Gates-gate: a race to judgment?

In light of today's White House kegger between Obama, his vice president, and the principals in The Cambridge Incident, I thought I'd post a few thoughts of my own. (And if you don't know what I'm talking about or what happened up in Cambridge, you probably spend a lot of time hanging out with the Miss Teen USA contestant who had that little geography problem.)

Let's review some of the post-mortem action here. Colin Powell thinks Henry Louis Gates bears a goodly portion of the blame for the incident. Now, in saying that, by no means do I imply that all you have to do to invalidate the so-called "black perspective" on some new development is locate a single high-profile black who dissents; still, I find significance in the willingness of a man like Powell to be outspoken on the point. The other day we learned that the woman who called 911 didn't even mention race, thus refuting the "oh my God, there's a black man in my neighborhood!" overtones that surrounded this story when it broke. That news, in turn, came on the heels of the revelation that there was a black officer, a sergeant no less, at the scene when Gates was led away in handcuffs, and that the sergeant supports the arresting officer's account of the incident. And isn't it interesting how little media play that aspect of the case has received?

Though it's impossible to fully diagnose these things afterward—for who can say with any specificity what complex mix of emotions give life to any given event in any given moment? and who can say whether the same emotions would produce the same result on a different night?—it is clear that with each new revelation—each new fact—the Gates case seems less and less an instance of racial profiling or "rousting" (as we used to call it in Brooklyn when cops would harass people for no reason other than the unwritten crime of being black in the wrong neighborhood). It begins to seem more and more like Prof. Gates himself had a bit of a chip on his shoulder, perceived the police response in the context of a certain "story line," and reacted/overreacted on that basis. Widening the lens, I hate to say it again, but this is what you get from people who are immersed in specialties like African-American Studies. (Ever see Cornel West on Bill Maher's show? The man is a sick joke, a walking cauldron of race-based animosity couched in pseudo-philosophical buzzwords and so-called "humor." I find it astonishing that this man is permitted to teach.) It is the same thing you get from people who are immersed in Women's Studies.* I dare say it is the same basic thing you get from the Aryan Brotherhood. (Giving bigotry a PhD and dressing it up in fancy suits doesn't make it more civil or less dangerous. All philosophies that sell separation and paranoia, regardless of the reason or the justification or the "history behind it," are the same at the core.) It is the same thing you may very well get from Supreme Court justices who believe there's some advantage in being a Hispanic woman, an attitude that necessarily implies there's a disadvantage in being a white man. There is no other way to interpret that belief. It is the same thing you get from anyone who defines himself or herself according to group thinking.

Now, can Gates be forgiven his knee-jerk skepticism of the police? Of course he can—on a personal basis (by which I mean, he shouldn't bring that skepticism into the classroom with him. But then he wouldn't be able to teach African-American Studies anymore, would he). It is absolutely beyond dispute that through the years, blacks as a class have not gotten a fair shake from cops as a class. And that's not just token lip service. I say that as someone who's had to put up or shut up more than once, in dangerous situations where I ended up taking sides against cops; I wrote about one such episode in a controversial piece for the New York Times Magazine. So it's probably not unreasonable for any given black dude to expect to be mistreated by the next cop he meets. Just as it's not unreasonable for Jesse Jackson to feel vaguely uneasy about the group of black kids he sees walking behind him. We all develop beliefs and intuitions based on experience and what we think we know of life.

All I'm asking for in the Gates case is that someone besides Colin Powell, ideally Gates himself, own up to it: "I thought I was being harassed. In retrospect, I may have overreacted."**

This is also what I mean about the media and the rush to judgment. It's understandable that blacks would react the way they do to such incidents...but the media are not supposed to get caught up in mob thinking, especially mob thinking that has a social agenda attached. This underscores one of the major problems with the 24/7 news cycle (and, by extension, the blogosphere). Yeah, I've heard the argument about how "we can always correct it later, even if we get it wrong at first." But by that time so much damage has been done that it's hard to undo it. All the more so in incendiary issues like this one.

Race relations is one of those areas where that old line about how "you can't un-shoot a bullet" surely applies.

* Understand that these courses are not merely informational in nature. They are about solidarity and unity of purpose; they trade in the identity politics of whatever word or concept precedes "Studies" in the title of the curriculum. I say that on the basis of personal observations made during my decade in the academic trenches, as well as a fair amount of reading and listening I've done through the years in my role as a journalist.
** And what of the cop, Crowley? Didn't he overreact, too? I have a hard time with that one. I have to tell you, honestly, that I think the world has become far too dangerous for cops to worry too much about being civil. I'm not saying that we should give cops license to pull a Rodney King; not at all. But increasingly I think that when cops encounter lawbreakers, or even just suspected lawbreakers, they should take every possible precaution to ensure their own safety. It is altogether reasonable today to assume that a man who's clearly furious and cursing at you may in the next instant pull a gun and blow your brains out. It happens with disturbing regularity to cops in Philadelphia.

You can't make sensible decisions...if you have no sense.

Apropos of last week's topic, comes, today, more seductive but ultimately meaningless b.s. from Cancer Treatment Centers of America, courtesy of its latest ad campaign:

"You can't fight cancer...if you don't have hope."

Who sez? Or maybe I should ask, Why not?

Let's take two individuals. Lou is an incorrigible pessimist; always expects the worst. But his friends persuade him that he has to go for chemo and radiation, even though he fully expects to die. On the other hand we have Larry. Larry is the very definition of optimism. He's convinced that he's "going to beat this cancer thing." He's so convinced that he thinks he's going to do it through meditation, herbal potions, and the sheer will to live.

Who do you think has better odds of reaching five-year survival? Mr. Hope? Or our friend Lou, who, the minute he heard The C Word, figured he was a goner? Come on now, don't give me the sentimental answer; assume you had to bet your 401K on it, also assuming you still have a 401K, and it's still worth more than $1.98.

But we needn't even make our hypothetical as extreme as all that. Suppose both Lou and Larry undergo the exact same treatment regimen. Are we really prepared to say that Larry's optimism will necessarily trump Lou's negativity? Aren't there myriad other variables that have something to say about it? (E.g. genetics/family history, the doctors' skills, the precise etiology of the cancer itself, etc.) And what about the sheer laws of chance? Seriously, if optimism and pessimism were so decisive in health care and longevity, then all other things being equal, wouldn't pessimists die at around 30 while all optimists live to be 109? In fact, why would optimists ever die? (On the other hand, maybe they don't. As Bob Proctor told us in The Secret, "Disease cannot live in a body that's in a healthy emotional state." I would therefore assume that the irrepressibly chipper Proctor, whom I wrote about in a recent Wall Street Journal column, looks forward to immortality. We shall see.)

