himself who (in)famously conceded*** that if he hears footsteps behind him at night, he feels relieved when he turns around and sees a bunch of white kids?

Look, by now you probably know my basic stance here. I'd much prefer that we abandon the entire concept of race. Just scrap it. Trouble is, we live in a society that has an obsessive-compulsive fascination with race in all its manifestations; a society that's determined to add an overlay of race/racism to any situation involving a diverse array of people, even when no plausible reason for that overlay readily suggests itself. So if we insist on giving race the exalted role that it clearly plays nowadays (and that it's sure to play much more of, as the 2008 presidential campaign heats up), then you cannot view it through a lens that selectively filters out the negative shadings.

Once again here, I'll be purposely provocative in making my point. The numbers tell us that, while blacks constitute just 12.4 percent of the overall U.S. population, they are arrested in just under half (47.7 percent) of the total number of murders nationwide. To put it another way, in 2005, blacks were seven times more likely than whites to be arrested and prosecuted for a homicide. That skew has remained fairly constant, ebbing or flowing a few points one way or another, for more than a quarter-century, according to breakdowns by the Bureau of Justice Statistics. This could indicate a grievously racist system. That is in fact the explanation that receives the most frequent play in mainstream media. It could also indicate that the social dynamic acting on young blacks is such that they come of age having a lower boiling point than their white counterparts. That possibility is somewhat more controversial, but is still acceptable in public discourse, as it basically blames the environment in which many blacks are forced to live. There is, of course, a third possibility, and it's the one that you cannot publicly utter without being attacked, marginalized and ultimately silenced: that black Americans may have a lower innate boiling point, merely by virtue of being born black. In other words, there is something about being of the black race that makes you genetically more violent.

Let me restate: I am not saying that I believe this to be true. I'm merely saying to the folks who champion race—who talk endlessly about racial role models and glory in all the milestones, the first this and the best that—that you can't have it one way only (just as my own dad couldn't have it one way in talking about DiMaggio and Fermi; if he wanted to be identified with the stars, he had to be identified with the thugs, too). You can't go around picking and choosing the characteristics by which you want your race or ethnic heritage to be represented. You take the whole mix, or you take none of it.

Which is why I say again: Let's have none of it. Or let's leave the Don Imuses (and parents of young girls like Zandra) alone, sad as that seems. No middle ground makes much sense.

* Yes, technically, I know, Judaism is a religion, not an ethnicity. But in New York especially, many people of orthodox Jewish faith treat their religion more as an ethnic way of life that governs all aspects of lifestyle and social behavior.
** and, I might add, sexless. Zandra, the last of a dying (and now dead) breed, was committed to "saving herself" for her husband.
*** albeit with much chagrin.

Dude, at least change your name to Chuck Leathery.

2008-06-24T19:50:00.002-04:00

Often when I write an item like yesterday's last one—where I went off on "push presents"—someone will accuse me of misogyny. Believe me, I sympathize with what American females are up against in certain respects. As I pointed out to one of my anonymous critics, I've blogged about the burden our culture imposes on women in such areas as body image, overall appearance, even personal hygiene. As it happens, I have another beef on that score.

How many of you have seen that grating and fundamentally stupid spot for Ocean Potion anti-aging sunblock, starring game-show bobble-head Chuck Woolery and those two sun-worshiping cuties, Megan and Jill? Clearly Ocean Potion went out of its way to make its new ad even more grating and fundamentally stupid than the old ad, also starring Woolery. (Here's a link to that previous ad. I couldn't find the new one online. Maybe one of our readers can?) Anyway, in the key action of the current ad, Woolery—ever the mischievous imp—decides he's going to prove the efficacy of Ocean Potion by asking both girls to sunbathe, but allowing only Megan to protect herself with the product. There's a quick dissolve, and then our hero is back for the big reveal. Megan's all bubbly and doing just fine. But Jill erupts in horror, clutching at her dessicated visage. "My face!" she shrieks, "my beautiful face!" That's because she now looks like...Chuck Woolery!

Maybe it's just me, folks, but every time I watch that ad (which runs every 19 seconds on Lifetime), I can't help being struck by that very thought: Doesn't anybody even notice what Woolery looks like? Here's a guy who resembles a freakin' Shar Pei—who could give Kevlar a run for its money when it comes to sheer toughness-of-hide—and he's smugly passing judgment on poor Jill. (He actually grimaces and turns away from her in disgust at the moment of truth.) You'd think Ocean Potion would pick a guy with skin like a baby's butt for a spot like that. But apparently smooth skin is not something we require of men in this culture. If you're a guy, you can look every bit as wrinkly as the sun-scarred Jill—and even be the public face of the anti-aging product!

I guess it's a testament to the gender skew in the way we regard aging in this culture that I'm probably one of the few people, male or female, who sees it that way.