We all understand why such slogans gain cultural traction. There are benign reasons (having to do with the very human need to believe) and there are less benign reasons (having to do with the entrepreneurial desire to turn a profit by pandering to that very human need. In truth, I think what Cancer Treatment Centers of America is really saying is, "If you don't have hope, you won't continue spending endless sums of money in a vain attempt to postpone the inevitable, and places like Cancer Treatment Centers of America would suffer an alarming attrition in business volume"). And there's a ton of sentiment/sentimentality attached to these topics, such that there's also a natural tendency to recoil when people puncture these balloons of hope...as yours truly learned back in November 2007 when I blogged cynically about Lynn Redgrave's "I refuse to die" spots. But why do we have to let that sentimentality induce us to go around spouting all these silly motivational catch-phrases that we know in our hearts* aren't true? Why tell kids things like "You can achieve anything if you set your mind to it!", which is absolute, empirically provable hogwash? Why isn't it good enough to say something like, "Look, just go out there and try your hardest, and maybe you'll be rewarded"? Or, in the case at hand: "Try to keep your spirits up as you fight this thing"?

Why do we have to imply that the hope is a therapy, a game plan, in its own right?

Oh, incidentally: Some years back CTCA came under FTC scrutiny for, in effect, promising more hope than it could legitimately deliver through its "groundbreaking" methods. Maybe that tells you something right there.

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

P.S. I guess this guy lost his hope.

* or maybe our minds is more like it.

On presidents, press conferences...and painful eloquence.

Now that we've gotten a half-dozen of these pressers under our collective national belt, I'm wondering how many of you are starting to feel the way I do about the rhetorical prowess we so admired in our man Barack when he was running for office. The word for the way I feel is "uneasy." Back then, of course, during the campaign, we were so starved for demonstrable intellect after eight years of Dubya that we exulted in Obama's rhetorical virtuosity and the obvious brainpower behind it. I must tell you, however, that after last night I'm starting to view that scholarly brilliance of his as, well, something of a handicap.

Just about every answer last night had a "first of all" or a "before we get into that"...then later had a "now, to look at the broader picture" component as well. This is nothing new for Obama; it is the continuation of a pattern established at his very first press conference, and even before that, during his campaign debates, though in those days it was clear that careful "woodshedding" had pared at least some of his answers down to easily digestible talking points. But today, every one of his answers includes six parenthetical asides. Every idea he puts forward has four qualifiers, caveats or conditions. He seems unable to deliver the "nugget," the central thought, without also providing every conceivable nuance. If he were asked to go over his answers and supply a topic sentence for each paragraph, as was required of me and my peers in sixth grade, I wonder if the man could even do it.

He's rhetorically ubiquitous: everywhere at once.

This is a characteristic of super-intelligent people. They see nuance everywhere. They perceive the complexity in even the simplest concepts; ask them if they like roses and you'll get a dissertation on the nitrogen cycle. I also think it likely that Obama figures he'll bulletproof his discourse and the agenda that underlies it by covering all possible objections before the opposition gets a chance to bring them up, thereby defusing any rebuttals. In that respect he's probably thinking like a trial lawyer (or his notion of the way a trial lawyer thinks; more on that in a moment). In any case, he's not a lawyer, at least not now, and this isn't a trial. He's the president of the United States of America at a most difficult juncture in its history, and he's seeking consensus on a critical matter. He is a man trying to demonstrate Leadership. And what that Leadership most demands is clarity.

Alas, the man simply cannot give us a snapshot of where we are; he seems bent on telling us, over and over, how we got here, what other routes we might have taken, and where we might go in the future. As I listened to him spend a numbing 60 minutes droning his answers to just 10 questions, one of two things I thought was, I'd hate to be lost somewhere and have to depend on this guy to give me directions. (I'll get to the second thing I thought, which will tie up that loose end about trial lawyers, in a moment.)

See, Obama speaks as he writes. Normally that's said as a compliment, as it often was said of intellectuals like the late William Buckley and is often said now of Gore Vidal—and I guess, in the abstract, it's a compliment here too. Very few people are capable of delivering, off the cuff, such wonderfully rounded, rhetorically imposing, lyrically and cognitively flawless sermonettes.

Which helps explain why Obama's approval rating is falling.

It's important to realize that people who aren't accustomed to functioning on that level, people who don't see the nuance and who feel they have a firm grasp on "the way things are" (or ought to be)—which is most people—distrust the bounty of oratorical artistry that burbles forth from our man Barack. They think maybe it's designed to be confusing. They think maybe he's hiding something, tap-dancing when he should just be explaining. They think maybe he's not as sure of this course of action as he ought to be.

Further, he doesn't know when to quit. He doesn't know how to throw a knockdown punch and simply retreat to a neutral corner. Last night when a reporter asked a complex question about how many people the administration's health plan realistically would cover, Obama's first line in response was, "I want to cover everyone..." And that should have been his answer, period. Next! Even if there were other details he wanted to get into the record, he could've found a way of bringing them up elsewhere. (Lord knows he spent enough time digressing in every other answer!) But the man has no sense of rhetorical moment. He doesn't know when to just SHUT UP and let his words reverberate in the room. Every answer to every question becomes a delving, searching, ponderous essay.

Brilliant though he may be, Barack Obama is no Winston Churchill. Obama's eloquence is often counterproductive. I dare say it is sometimes painful to listen to.

I'm convinced after this latest performance that increasingly, now that Barack Obama is no longer a mere metaphor and must actually govern, the only people he connects with are people just like him—people who glory in brilliance for its own sake—and overall, there aren't that many out there across America. Which brings me to the second thought that kept occurring to me last night: The man does not know how to speak to "the folks," as Bill O'Reilly likes to put it. I was reminded of what legendary defense attorney Gerry Spence told me during an interview for my Skeptic piece on the criminal-justice system. Harvard lawyers, said Gerry, "have spent their entire lives in their left brain... They've not been taught anything about communication. They don't know how to talk to ordinary people." Spence went so far as to argue that such types have been "ruined as communicating human beings."

Barack must learn that brilliant oratory does not equal effective communication. Those are two very different things. And he must learn it soon.

More poetic-sounding b.s. from the folks who gave you the Law of Attraction!

I heard the first of the italicized lines below during one of those tedious and insipid "self-esteem building" PSAs on Lifetime last night. That got me thinking about a couple of other canards I've heard recently (though it's hardly the first time I've heard any of them). So here goes.

If you don't believe in yourself...who will?
Outright nonsense. How many actors and actresses had no particular ambitions nudging them towards the Silver Screen when they were "discovered" by some talent agent or director? Models, too. Life is full of tales of accidental success revolving around people who were plucked from the obscurity of their humdrum lives. Indeed, some of the most tragic stories in Hollywood history involve people who became icons despite being wracked by self-doubts—Marilyn Monroe comes to mind. (Becoming an icon only makes things worse for such people, as they never feel "worthy.") For that matter, the second-most compelling story line on American Idol, right after the one that goes "I was born to sing!", is the one that goes, "I never thought I had much talent, but my friends insisted that I try out." That's a perfect example of an individual who had no real belief in himself until after everyone else did! As for that old (related) chestnut about how you have to "love yourself in order to be loved"...think about that for a moment. Don't we all know folks who have no trouble at all loving themselves...and that very "quality" is what makes them some of the most obnoxious, rigid, thoroughly off-putting individuals you'd (n)ever want to meet? I for one have always been drawn to soft, retiring, low-key women, and I don't think I'm unique among men in that preference. If anything, I suspect we could all do with a bit less self-love nowadays.

Great spirits always encounter violent opposition from mediocre minds.
True...but relevant and meaningful in its intended sense only in cases where the "spirit" in question is, legitimately and provably, far beyond mediocrity. The line is attributed to Albert Einstein, who rightfully saw himself as a great spirit, too often harassed, nitpicked and impeded by the mediocre minds around him. Today it's a popular rallying cry at motivational seminars, often used to pander to audience members by giving them a psychic mechanism for embracing and justifying all kinds of self-indulgent, harebrained, "boundary-stretching" garbage. (Lines very much like this also have been used by MLM/Ponzi schemers to pitch tactics that are immoral or illegal. I.e., "The winner makes his own rules!" Kind of like Bernie Madoff.) In its largest, most generic sense it's an exhortation to Be Yourself!, Dare to Dream!, Throw Off the Shackles of Convention!, blah blah blah. Keep in mind: Only history gets to judge whether or not you deserve to be regarded as a "great spirit." That's not a title that you bestow on yourself—certainly not early in life, nor alongside 2000 fellow seminar attendees who are all chanting the very same thing. Speaking of "same things," that brings us to:

If you keep doing the same thing, you'll keep getting the same results.*
Hogwash. We've touched on this before, and it bears repeating: There can be any number of atmospheric reasons why something that didn't work in attempts 1 through 30 suddenly clicks on attempt 31. How do you know when you're just one more try away from spectacular success? (Besides, doesn't this run counter to that other cardinal self-help ethic—the one that prizes persistence and urges you to "never give up your dreams!"?) Sometimes the rest of the world needs to catch up to you. Sometimes, for reasons that dwell only in the realm of chance or fate or whatever inscrutable thing you want to label it, something works that never worked before. (Here's another way of saying that same thing: Sometimes that initial run of failure may be nothing more than an aberration in the laws of chance. Take a person who has never flipped a coin before: If he flips it five times and gets all tails, he may mistakenly assume that coin flips always result in tails.) Understand me now: In saying all this, I am not implying that a dogged refusal to give up will ultimately lead to success; as a general prescription for living, that's pretty silly, too.

Which is the larger point: As is often true of "axioms," the polar beliefs (i.e. nuggets of advice that start with "never" or "always") are false and absurd.

And that's the trouble with all of self-help in a nutshell. There are no "easy buttons" for deciphering life. You cannot reduce the human experience to universally valid bullet points: always do this, never do that, 10 Rules, Seven Keys. There may be odds to play—"chances are" that this-or-that will be more effective than something-or-other. But those odds are much closer to even-money than what SHAMland's liturgy implies. As I've often said of baseball, there is little reason to assume that the winning teams, in most cases, are inherently better than the also-rans. The so-called best teams usually win their divisions by just a few games, cushions that fall within the margin of error and could be explained by totally random events: bad hops, sudden gusts of wind, a rainstorm that ended a game prematurely, an unexpected injury, a pitcher inexplicably pitching over his head for a few weeks, etc. Were baseball to perform an experiment by playing its entire season over again from Opening Day, the first-place team might well finish fourth. I am convinced of that.

Much of life is a similar crap-shoot: Maybe it works, maybe it doesn't. Maybe what you tried yesterday will pay off today, maybe it won't. Life is experienced individually by individuals—silly as that sounds—and each new day is, in fact, a new day, with new possibilities. The clock starts over.

Unless it doesn't. Unfortunately, you never know till you get there.

Finally, as a sort of mental exercise, I invite you to leaf through these "inspirational sayings," and, before you succumb to their surface allure, spend just a bit of time asking yourself whether they're true—or whether they even make sense. It's astonishing how these proverbs become verbal touchstones, entrenched in the culture, when half the time the core idea is somewhere between (a) untrue and (b) patently ludicrous.

* This is often labeled as the "definition of insanity: doing the same thing and expecting different results." There is also a slightly more hip-sounding version: "If you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you've always got [sic]." Tony Robbins is fond of putting it that way.

Happy birthday, Natalie.

In an age when words like beautiful, hot, and sexy are thrown around in the media like frisbees at a dog park, consider this post a simple tribute to the woman who, in this man's judgment, was by far and away the most beautiful actress in the history of American film.

Let us remember that beauty is not a byproduct of hormones set in motion by the display of breasts and butts. Beauty is in the face. And when it comes to that, there is Natalie...and there is everyone else. At least that's how I see it.

She would have been 71 today.

When they 'kid' you, it's no joke.