P.S. I'm not being holier-than-thou, either. My face looks like Chuck's.

Celebrating Carlin. Pricey pushes.

2008-06-23T10:25:00.010-04:00

Was it just last Monday that we met in this space to talk about the death of Tim Russert? Today we have a somewhat more momentous death to discuss—the loss of a man whose life actually stood for the sort of "no spin" commentary about American mores that O'Reilly, Russert and the rest of their peers merely preach (and yet tirelessly pat themselves on the back for).

You weren't ambivalent about George Carlin. You loved him or hated him. My mother-in-law, for instance, couldn't even stand to see his scruffy face on the tube; she'd groan as if her sciatica were acting up and instantly change the channel. But regardless of how you felt about Carlin's comedy—and despite falling into the "love" category, I thought his routines were uneven—you had to give the man his due for "going places" that few other mainstream comedians (and zero journalists) ever went. I have to laugh every time I hear Anderson Cooper say that he and his CNN news team are "keeping them honest," as if Cooper's show owns the franchise on discerning truth from lies, good from bad. Carlin's entire career was devoted to devil's advocacy: exploring the Givens. In every single one of his highly rated HBO comedy specials, there came a moment when he sliced-and-diced some absurdity of life with a painful acuity that the Coopers and Russerts could only dream about.

The eulogies I've heard so far today have tended to summarize George Carlin via his "seven words you can never say on television," as if the comic peaked with that controversial routine, which he first unveiled in the early 1970s. ("Seven words" later landed on the Supreme Court's desk, inspiring a landmark free-speech ruling.) Carlin never stopped courting controversy. In more recent times he notably lampooned America's own warlike tendencies ("And if your country has brown people in it, we’ll bomb the shit out of you! We love bombing brown people…"), the nation's schizophrenic posture on guns ("We're gonna ban toy guns...and keep the fuckin'* real ones!"), the Dr. Seussian gibberish of corporate-speak and ad copy, the inherent paradox of today's Nanny-state-ism, which seeks to protect everybody against everything, and, maybe above all, our abiding faith in faith. A few years ago the Catholic-born Carlin had his audience shifting in their seats with a bit in which he grew serious towards the end and just said quietly from the stage, "There is no God, folks. Never has been…." The point is that for all his silliness and oft-excess in the area of bathroom humor, Carlin got us thinking about politics, people and life itself, and he did it routinely. The average journalist could only hope to have such an impact even once.

P.S., 11:38 a.m. When I first posted this, I somehow forgot to include my all-time-favorite Carlin line, where he's riffing on the contemporary depression epidemic and white people who get the blues: "What the hell do white people have to be blue about? What, did Banana Republic run out of khakis....?" As they say in those VISA ads, priceless.

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By the way... I'm also looking into another noteworthy death—one that you probably haven't heard about, and that's tied to the SHAMscape in a subtly significant way. I may have more on this soon, depending on what I find.

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Finally, for today, I've been hearing a lot of late about so-called "push presents"—gifts given to women, by their husbands, to commemorate a birth. Typically these gifts take the form of jewelry; typically it's assumed that such jewelry will be expensive. (Just as one doesn't give a cheap engagement ring, one doesn't give a cheap push present. The word "Tiffany," for example, makes a cameo appearance in this morning's article on the trend in my local paper.) I could go on, but perhaps it's best that I just invite those of you who're interested to read the article, paying particular attention to the quotes from some of the women, which I found to be almost nauseatingly materialistic and, for want of a better word, girlie.

I say again: Nowadays there is very little that men do to women to perpetuate gender stereotypes that even comes close to some of the practices that women gleefully embrace for themselves.

* I took some leeway for myself here in quoting the line verbatim.

A Hill slides further down a slope.

2008-06-19T12:03:00.076-04:00

So now ESPN has suspended columnist Jemele Hill (shown right) for typing out a piece in which she compared cheering for the Boston Celtics to apologizing for Hitler. Specifically, Hill wrote as follows: "Rooting for the Celtics is like saying Hitler was a victim. It's like hoping Gorbachev would get to the blinking red button before Reagan." (Here's a denatured version of Hill's column; ESPN removed the offending language within hours of the Celtics' stunning rout of the Lakers in the NBA Finals this past Saturday.)

Hill, in turn, has now apologized as follows: "I deeply regret the comment I made... In expressing my passion for the NBA and my hometown of Detroit I showed very poor judgment in the words that I used. I pride myself on an understanding of, and appreciation for, diversity—and there is no excuse for the appalling lack of sensitivity in my comments. It in no way reflects the person I am. I apologize to all of my readers and I thank them for holding me accountable. This has been an important lesson for me and illustrates that, like many people, I still have a lot of growing and learning to do."