I remain astonished by these types of stories, though regrettably they're far from rare. Before we go any further, I should reiterate that this is sensitive terrain for me, as my family has experienced paternity fraud firsthand. From the moment my wife and I found out about Jessica's pregnancy till the moment three years later when DNA tests broke our hearts by eliminating our son as the bio-father, that child was the dominant emotional theme in our lives; the episode would grow even more tragic and emotionally complex after Jessica took her own life. I look back on that entire period and even years later, with the benefit of hindsight, I don't know how to feel about any of it. I've tried to write about it a number of times in hopes of exorcising the demons. Nothing works. Pictures of little Sophia (and Jessica as well) still hang on the wall of my basement office. To this day I can't look at them without a lump forming in my throat.

Which is why this is one case where I step well outside any pretense of objectivity in asking, Why aren't all right-thinking people horrified and offended by paternity fraud and its crushing impact on the life of the man who's defrauded? I don't understand what the counterargument could possibly be. I do know what the bureaucratic argument is: "Society's primary focus is on what's best for the kids. DNA or no DNA, if we allow the duped dads to wriggle off the hook for paying child support, then who will take care of these innocent children?" Largely for such reasons, there is a legal presumption of husbandly paternity (with all the attendant financial obligations) that applies to any children born during a marriage, even when it's clear that those children might have been the product of Mom's adultery. Put simply, if Dave is married to Dawn, and Dawn conceives as a result of an affair with Dick, it doesn't matter as far as the family courts are concerned. It doesn't even matter what the DNA tests show. The child is "Dave's." And in most cases Dave will be obliged to pay for that child's upkeep till he or she turns at least 18.

To which I would ask, Why is it assumed that it's the father's sole obligation to maintain a stable life for the unfortunate offspring of such messy situations? Maybe the mother should have thought of that before she got pregnant with another man's baby and deceived her current partner into thinking the child was his. This appears to be one of those settings where all the talk about gender equality is revealed for the sham (as it were) it too often is. "Equality under the law" means nothing if it doesn't also mean "equal responsibility under the law."

Some of the horror stories in this area defy belief. After Air Force Master Sgt. Ray Jackson's wife divorced him, Jackson learned that all three children born during their marriage were the product of extramarital affairs—which is to say, three different ones. Nonetheless, Jackson ended up paying half his income to support the three kids. Bert Riddick of Los Angeles was thrown into a 13-year downward spiral of debt, culminating in a period of homelessness, by a former girlfriend who falsely accused him of fathering her baby. Suffering right along with Bert were his wife and three actual children. You may want to read about Ben Ridley, too, as the article includes some interesting stats.

In fact, if you research this subject to any depth, you'll even find cases where women cheated on their husbands, conceived a child with the other man, eventually left the husband in order to live with the other man (or yet a third man), then collected both child support and alimony from the ex-husband! So in effect, the duped dad was paying the upkeep not only on the child he didn't father, but on the entire new relationship the woman had forged with the real sperm donor.

If that's not a perversion of the system...I don't know what is.

And if I cross my legs over my chest, does that mean...?

This recent article on nonverbal communication got me thinking about whether I might have anything to add to the literature in that area. So, after lengthy consultation with my own team of experts*, I have decided to provide some additional tips on body language.

1. Zipper undone, genitals in plain sight. Indicates a carefree, open attitude towards life.

2. Dead-drunk, vomiting on coworkers. Indicates that you live in a state with high unemployment benefits.

3. Intense glare, arrive for meetings carrying scythe or chainsaw. You're serious about business, determined to have the last word in any negotiation.

OK, I suppose I could get sillier and siller (as if the foregoing examples aren't silly enough). My point is that I think we make too much of these supposed "cues" to what's going on in people's hearts and minds, and shows like Lie to Me and The Mentalist don't help matters. Nor does Tonya Reiman (shown), that saucy body-language expert who's always popping up on O'Reilly (though certain male media acquaintances of mine report that they very much like what her body is saying). Not everything that appears on the outside is a dead giveaway to something specific that's going on on the inside, and I think we risk being very unfair to others (or drawing grossly misleading inferences that may cause us great embarrassment or worse) by assuming that a "mastery" of these unconscious signals provides an unerring road map to the human personality in all its myriad diversity. It behooves me to point out that when I cross my legs, it's usually because my knees ache and I'm trying to find a more comfortable position. Where this is especially unfair—I dare say it's criminal—is when jurors think they can "read" a defendant, just based on the way that defendant sits there in court, and they go as far as to form judgments about guilt or innocence (particularly guilt) based more on these readings of demeanor than on what the actual evidence shows. If I hear one more juror say "He just didn't look believeable to me" or "He had such a cold expression in his eyes" or even "He seemed like he was lying," I'm going to find that juror and do something that will require my own appearance in front of a jury.

I've blogged about this before, in a post that foreshadowed (and to some degree inspired) my piece in the current issue of Skeptic, but I don't even think jurors should be permitted to consider whether someone "acted appropriately" in the aftermath of a crime; after all, what constitutes "appropriate" behavior when your family has just been slaughtered? As I write in the Skeptic piece, "It's one thing if the defendant was observed in the backyard at midnight tossing machetes and bloody towels into an oil drum, but of what legitimate probative value is testimony from cops or witnesses that a woman 'didn't act the way you'd expect someone to act when she learns that her spouse was murdered.' " I illustrate with the case of Cynthia Sommer, a San Diego housewife and mother who was convicted of poisoning her husband, Todd. It was clear that jurors didn't like the fact that she lived a swinging lifestyle after Todd's death, or that she used part of the life-insurance proceeds to buy herself a new set of boobs. After more than two years behind bars, Sommer was freed when sophisticated tests on saved tissue samples found no trace of the poison she supposedly used to kill Todd.

While I realize it's only natural to want to know as much as we can about what makes people tick, I don't understand why that means that we need to reduce everyone to caricature. We do it in court, we do it at work, we do it in forming snap judgments about kids in school or at the playground or on a Little League ball diamond. We do it constantly in self-help, a la, say, that whole Mars/Venus thing, which teaches us to relate to one another as stereotypes rather than people. We'd do well to remember that the first part of self-help is self. Humankind is astonishing in its variety—not in a gender or racial or ethnic sense, but in an individual sense.

I don't care if we all share 99 percent of the same DNA. We all eat lasagna or listen to music or begin a kiss a little bit differently. And in that there is magic.

* The pitcher and third baseman on my over-45 baseball team.

'Where's Sully?' update! All-Star Monday evening...

So I just switched on the MLB Network's coverage of the festivities ramping up to the much-publicized Home Run Derby that takes place annually the night before Major League Baseball's All Star Game...and Jesus H. Christ, standing behind the batting cage with his patented aw-shucks smile, framed by sports legends Tony La Russa and Bobby Knight...is Chesley Sullenberger.

He's becoming the Kilroy of his generation. (People under 50: Look it up.) He's freakin' ubiquitous!

I'm sure that when we finally succeed at landing a crew safely on Mars, the first thing they'll see will be ol' Sully Sullenberger walking towards them, no doubt with a book under each arm....

Crash-landing over Chesley Sullenberger.

I invite anyone who harbors any lingering doubts about the vacuousness and empty opportunism of self-help to open up Parade magazine when it arrives tomorrow morning*; there you'll read about Chesley Sullenberger's plans to return to the cockpit "later this summer after completing his memoirs, Highest Duty: My Seach for What Really Matters." The book is phase one of a two-book deal for which Sullenberger reportedly was paid $3.2 million. Think about this. The man flies an airplane into the Hudson River. ("Hell," said my youngest son when it happened, "I can do that..!") And now, by apparent virtue of that chance act—that moment when fate picked him to be in one of the infinitesimally small number of commercial jets that actually go down—he's qualified to mentor the rest of us on the meaning of life.

Of course, that's not really what it's about. What it's really about is that publishers know that the usual mob of inspiration-mainliners and corporate types who feel obliged to buy such books for their mid-level minions will queue up to hear what Sully has to say...even if what Sully has to say is something like, "Life is always testing us, and the question is, How do we respond to that test?", which I'm betting is something very like what Sully will say, and which is something that Sully (or anyone else) could say without ever flying an Airbus into a river even once.

No matter. Cha-ching. Collect your 3 mill!

The whole thing somewhat reminds me of ol' Beck Weathers, the Texas pathologist who was part of the ill-fated May 1996 Everest expedition that became the subject of Jon Krakauer's spellbinding best-seller, Into Thin Air. Weathers lost his nose, his left hand and part of his right hand to frostbite. He nearly lost his life itself. For purposes of expediency, I quote the balance of my point from SHAM pp. 15-16:

Weathers, now in his late fifties, travels the lecture circuit, expounding on the theme of 'surviving against all odds.' You wonder, though: How many people live in situations that are truly analogous to what Beck faced up on that mountain? For that matter, what role did any of Weathers' own actions play in his survival? According to Krakauer, Weathers was like a hapless pinball bounced around the mountaintop for sixteen hours, and he almost surely would have died if others hadn't helped him down the treacherous slopes at significant risk to themselves, and if his wife had not arranged for a dangerous helicopter rescue. (To be blunt about it, Weathers probably had no business being up on that mountain in the first place, as Krakauer himself strongly implies.) So what do we learn from Beck Weathers? Tellingly, he informs his admiring audiences that "Everest, in many ways, was one of the best things to happen to me." At $15,000 a speech, he's not kidding....

Needless to say, $15,000 a speech is chump change compared to the windfall Sullenberger has collected—and is sure to continue to collect once the inevitable film is green-lighted.

I bet this sounds a lot like envy. Let me clear things up for you: You're damned right it is. It's envy on more levels than you can imagine.** Some of us, after all, have devoted decades of our lives to honing our craft, which is Writing, which believe it or not isn't something just anyone can do well. Yet the only time we're gonna see $3 million is when we see it being handed to waterlogged pilots to write their inspirational "memoirs." And anyway, does one act, one discrete moment in time, really qualify a person to write "memoirs"? (Andy Warhol was never more pertinent than here, where the pivotal star-making action did indeed unfold over the course of about 15 minutes.) The whole thing is as absurd as my walking into USAirways' corporate HQ and demanding (1) to fly a plane, and (2) to be paid $3 million for the privilege. And in case you think that comparison is a bit too easily drawn, I dare say that the skill set that underlies good writing—or is supposed to, in any case—is far more specialized and difficult to master than the skill set that underlies piloting. (I've written about pilots and piloting. And I talked about it often with my nephew, who ultimately died in the course of crash-landing his plane in a way that didn't lay waste to the surrounding neighborhood.)

But my envy is far broader than that. It extends to matters philosophical as well. Some of us take pride in asking the hard questions, in avoiding the easy answers, in saying things that people don't want to hear (e.g. my recent post on pedophilia), all of it in an effort to poke at the crust of a less superficial level of truth. I think also of my piece in the current Skeptic, where, for rather less than $3 million, I expended 5000*** words tackling such questions as, "Why are certain things crimes and other things not crimes even though some of those other things clearly have wider, more harmful effects than the things that are crimes?" Such thoughts have to struggle to find an audience (in truth, they have to struggle to find a forum, first). Meanwhile, millions of us will mob stadiums to hear people like Tommy Lasorda yell, "You gotta want it!"

Oh, I see. I gotta want it. Well thank you for sharing those words of wisdom, Tommy.

I don't understand why we're so fascinated by cheap, easy "motivation." I don't understand what makes us so inclined to confer instant guru status upon people, like Sully and Beck, who just happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. Or the right place at the right time, a la Michael Phelps. Even in cases where people achieve remarkable things, what makes us think these people have anything to teach us? And if they do have something meaningful to say, what makes us think their skills are translatable to our own lives?

I guess I'll just have to buy Sully's book to find out.

* Mine comes with the Saturday paper.
** OTOH, it's pointed envy, not the generalized kind. For example, I do not envy Jon Krakauer for the fame and fortune he enjoyed as a result of Into Thin Air, even though it was also an obvious bit of happenstance that put him up on that mountain. Krakauer is a wonderful writer, and his book on the disaster is as seamless a blend of journalistic description and authorly lyricism as you'll find anywhere. Although, I do recall some writers (half-)joking at the time, "Can you believe that lucky sonofabitch! How come he gets to be a member of a climbing party where almost everybody dies!" Incidentally, if you think I'm envious, try to imagine what some of the nation's starving poets must feel, hearing the rumors that Sully's second book may turn out to be a volume of poetry! John Berryman must be spewing profane verse in his grave.
*** That's a ton of words for a magazine feature these days, and I am eternally grateful to Michael Shermer for allotting me that kind of space.