Oh please. Does it not tell us everything we need to know about how absurd things have gotten when the apology drones on for about ten times longer than the embattled verbiage itself? Jesus Christ, I'm almost surprised that the Detroit native didn't end her overwrought mea culpa by offering to hang herself in front of the Ren Center!

I grant you, Hill's analogies were a bit odd. But I'm not quite sure who was supposed to be so grievously offended. "Rooting for the Celtics is like saying Hitler was a victim." Ohhh-K... So if you root for the Celtics, you're the kind of person who apologizes for mass murder. First of all, clearly she's not praising Hitler; she's denouncing the people who praise him. So the worst we can make out of that analogy is that Celtics fans are hateful people. (Where does the "diversity" come in? Can ESPN actually be saying, in censoring Hill, that you can't even make a semi-jocular reference to Adolph Hitler anymore without offending Jews? Somebody needs to get out and see The Producers.) And just as clearly, I think, if you read her column in toto, she's not speaking literally. When did we get so thin-skinned in our approach to sports, of all things! Hill is using a mild form of the kind of language that, say, fans in Boston and New York commonly use to describe each other. In fact, I invite anyone who thinks this is strong stuff to hop on the No. 4 train to the Stadium sometime when the Yanks are playing the Sox, and you have both contingents of fans pushed up against each other as if in a long, noisy, sweaty, mobile mosh pit. Trust me, it's an NC-17 experience that is not for the faint of heart.

More to the point, where does this constant scrutinizing/sanitizing of public speech end? If it wasn't clear with Don Imus, it should be clear by now that we're tumbling full-speed down that slippery slope wherein decorum in speech (and, of course, the thought that produces it) is not only encouraged but enforced. Seemingly not a day goes by that someone isn't apologizing profusely for his or her "appalling lack of sensitivity." We'd do well to remember that America's founding laissez-faire stance on speech and expression was designed to protect the outrageous. (Popular, namby-pamby public speaking requires no protection, after all.) We have strayed quite far indeed from "I despise what you say but I defend to the death your right to say it."

Once we get to the point where the only remarks that can be uttered publicly are things that represent the authorized, consensus position (and/or could not possibly offend anyone else), in effect if not in practice we'll have outlawed not just originality and personality and imagination...but also dissent.

Which, by the way, is what Hitler did.

Rethinking Russert. Selling Starvation.

2008-06-16T13:27:00.012-04:00

By now you've heard about Tim Russert—probably to the point of overkill (no pun intended). Apart from being inherently sad, Russert's sudden death has generational significance. The man was 58. I am 58. Lots of people I know are within a few years of 58. Though there have been recent deaths of men even younger, Russert's shocking demise serves bold-face notice that the Grim Reaper is now stalking Boomers. One by one, give or take a few years or (if we're lucky) decades, we'll all have our turn. Quite possibly, the seeds of the maladies that will kill us are already going about their nefarious business inside our bodies, just as Russert's fatal malaise was silently at work in his coronary arteries.... Now there's a cheery thought going into the new week, huh?

The loss of Tim Russert also represents the end of an era. His Meet the Press was considered a clinic in high-level interviewing as well as a journalistic masterpiece that could be compared, for sheer gravitas, to Cronkite's oeuvre at CBS. Beyond that, Russert's MtP had a certain all-knowing, inside-the-Beltway inflection that we may not see equaled in our lifetime. But again, there's a deeper/bigger meaning here. If you watched the weekend's coverage to any degree, you noticed that many of the longer retrospectives on Russert's place in journalism became, in effect, meditations on the nature and very purpose of the news media. And if Russert was the best at his craft, it must be said that he was the best of a bad lot. Indeed, it could even be said that, as the best in the business, he was by definition the apotheosis of all that's wrong with modern journalism.* Thus one can hope—or at least I do—that these earnest discussions of Tim Russert serve as the springboard for a huge leap forward in the perpetration of daily journalism, especially in broadcast. (But I'm probably just kidding myself.)

To be a bit more specific: If there was one accolade we heard heaped on Russert time and again this weekend, it's that he was a hard-nosed, relentless interviewer—a guy who "wasn't afraid to ask the tough questions." I disagree. Vehemently. It's not that I'm calling Russert a wimp; I do think he was intrepid, as far as he went. He just didn't go far enough. Not even close. Modern journalists as a class simply don't ask tough questions. They probably don't even think of tough questions, because such questions are not in their frame of reference. To the extent that they play devil's advocate, it is only within a narrow range of ideas and possibilities.

That's because, at least here in the U.S., the journalist's brand of so-called toughness is circumscribed by The Givens: those knee-jerk assumptions about life, truth, morality and justice that "inform" (which is a nice way of saying corrupt) the news. The Givens dictate the way in which any specific event is—and must be—covered and couched in major media. Nor does the problem end (or perhaps I should say begin) there. Long before The Givens exert their corrupting effect on coverage, they have a decisive impact on "news judgment," dictating which items are considered newsworthy to start with. This short-circuits the mere presentation of news that doesn't fit the American consciousness or American journalism's established world-view. All of this (a) robs news consumers of the right to react to stories in a personal manner and/or make up their own minds about what's really happening, and (b) marginalizes and even disenfranchises people who already hold an opposing point-of-view.

Like virtually all of his peers, Tim Russert approached reporting with a distinct sense of What It Means To Be An American (and, for that matter, a journalist). He assumed certain things to be true and certain things to be false, certain things to be good and certain things to be evil. Such prejudgments (as well as entire other categories of value judgments) have no place in honest journalism. Honest journalism has no country, no allegiances, no sympathies. (Obviously the journalist as an individual is going to have such feelings...but they should never be visible in his work.) Honest journalism is amoral. Honest journalism does not assume that the U.S. Constitution is the ultimate, unimpeachable legal and moral authority. (It is simply a document that codifies what we believe—but what we believe is not universal truth, and should not be interpreted or reported as such. Besides, laws change; the Constitution itself changes. Would "ultimate truth" be that malleable?) Honest journalism does not even assume as basic a thing as that "all men are created equal," regardless of what it may say in one of America's founding documents. "All men..." is a philosophical ideal, not a proven, empirical scientific truth. That last thought alone would have major implications for the coverage of civil/gay rights, racism, etc.

And—to be as controversial as possible in order to drive home the point—honest journalism would not assume that the 9-11 hijackers were bad and that the 2973 or so Americans killed that day were heroes or martyrs. If you find that statement repellent and odious, ask yourself this: Did all people everywhere think that 9-11 was a terrible tragedy? No. Certainly not in Tehran or Tikrit or Kabul or Palestinian areas of Jerusalem (and in many other places where they wouldn't admit it, like, perhaps, some Parisian cafes). Don't those people's feelings "count"? More to the point, were the people who celebrated 9-11 "wrong"? Intrinsically wrong? I don't see how anyone can say that. Remember: It wasn't that long ago that Americans danced in the streets after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, which took the lives of roughly a quarter-million Japanese civilians (and whose repercussions continue to be felt to this day). The privilege of deciding when slaughter is just does not reside uniquely with Americans. And honest journalism understands that it never gets to decide what's right or wrong. It just reports and tries to illuminate in a fair-minded, unbiased manner. Honest journalism understands that it can't even turn to god/God in its search for answers to today's journalistic dilemmas. The reasons should be obvious, but to belabor that obviousness for a moment: Whose God would it be? The "American Christian" God? Allah? Jehovah? And who says there's a God, anyway?

An old saying in journalism goes as follows: "If a reporter's mother tells him she loves him, he checks it out." Point being, the good journalist makes very few (if any) assumptions about the material s/he's covering, and takes almost nothing for granted.

It's a wonderful, trenchant observation...that hardly anybody in journalism observes or applies nowadays.

More on this next time.

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On in the background as I write this is a Lifetime movie, Hunger Point. It chronicles one family's experience with anorexia/bulimia. This is a very sober-minded "message film" that clearly is meant as an attack on the social and cultural forces responsible for the extreme weight-consciousness of our young females. But here's the kicker: Though I'm paying attention with just half an ear as I dive into my Monday's workload, already I've had my concentration broken by ads from three different advertisers pushing weight loss; all three ads were patently and cannily designed to make viewers worry about how they'll look in their swimsuits, come summer. Two of the ads featured rail-thin models, and the other spokesperson is the aptly named pseudo-actress Jillian Barberie, whose Barbie-doll figure is probably unattainable for 97 percent of American women sans surgical intervention. (That's Ms. Barberie at right.)

You wonder: Is there no shame over this at the self-described network "for women"? I say again: Unreal.

* Worse, by being hailed as the gold standard for tough interviewing—this is important—he became a role model for thousands of young J-school graduates who believed that if they simply patterned their journalistic behavior after Russert, they were doing their jobs.

By that same logic, apples + oranges = apples.

2008-06-10T15:50:00.000-04:00

Finally, CNN asks the question I've been asking around here for a good 18 months: How is Barack Obama "black"? You gotta wonder—PC sensitivities aside—what the hell took them so long?

And God-be-praised, could this mean that someone in major media will soon, or at least eventually, find the cojones to question the role black racism is apt to play in the Obama presidential run?

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P.S. No, I'm not cracking...yet. (Though I must admit I do like the sound of "SHAMblog Mondays." Or maybe "Sundays": more alliterative.) For now, we'll just put this down as a pertinent follow-up that I couldn't resist.

This is the way the blog ends, this is the way the blog ends, this is the way the blog ends....