'The Joneses are proud to announce their first murder-suicide.'

It still tickles me when I see stories like this, which contain lines like "so-and-so are expecting their first baby, and are now engaged." And yet in a more serious vein, I have to think that stories like that are also, too often, responsible for stories like this...which, of course, do not tickle me at all. There is no moral judgment implied or intended here; my skepticism about all this out-of-wedlock parenting is purely a matter of pragmatics.

When children are brought into the world in the absence of the emotional and financial infrastructure that should be there, heartache/tragedy of one sort or another is a too-common result. At the very least you end up with a lot of daycare, a lot of latchkey kids. Maybe a downbeat outcome isn't so inevitable in Hollywood, where there's enough money to buy a workable support network. But for those of us in the real world, the whole thing strikes me as sad, if not downright scary.

A cautionary tale that speaks for itself.

Or, perhaps, a modern morality play in five acts...each of them a gunshot.

Goodbye, Michael... Hello, Paris!

It's a terribly cynical question, but one that, I think, cannot be avoided in light of the events of the past 24 hours, and the media/public's response to same:

How long before they make an industry out of the three Jackson kids?

(And God I hope that 20 years from now, we're not asking questions about what's going on with Prince Michael Jr.'s nose...)

Non-Lord, deliver us from the negative certitude of the true un-believers.

Events on SHAMblog in recent times have me mulling the whole point of discussion and "intellectual engagement," if you will. Or let me be more direct: What is the point? (That's not rhetorical. I'm honestly asking.) Do we really want to have our assumptions challenged, tested? Or do we just want all of our personal truths confirmed, so that we sense the ground a bit firmer beneath our feet when we leave the house each day, and feel that much more secure in our beds as we pull the covers over us each night? Is that why some people refuse to watch Keith Olbermann ooze his special brand of left-leaning sanctimony on MSNBC...but are perfectly comfortable watching Sean (DMoTV) bluster and bloviate from the starboard side on FOX? Is that why many of us have a welter of issues that we simply declare "off the table" when it comes to debate?

Come on, Salerno. There are certain things that all civilized people can agree on. For instance, we all agree that murder is wrong.

Is that so? What about abortion? What about capital punishment? What about war?

That's not murder.

Who says?

Well, that's not murder as I define it.

Ahhh, as you define it. Well, some people define it differently. Pro-life groups, for example. Or ask the Catholic Church or Amnesty International about capital punishment. For that matter, ask the Japanese about Hiroshima, or ask the Taliban about our actions in Afghanistan, or...

But we're Americans!

Yes. And they're not. Where is it written that "American truth" is The Truth for all of mankind?

Dammit, Steve, you're contradicting yourself again. You yourself said we should consider "taking out" the regime in North Korea!

Yes, and I'm an American, aren't I? If I were Kim Jong-il, I'd see it differently. There's nothing contradictory about it....

See the problem? We don't know what the universal constants are—assuming any exist in the first place. Further, as soon as you're allowed to parse these concepts, creating exclusions and conditions and amendments, so am I. So are Islamic terrorists. So is everyone else. And murder is an issue on which the largest number of us would probably agree. Imagine trying to find any degree of unanimity on the lesser concepts!

So then, how should we go about deciding which Givens are universal constants and which aren't?

What most people believe?

Well, most people once believed in slavery. Most people once believed in male-only voting. They still do in some other cultures. People in China and other parts of Asia think it's OK to abort, even kill, the female children.

What most right-thinking people believe?

I hope the flaw is obvious on that one.

What science shows us?

Science reverses itself all the time. Besides, science is amoral. There are many things that are "true" in science that we might not want to implement in daily life. Science marches on, oblivious to its coincident impact on mankind: It gave us both amoxicillin and the hydrogen bomb. You can't trust science (or anything overseen by men); it can be perverted to opportunistic ends.

Well then, how 'bout what your religion tells you?

Sorry. I'm not obliged to recognize your religion's catechism or its overall lens on life. I'm not obliged to recognize any religion. I'm not even obliged to recognize the idea of a Supreme Being. Your belief in the Ten Commandments is no more inherently valid than someone else's non-belief. Maybe I climbed a mountain and came down with a tablet that says "Thou Shalt Kill." And lest you think I'm being purposely asinine, let me remind you that there's a section of the Qur'an that comes darned close to saying just that.

The only approach that makes sense to me, then, is to take all the Givens off the table. To assume that everything is up for discussion. Every last thing.

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

Something else that occurred to me recently is that you'll get some of the most close-minded, intolerant feedback from those who regard themselves as skeptics, cynics, "free thinkers." Several times on this blog I've alluded to Barbara Ehrenreich's wonderful piece for Harper's, "Pathologies of Hope," in which she chronicles and laments the fury of the true believers. But the true un-believers strike me as being just as bad, if not worse. They won't give an inch, either. They're as entrenched in their disbelief as the other side is in its belief. As a class, in fact, they much remind me of the aforementioned Hannity, who seems unable to give an iota of credit to Barack Obama or the Democrats, no matter the topic or situation. If Obama were to walk out onto the White House lawn today and announce that he loves his daughters, Hannity tonight would (a) try to refute it, and (b) link it to some covert plot to put U.S. military forces under the thumb of the UN.

This actually speaks to a common, and ironic, human foible. Even those who consider themselves rebels, revolutionaries and groundbreakers often get stuck in the revolutions they start, such that they're incapable of further growth and eventually become the very mainstream that subsequent generations of rebels must rebel against. A fair number of the same musicians who got (and gleefully accepted) the credit for innovating "bop" could not, a decade or so later, bring themselves to admit the aesthetic legitimacy of John Coltrane. At least not at first. "But the cat doesn't play music!" they complained of Trane's so-called "sheets of sound." Apparently they felt that the leading edge of the modern-jazz vanguard extended only to them, and not one grace note beyond.

Look, I have my beliefs, and some of them are quite strong. One of those beliefs is that most self-help is worthless, if not damaging. I think the empirical evidence is on my side; a few years ago, that evidence took the form of a book, which is the whole reason why we're here today. But I recognize that there's a difference between my beliefs and Universal Truth. I recognize that my beliefs are valid only for me, and only in the immediate moment when I'm believing them. As for the next moment, all bets are off. As an example, I cannot imagine that the Law of Attraction is the solution to any of life's problems. It seems absurd; indeed, it seems borderline-insane. If, however, I one day awaken to the notion that the LoA really is the solution, I'll have committed no crime in doing so. I will not have transgressed either legally or morally. I will have simply changed my mind. (Or, to be more precise, my mind will have changed itself.)