2008-05-31T16:10:00.011-04:00

I always thought that when this day arrived I'd have something poetic to say, or at least I'd make a reasonable attempt at poesy. But all I can really think of at this point is: I guess I'm burned out. And so, rather than just let SHAMblog begin a slow, sad march to obsolescence by allowing my posts to dwindle to nothingness (hence the Eliot reference in the title), I thought I'd make more of an official declaration. Thus it's with mixed emotions, but a sense of resignation nevertheless, that I report that this post, No. 554 in the series, will likely be the last. I'm going to keep the site up; I'm not planning to delete the blog, at least not yet. I just don't expect to be doing any new posting in the foreseeable future.

A bit of history. In the beginning, I'll confess, I saw SHAMblog as a natural complement to my book, one that I hoped would drive traffic to Amazon or into bookstores. Logically speaking, of course, there was never much reason for me to make that assumption. In my state of self-deluding authorial narcissism, I failed to consider that the process was almost sure to unfold in reverse: Only after reading SHAM might it occur to anyone to look me up online. And within a matter of months, once the Random House-orchestrated PR campaign wound down (and I could assess the blog's impact without that added variable muddying the waters), it became clear that nothing I ever wrote on this blog was apt to have more than a trifling impact on sales: a few incremental books a week at best. Given the prodigious number of man-hours I typically invested here, that works out to maybe 50 cents an hour. In strict cost-effectiveness terms, I'd have been better off entering the managerial-training program at my local Mickey D's.

Point being, it's been a long, long time since I viewed SHAMblog as a "revenue generator." And that's fine with me. Blessed (or cursed) with boundless curiosity, I came to see this as a sounding board, a clearinghouse for high-level opinion on this and that. (I also saw it as a place to work out my own, oft-ambivalent feelings on this and that.) Over time we broadened SHAMblog's mission and mandate. We stopped looking exclusively at narrow topics in self-help and began examining developments and trends in the wider culture (though always with an eye toward connecting the dots to issues in self-help and self-awareness, when such a connection was not too much of an ideological overreach). Through it all, I took enormous pride in the thoughts and feelings showcased here...and I don't mean my own thoughts and feelings. I've read all of the "hot" blogs, from Boing Boing to Huffington, from TMZ to Kos, and overall, I'd put our contributor content up against that found anywhere in the blogosphere for its cogency, lucidity, originality and wit, not to mention sheer literary flair. And I'm not just referring to our regulars, either. One of the coolest and most fascinating things about blogging is that folks will randomly pop in now and then to offer their two cents on either a pet peeve or a topic especially near and dear their hearts; you'll hear from them on April 5 and then not again until November 9. And as is the case with old friends, you're always happy to see them again (not that I'd know from personal experience).

Anyway, though it's been an interesting run, folks, I'm afraid I've gone as far as I can with it. I find that I'm increasingly repeating myself and recycling content; that's the same sin of which I used to accuse the self-help gurus (although, in my defense, I've never charged anybody for it). Bottom line, I think I've just been writing about self-help for too damn long: six years, now, since I signed to do SHAM and threw myself into the research. And almost 25 years, if you count all the time I spent chronicling this or that element of the SHAMscape before I even saw the Big Picture.

I know that I'm leaving some unfinished business—Byron Katie comes to mind—and for that, I apologize. Maybe someday I'll write about it for-profit (i.e. with a magazine paying the freight). Maybe you'll Google me from time to time, see what I'm up to.

One last thing. Of all the criticisms lodged against me and SHAMblog, the most frequent—and the most cutting, to me—was that I'm a pessimist and a naysayer; that I'm some kind of dark-side presence who "roots for people to fail." Nothing could be farther from the truth. Believe it or not, from the time I was a boy, I've always been someone who sees the good in people and in life itself. (During my school days—no joke—I'd get in trouble for spontaneously laughing too much in class. Now, that could be a comment on my sanity as well, but I prefer to think of it as testament to the joy that just bubbled up from somewhere inside me and could not be contained.) Nor am I one of those people who, after a while, gets jaded and misses the beauty in life. I think I've mentioned this before, but when we first moved to California, we lived in a neighborhood that was rimmed by picturesque high hills; it was a constant tableau of color silhouetted against color. In the four years we lived there, I never got used to it. Our neighbors would simply walk out their front doors in the morning, their eyes fixed on the pavement or their car keys, never looking up. Me? I looked up every single time I left the house. I never took the hills for granted.

I urge all of you to keep looking up, too. You have picturesque hills in your own lives, and you should never take them for granted.

I thank all of you for your participation and input, both on and off the blog. And I wish all of you well.

Why I suddenly love Dr. Phil.

2008-05-27T09:51:00.002-04:00

Comes word that Dr. Phil McGraw's forthcoming book, Real Life: Preparing for the 7 Absolutely Worst Days of Your Life, will benefit from a million-copy first printing. The book is due out in mid-September. McGraw knows something about worst days, having had a few of them in recent times. Notably, there was the $10.5 million settlement of the class-action lawsuit over his Shape Up! "nutrition bars." Then, first-thing this year, there was his cheesy, publicity-seeking involvement in Britney Spears' latest meltdown, which once again left mental-health professionals shaking their heads over McGraw's professionalism, or lack of same.*

Anyway, it should be obvious to those who've been reading this blog and/or following what's going on in the SHAMscape that the new McGraw title is distinctly off-message for a positive-thinking era in which preparing for the worst could be construed as inviting—that is, attracting—the worst. It's not often I find reason to line up behind a self-help guru, and lord knows I've given McGraw grief often enough (or tried to, in my small SHAMbloggian way). What's more, I have no way of knowing whether any of the "emotional preparedness" advice in McGraw's new book will stand the test of time any better than his Shape Up! bars did. If nothing else, though, I gotta give the guy props for going against the grain in a realm that seems to have lost its collective mind (and assumes that all of us out here listening have lost ours, as well). At least it sounds like he might be giving useful tips for better living (as opposed to just blowing fanciful smoke up the you-know-whats of the hordes expected to queue up for that new book).

It's remarkable to me that so many of the leading figures in self-help apparently feel no need to project a consistent message; they seldom even deign to resolve the contradictions that usually arise from even the most cursory reading of their so-called programs. As just one minor example, I'm still waiting for Tommy Lasorda to explain how he can go on-stage during a presentation for which he's being paid $1000-a-minute, tell his rapt corporate listeners that two of the most important principles in any joint enterprise are teamwork and individual initiative...and just go on from there! How can you not at least spend a few moments explaining how those two normally incongruous attributes resolve into a cohesive plan of action! It's like my telling you that the two most important factors in marital longevity are everlasting togetherness and respecting each other's personal space. I grant you, they're not totally contradictory, and anyone who's been married a while knows just what I mean. But still....

Or take Oprah.** It'd be one thing if The Oprah Winfrey Show were just an ordinary gabfest like an afternoon version of Conan O'Brien (or even, say, The Ellen DeGeneres Show), featuring a random cast of guests unconnected to any particular agenda or organizing theme. But Oprah stopped being "just a talk show" years ago. There's little question that Winfrey today sells a philosophy of life that's deeply rooted in New Wage gospel; this is clear in her cultish and unflinching public sponsorship of the likes of Marianne Williamson, Rhonda Byrne and, most recently and ambitiously, Eckhart Tolle. I'm always amazed, therefore, that she reserves the right to step out of character whenever it's expedient. Like, say, when she'll do a show with Suze Orman about surviving financial disaster. There really shouldn't be any financial disaster if you buy into Oprah's LoA-based mode of thinking. And if you're planning for disaster, you haven't bought in. Indeed...if you're planning for disaster, you've opted out. No matter. Oprah knows that women love Suze, and it's good for ratings, so she does the show. No one gives it a second thought.

To anticipate some of those who might accuse me and this blog of the same sin: As I've said before in the Comments section, philosophical and thematic consistency aren't too high on my list of priorities, because SHAMblog is devoted chiefly to raising questions, not seeking answers. (Maybe I should say it this way: I believe that the process of finding answers is facilitated by subjecting the conventional wisdoms to constant devil's advocacy.) That explains why I might put up a post on Monday that attacks capital punishment, then a post on Tuesday that wonders if we need to be tougher on crime. All of that is perfectly fine, as I see it, on a blog devoted to critical thinking.

The Oprah Winfrey Show—like the SHAMscape as a whole—isn't about critical thinking (or thinking of any kind, really). It proposes to give you The Answer. How can Tuesday's Answer contradict Monday's? And why don't people care, or even seem to notice?

* McGraw got off on the wrong foot with practicing therapists with his very first prime-time special, "Family First," wherein he implied that a 9-year-old boy was destined to become a serial killer. If you have a copy of SHAM, see page 69.
** like the comedian says: please.

A few Self-ish thoughts.

2008-05-24T10:08:00.004-04:00

First the disclaimer: These are just ideas. Ruminations. You should not expect them to coalesce into a comprehensive Body of Thought. I lack the credentials for that. Still, these observations may serve as a springboard for some useful discussion (or at least some Self-examination). Especially in the wake of some of the recent action on SHAMblog.

As I reflect on that give-and-take (as well as other cultural dust-ups one hears about with increasing regularity), it occurs to me that even people who claim to be fed up with the SHAMscape and who supposedly reject its dogma outright may have been corrupted anyway by self-help's ongoing penetration of American life; more on that in a moment. But the individuals I have in mind appear to suffer from a fatal misconception of Self. Oh, they have no trouble embracing their own right to be who they are—but will give you a befuddled look when it comes to recognizing ways in which their pursuit of Self impinges on the corresponding goals of those around them. We saw much this same blind spot in the two horror stories I presented before suspending the series.