Or maybe that will indicate that I've finally gone insane. Who knows?

I can be a bit slow on the uptake, folks, but I'm learning that there may be no more inflexible a creature alive than the evangelical skeptic. He has all the non-answers. He's not the least bit unsure of himself. And if you call him on it...watch out.

Rick Ross tri-dux. The finale.

I had really wanted to move on, but another aspect of this topic has come up that probably deserves to be addressed, if only because its implications go far beyond our little melodrama here.

If I refuse to allow laypeople to come forward with damning charges against this or that SHAMblog contributor, it isn't because I'm protecting anyone or I'm simply "too fond of" so-and-so and don't want to see him (or her) hurt. The reason I won't permit readers to initiate mud-slinging campaigns against others who post here (or against gurus and/or other public figures who have never posted here, for that matter) is simple, really: I don't want my blog to become a vehicle for private-label character assassination and other reckless "fact-finding" from those who haven't done enough homework...and whose own motives may not always be as apparent or as pure as they appear.

This may not have occurred to anyone, but I take my journalism seriously.* In fact, that's the principal reason I haven't yet gone after Byron Katie in this space, as I've explained several times already. If you're going to attack a public figure in a (reasonably) visible venue like SHAMblog, it shouldn't just be 500 or 1000 words of clever, lively snark; it should be a fully researched piece of journalism that could stand up to formal scrutiny, if it had to. I don't trust the average person to do the necessary legwork. Or to even know how. In recent years I've watched almost all of the pillars of structured journalism that I once helped teach at Indiana University fall by the wayside amid the twin imperatives of immediacy and impact. It has to be fast and it has to be hot.

Leaving aside the navel-gazing, self-promotion and other horribly self-absorbed stuff (e.g. like much of what one finds on Twitter), there are many wonderful aspects of the blogosphere/so-called "Web 2.0." But one of the profound sins of cyberspace is that it has incentivized two highly regrettable notions, and facilitated their translation to reality:

REGRETTABLE NOTION 1: Anyone can say anything about anyone else at any time.

REGRETTABLE NOTION 2: Anyone can be a journalist.

The blogosphere feeds into that unfortunate cycle of raw, 24/7 news that I've written about at length for Skeptic. Not only do people think they're journalists, but investigative journalists to boot—all qualified to render final judgment on this or that. So you have this endlessly flowing slog of unedited (often jaundiced) material dispersing itself through cyberspace, and the prevailing sentiment seems to be, "Hey, if we get it wrong, no biggie. We can fix it later." Concepts like libel and defamation of character—important concepts that are still technically valid, and should give pause to anyone who presumes to join the world of media—have lost their real-world meaning for media types and targets alike. The average person who can't afford O.J.-level legal representation is SOL.

Is SHAMblog "journalism"? No, not always. Not even mostly, I would say. Some of it is discussion and some of it is sarcasm and some of it is nothing but some wacko quasi-philosophical musing that occurred to me one night when the meds weren't working and I couldn't sleep. But if I'm going to actually try to take somebody down in a major post or series of posts, I'm going to do a journalistically competent job of it. I'm going to observe the rudiments of proper (multiple) sourcing, I'm going to perform an analysis of public-record material, I'm going to check credentials (e.g. call the school that is listed as having issued so-and-so's degree to make sure it's not a lie and the school itself is accredited). I'm going to find out, to the best of my ability, how the person earns his income. Not just the evident ways, but the not-so-evident ones.

Why? I'll give you a pointed example. Let's say Joe Jones is a regular contributor to SHAMblog. And let's say Jack James comes to me with a comment that accuses Joe Jones of being a SHAM guru in his own right. And let's say that Jack James even presents a certain amount of documentation that appears valid. Now how do I know—without looking into it—that maybe Jack James isn't himself a shadow investor in a company that competes with Joe Jones?

How do you know?

That's why I've decided, as a matter of principle and policy, that I'll be the one who calls the spades spades around here. If others have more to add after I set the tone for such discussions, I'll (generally) be happy to post what they say. I'm just not going to let contributors walk into the room and begin firing wildly, leaving blood all over the Comments section and possibly hitting any number of innocent bystanders in the process.

Does this mean I consider myself the world's best journalist? Not at all. But I am a journalist, and a proven one. Moreover, this is my ballgame, and I'm willing to take responsibility for my actions as a journalist. If I savage a person that's one thing. I know what informed that decision. That's my call and no one else's. To be blunt about it, I'm not going to allow people to be tarred and feathers by a bunch of amateurs, some of whom see all this purely as blood sport.

In the meantime, readers should rest assured that no one is off limits. No one is "untouchable." Without going into any great detail, several of the top figures in the SHAMscape attempted to bully us into backing away from SHAM prior to its 2005 release; they repeated their attempt at intimidation a second time when the paperback was about to ship. We didn't cave then, and I wouldn't cave now, as long as I know I've got solid ground beneath my feet.

So that's that. Please don't try to tantalize me or provoke me via email, because I'm done.

* And now, having said that, I'm sure that some armchair Matt Drudge or Harvey Levin will have to go hunt down some minor error of fact in something I once wrote so he can yell Gotcha!

Rick Ross redux.

Because the private messages and attempted comments continue to flow in, I'm going to take one last stab at putting this Ross imbroglio behind us.

Am I telling this from my perspective? Yes, obviously so. It's the only perspective I've got, and I'm sorta stuck with it.