This may come as a shock to some, but the concept of Honoring Thy Self doesn't just apply to you, John or Jane Doe who's reading this. Your neighbors, too, are entitled to honor their respective senses of Self. The fact that I may wish to declare myself King does not mean that you're obliged to bow before my throne. Because you'd have the right to declare yourself King as well. So would all of our neighbors. Which ultimately means that none of us has the right to summarily declare ourselves King. Not to get too airy about it, but the call for the primacy of the Self—which I've made many times on this blog—is not a call for solipsism.

Some folks today never seem to get this. They expect to be able to be themSelves and yet also be insulated from the untoward consequences sure to arise when their single-minded pursuit of Self runs up against someone else's (equally valid) interests. This is important because, for a society to avoid little upsets like, oh, mass bloodshed, the disparate interests of all the various Selves must be mediated and resolved into something coherent and sustainable. Failing that, what you have is anarchy.

Though I can't say authoritatively where people got the idea that honoring YourSelf means dishonoring everyone else's, I can take an educated guess. I think the answer lies in one of the seminal buzzwords of modern* self-help: codependency. Though intended in clinical settings to apply to the peacekeeping behavioral adaptations common among those raised amid alcoholism, the term broadened quickly once the self-help movement got hold of it. (The cynic in me can't help observing that the more inclusive you make the definition of the disease, the more you expand the potential market base for "treatment.") Pretty soon almost everyone was codependent, and I don't necessarily say that in jest. If you click the link earlier in this graph and browse some of the sites, you'll find definitions and explanations of codependency that implicitly (if not explicitly) apply to everyone who forms a close personal bond with another human being.

During the 1980s, best-selling books and 12-step workshops taught people, primarily women, to begin looking out more for No. 1. Of course, it's indisputable that for centuries in America, women were stymied in their pursuit of even the most basic sense of Self by the expectation that they'd consecrate their lives to the care and feeding of their husbands and kids (as Dr. Laura would put it). There's such a thing as overcorrection, however, and this is one case where, for a fair portion of us, the pendulum swung way back past the midpoint. "Look out for No. 1" became the anthem of the Me Generation. As I point out in SHAM, the backlash against codependency (and selflessness as a whole) led straight to the twin pillars of Empowerment/Entitlement that have characterized self-help since the early '90s. Just as the self-esteem movement over the past quarter-century taught American kids to equate striving with achieving—such that they felt entitled to success, and cheated if they didn't get it—not a few grown-ups came to see their Self-actualization as if it took place in a vacuum, quite apart from the wants, needs and feelings of everyone else.

And, as I see it, there's another mega-factor in play here. Cyberspace. To be sure, the 'Net has had a transforming effect on every aspect of life...but anthropologists may one day reckon that none of them was more significant than the Web's impact on the way in which people present themselves to the world. Consider above all the process of the so-called "social networking" sites: Yes, you reach out to friends and lovers that way...but first you retreat to your electronic cottage, sit down at your computer and decide "who you are" and how you want to be seen. For the first time in history, everyday people are able to micromanage their public images almost as if each of us were a Hollywood celeb with benefit of a studio-orchestrated PR campaign. On MySpace and Facebook, we celebrate ourselves, create soundtracks for our lives; we decide which photos, videos and song lyrics best capture The Look we hope to project to people who—this is key—may never meet us in the flesh. We craft a virtual identity that, at the very least, differs from the lives we really lead in critical areas of nuance. I'm not so much talking here about the 52-year-old truck driver who masquerades as a 28-year-old CIA operative or lead singer for a garage band. Rather, I have in mind the socially awkward 17-year-old girl who "adjusts" the imagery of her life to cast herself more as a diva or a vixen; who quotes poetry or movie lines that reflect what she'd like to be instead of what she is; who uses bold color schemes or frankly scary clip-art to exude a brashness, a sense of control, that she hardly ever feels among family and friends. We didn't used to have that option/luxury; we were stuck with the way we were seen by the people who actually knew us. No more. Today, if we can't have our way in the real world, we can have it online. (And frankly, when it comes to blogging, I think some of us get a little too caught-up in these fanciful alter-egos.)

Then, add the iconography of modern-day celebrity. Our kids see the Britneys and Parises and Lindsays and Mileys, who appear to live by no rules except those they willingly choose for themselves.

All told, you could say the era we live in has produced The Perfect Storm for narcissism and self-involvement....

To sum up, then, the Selfhood I envision resides more in figuring out where your strongest personal inclinations and aptitudes best fit within the overarching framework of society; it's maximizing that Self within a structure that respects the Selfhood of the folks around you, too. Hell, within the privacy of your own mind, you can be as psychotic as you please. But it's unrealistic (and probably self/Self-defeating) to expect to impose your psychosis on others. If you do want to take an extreme stand on Selfhood, that's fine; just know that there will be penalties, possibly severe ones. Just as (contrary to self-esteem-based lore) not everyone can grow up to be president, not everyone can be an unalloyed version of Himself or Herself without encountering pushback—perhaps a devastating degree of pushback—from society-at-large. So if you're determined to be 100 percent YourSelf, you should also be prepared to end up living in a rural cabin somewhere, like Ted Kaczynski. And maybe coming to the same end.