Here we have a case where I got drawn into a situation and I accepted the challenge, i.e. to explain a few things about my blog and clarify a few possible misconceptions that I deemed subtle yet important, as they went to the heart of my credibility and professional integrity. Even if the comments on the Ross board weren't always skeptical of me, per se, I didn't like the implication that SHAMblog was being manipulated or used as a tool by people of evil intent. I don't see how that's the case at all. Then I got my hand slapped in what I felt was an unfair way, so I begged off in a private message to the Ross moderator; it was never published. Incidentally, if you look at the hand-slap (the comment to me that inspired my departure), there was no reason for him to be that curt or provocative even then: "Forget your stupid blog, Salerno. Stick strictly to the topic or we'll kick your ass outta here." No, he didn't use those words, but I defy any reasonable person to read what he actually did write and tell me that wasn't his point. For crying out loud, it was my second full day on the forum; I'd said nothing inflammatory or weird, and was simply trying to expand people's understanding of the way I run my blog and why I like to keep it open to a diversity of thought. It was relevant to the thread, because I was explaining why certain people who do not seem to be very well-liked on that forum, and whose names had come up just a few comments prior, are nonetheless welcome on SHAMblog. And already he's talking about banning me!? Confronted with that mentality, I walked. (I do have a right to withdraw from a forum, don't I?) That should've been the end of it.

But no. The forum moderator decided that he couldn't let it go at that. He had to have his little say. If we're going to talk about being provocative, look at it this way: The moderator could've sent me an email informing me that I was banned, and he could've included as many denunciations as he cared to. I would've answered him in my special snarky way, maybe we would've gone back and forth a time or two, one of us would've invited the other to a dark alley, and that would've been that; all of it off-stage. Worst-case, if he felt he had to put something on the board itself, it could've been a simple advisory explaining that "iwrotesham is no longer a member of this forum." This guy, though, had to get in his zinger, his parting shot. Not only that, but it was a parting shot that attributed ulterior motives to me and impugned my very reasons for coming to the Ross board, almost as if to lend credence to the skepticism that caused me to seek out the board in the first place!

And I'm the heavy here, in certain people's minds?

Sorry, folks. Life isn't that neat.

Besides, correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't the Ross moderator an anonymous entity? I don't know the answer to that. I'm just assuming. I could be wrong. But if I'm right, then between the two of us, who's the only one who's publicly known in this teapot tempest? Point being, even if I posted all sorts of nasty things about the moderator's mother, can you really have an ad hominem attack where there's no...hominem? I'm just askin'.

Maybe the Rick Ross people take a Hypocritic Oath?

Last week, and unbeknown to me at first, I got dragged into the discussion on the Rick Ross Cult Education Forum. Apparently people on the board were uneasy about some of our regular contributors. It was implied that maybe I'd been duped somehow, put under the spell of the covert Byron Katie loyalists here on SHAMblog. Perhaps I'd even been conscripted into the service of cult interests by people who'd used their advanced neurolinguistic skills with surgical precision to bypass my usual defenses; presumably they'd reached deep into my subconscious and ingratiated themselves with me, thereby softening my skepticism about BK in particular and psycho-charlatanism in general. To some people on the Ross board—reading between the lines—this concern was further magnified by the fact that I'd never delivered on my long-ago vow to blog about Katie. (I mean, clearly, if I don't blog about someone, what other conclusion could there be except that I'm now a boot-licking sycophant, right?) If nothing else, the suggestion seemed to be that I wasn't doing a very good job of policing my blog or protecting my dumb, gullible readers from the evil intentions of the BK riff-raff.

In fairness, it was also theorized—in my defense, I guess—that I might be quietly preparing a book on Katie, or at least a major magazine piece.

Given all this armchair speculation (to which I was finally alerted by another of our regulars), I thought it was time for me to appear in the flesh on the Ross board and set the record straight about (a) my blog and (b) my approach to blogging/intellectual discourse in the first place. And yes, I'll admit, I figured I was entitled to do so as well as to offer my 2 cents on some of the attendant issues. And in light of the nature of some of the remarks on the Ross board, I figured I'd be allowed some leeway in making my point.

I figured wrong.

You can read the evolution of the thread yourself by clicking here,* but the upshot is that I ended up recusing myself from the board—and then being banned—after I committed the unforgivable sin of trying to (a) point out that I value fairness and the free exchange of ideas, and (b) bring in some contextual examples that I thought helped clarify the point. Evidently that kind of heretical thinking is unwelcome on the Ross board. I got the impression that if you're not there to witch-hunt, to participate in a gleeful savaging, well, don't bother.

But here's the best part. Not content to simply ban me privately or at worst to post some generic notification that I'd been banned, the moderator felt compelled to chastise me (on the board itself) for being too self-centered, implying that I'd come to the board for the purposes of "self-promotion." As exhibit A in this line of reasoning, he offered this gem:

"Count how many times he used the word 'I' in his last post.

Very telling."

Naturally I was not allowed a rebuttal, as that would've been the fair-minded thing to do.

I've said it before, but I'm always amazed that those who cry the loudest about "brainwashing!" are often the most philosophically tyrannous in their own activities, insisting on absolute and unwavering loyalty to their point of view. Free speech begins and ends with them.

Anyway, I thought my final comment to the moderator—which, of course, will never see light of day—was worth including here, unedited. Yeah, I was angry. But I basically stand by it nevertheless:

Hey...dickhead...first of all, I use "I" because, unlike some people, presumably including yourself, who have the apparent benefit of being omniscient, I like to introduce my opinions as my opinions, not universal truths. Secondly I do happen to have some bona fides in the field as a result of the years of research that went into SHAM, so I think I can say certain things on my own authority without having to footnote them. Thirdly I never viewed this board as "self-promotional." I got dragged into it by people who suspected that I (oh, damn, there's that offending word again!) was being "duped" by some of the folks who post on my (am I allowed to use my?) blog. (Wait, let me amend that: "...some of the people who post on Steve Salerno's blog." There; that better now?)

Bottom line, maybe you think you're very clever to allow yourself that coup de grace in explaining my banning from the blog [sic], but I've been dealing with pompous assholes like you my whole life—people who present themselves as "reformers" or "truth seekers" but in fact are every bit as didactic and closed-minded as their philosophical targets, the only difference being that they come at the subject from the other pole in the discussion. So go ahead, have some fun at my expense. Maybe it'll make you feel a little bit less inadequate (i.e. the equivalent of rhetorical Viagra)?

P.S. I think I'm going to take this up with Michael Shermer, too—"the tyranny of the reformers....", i.e., how skepticism sometimes gets perverted to an agenda all its own. I don't know how he'll feel about it as an overall topic, but maybe there's a good article in it, if I can frame it properly.

* Scroll down to the first comment from "iwrotesham," which is me, then go forward from there. The whole thing unfolds over just two pages or so.