Hmmm. I wonder if there's a self-help book in all this? I think I'd make my agent very happy.

(That's a joke, folks.)

* As you know if you read SHAM, I divide modern self-help into two phases/periods: Victimization and Empowerment. Victimization held sway in the early years of modern self-help, kicked off (to my mind) by the 1967 publication of I'm OK, You're OK.

Perpetraitors.

2008-05-20T14:03:00.005-04:00

You've probably seen the video of those dozen-or-so Philadelphia cops enthusiastically beating three black suspects back on May 5. Yesterday the city announced that four of the cops would be fired as a result of the incident; disciplinary action remains pending against several others. And now, predictably, the local Fraternal Order of Police has come to the cops' defense, alleging a rush to judgment and vowing to get all of the officers reinstated within eight months.

Among other things, the FOP argues that (1) the public hasn't heard all of the relevant facts, and (2) Philly cops were in an overwrought state of mind during the period in which the incident took place. It's true that just two days earlier, on Saturday, May 3, one of their own, Stephen Liczbinski, was fatally shot while trying to apprehend three bank-robbers fleeing the crime scene. Still, that doesn't justify street justice. (Even if the trio in the May 5 incident had been Liczbinski's killers—which the May 5 cops already knew was not the case—would that entitle the cops to beat them?) Just as Sharpton loses all credibility when he organizes ad hoc rallies in defense of blacks who clearly broke the law, police apologists lose all credibility when they go to the mat on behalf of cops who clearly violated policy—and broke the law. Assault is assault, regardless of whether the perp is wearing a badge.

As for point (1)... I can even see an argument for shooting a suspect before beating him; one can certainly mount a plausible defense for killing a suspect who turns out to be unarmed. Those are split-second judgments made in the heat of the moment, under tense circumstances where the cops' own lives (or the lives of innocent bystanders) are at peril, or the cops honestly believe them to be. I'm not one of those bleeding hearts who insist that cops must be willing to give a suspect a free shot before they pull the triggers of their own guns. Generally speaking, a cop who believes he is facing deadly force has the right to shoot first and ask questions later.*

But how do you justify kicking the living crap out of three men who are on the ground in a fetal position while you're wailing away at them with feet, fists and batons?

I had hoped for more from the FOP. I had hoped that someone might step forward and say, "Look, we have some bad apples in the department. And you know, we understand that these episodes might make the public wonder about the types of people who go into law enforcement in the first place. The last thing society needs is a bunch of bullies or vigilantes wearing a badge. Especially racist bullies or vigilantes."

I guess such candor is too much to ask for in a culture where the standing policy seems to be, "CIRCLE THE WAGONS! When attacked for any reason, under any circumstances—no matter how egregious—just deny, deny, deny." So it is that when doctors are hauled into court to account for a sensational instance of malpractice (like, say, sawing off the wrong limb), the AMA nonetheless finds a dozen reasons why the criticisms are unjust, unfair and politically motivated, while reminding us of how society needs to be protected from those money-grubbing opportunists who call themselves personal-injury lawyers. On the other hand, when evidence suggests that some personal-injury lawyers are just money-grubbing opportunists, you can count on the ABA to step forward and pontificate about how its members are the only things protecting us from those knife-wielding incompetents who call themselves doctors.

I say again: We need to stop thinking like blocs or interest groups and start thinking more like Selves. If there's one question I've been asked more than any other during the 200-some radio shows I've now done in connection with SHAM, it's this one: "But Steve, if the self-help you write about is no good...then what's the alternative?" The alternative is: Be yourself. Think for yourself. Don't identify with other people who are "like you." Just be you. Never expect to find your personal answers in some one-size-fits-all-program. Refuse to be categorized or pigeonholed. Never define yourself based on labels—cop, collegian, cancer patient, white, black, Catholic, Muslim, husband, wife, father, mother, man, woman—and refuse to be defined by a label.

That is how we'll get to be a colorblind, gender-blind, fair-minded society that respects the Individual and can call a spade a spade without falling back on demagoguery or demonizing. That is when each of us will sink or swim on his or her own merits.

* This does not mean that any given cop can go around indiscriminately shooting citizens. If an officer develops a history of firing upon people who turn out to have been unarmed, that situation must be investigated thoroughly—and preferably by an agency outside the PD itself. And it should go without saying that if the facts show malice or even reckless disregard for human life, the mere loss of his job is not enough. The officer should be prosecuted to the fullest extent.