O-O-O-Obama

Pictured here is the newsstand at Fondamente Nove on the north side of the islands that make up Venice, Italy two days after the Obama victory. Obama, oh-yes!

Last week I was there for a conference on art, culture and the public sphere. The conference was terrific, but the downside was that I missed the election day celebration at home.

Friends said it felt like one images V-day would have felt. The end of one long war . . . The liberation of a nation held hostage. One friend reported that back in New York everyone was dancing in the street, coming up and hugging her and high-fiving her as she walked up to the Apollo Theatre for the celebration in Harlem. People, she said, were wearing buttons with photographs of departed parents and grandparents, wishing they could be here to witness the historic transition.

At the conference over in Venice, over lunch, a sociologist from the mideast asked me how I felt about the election results and I surprised myself as my eyes started to well up. Teary-eyed I said what so many have said — that the Obama victory is a repudiation not only of 8 years of presidential criminality, but of hundreds of years of racial bigotry.

I was apprehensive early on when it looked as though makeover maven Oprah Winfrey was choosing the next president of the United States. And I was annoyed with that primary remark "You're like-able enough Hillary." But in the end it's easy to see that Oprah got this right. When America needed an extreme makeover, it looked toward Oprah and Obama. O-yes.

Imagine: The Secret of Life Now Online . . .

Someone has posted the BBC interview that Alan Yentob did with me last February on YouTube, so I can share it with you now.

This was part of Yentob's cultural news program Imagine. The episode' – The Secret of Life — is Yentob's quest for meaning of self-help culture . . .

Package Less || The Movement Movement

Choreographer Martha Williams and her company, The Movement Movement, have developed a performance piece inspired by Self-Help, Inc. and the issues it raises about "human capital." Package Less will premiere at the Soho Joyce Theater (155 Mercer Street, New York, NY) on Thursday, June 19th, 8 pm at 8pm and will run through Saturday, June 21st.

For more information, visit The Movement Movement's website.

May Day 2008: Is Red the New Black?

In honor of May Day 2008, I must ask, is red the new black?

Red took a beating for roughly fifty years. From 1945 until just recently the color was viciously maligned, with children told that they were better dead than, well, you know, red.

But recently red has emerged as the color of choice for charities and corporate marketers alike.

If you have great images of red in marketing campaigns, and want to include them in our gallery of red, kindly send them to micki at selfhelpinc dot com.

Imagine: Credit Where Credit Is Due

Last week Alan Yentob and his marvelous crew of producers at the BBC aired an episode of the cultural program Imagine focused on the rise of self-help culture.

Yentob had been on a Panglossian (is that a word?) quest for the truth about self-help and happiness, and on the way he stopped by in New York City and interviewed me about my take on self-help culture.

Part of what I said is "Now we live in a culture of constant change and turnover . . . you not only have to be employed, but constantly employable. Not only married, but constantly marriageable. And that is the moment self-help emerges as a powerful literature."

It's a lovely summary, and I'm sure I did indeed say that, but the credit for this language rightly belongs to Jerald Wallulis who wrote a wonderful book called The New Insecurity: The End of the Standard Job and Family.

When I mention this idea in Self-Help, Inc, naturally I cite Wallulis and his work, but somehow in the ebb and flow of the interview I must have forgotten to mention this intellectual debt.

Apologies to Wallulis, whose book is a veritable goldmine of ideas about the use of anxiety and cultures of self-governance as instruments of social control. And thanks to the BBC for a thought-provoking program.

Self-Help Yourself

Stopped at a traffic light on Manhattan's Westside Highway last week I had a chance to snap a picture of this billboard. Self-help yourself!

At first I thought it was an ad for a self-storage facility, since there is huge one over there by the Hudson River, and the colors for the company that owns it are pretty similar to these, but no, I was wrong. Just an ad for a job search website, which, judging by the state of the U.S. economy, we may all be in need of very shortly.

But I've not been stuck in traffic for a full six months, so what's my excuse for the inexcusable blog silence? I've not been out here blogging about much of anything . . . didn't weigh in on the good doctor Phil's heinous misjudgment in springing the ailing Britney from her 72-hour clinical observation period, or his egregious breach of professional ethics in sharing with a national audience his observations about "his client." (Well, who ever thought Dr. Phil had professional ethics in the first place?) And I haven't chimed in on the rise of O politics, the Oprah-Obama endorsement. But I just can't help myself this week. I have to say something about two Oprah episodes this week.

On the first of the two shows, Oprah revisits The Secret, continuing to claim that the magical thinking contained therein can work magic for anyone who believes. My dearest childhood friend called me the morning after the show aired. (But not, dear readers, because I'd done a creative visualization summing her attention). She called to rant about her shock at the unmitigated arrogance of the bubble story — the silver Tiffany bubble blower story — that Oprah told as evidence of deep knowledge of The Secret, of her election as a very special chosen person.

I have to tell the bubble-blower story here because this part of the episode is not recapped on the Oprah website. Winfrey had a bubble-blowing world-record-breaking champion on her show recently, and in the midst of his bubble-blowing she'd said, "Wow, I'm gonna have to get me some bubbles." Then, when she got back to her desk, she discovered a silver Tiffany bubble-blowing wand with several bottles of bubble solution. She was astonished. She asked her assistant where it had come from and she said she'd gotten it for her as a present several weeks before. And she hadn't noticed. She hadn't noticed a present that one of her staff members had gotten her several weeks earlier. It had just sat there, unopened and unacknowledged, on her desk for weeks.

The message Oprah takes from this — and tells the world — is that this is the miraculous power of The Secret at work and that she is special and chosen and that the universe has pre-ordered her a bubble blower to accommodate her needs, desires, and whims even before she knows she has them. One of Oprah's guests chimed in that Oprah's so special that she doesn't get just any bubble blower — that the universe sends her a silver one from Tiffany's.

The message my friend took from this story is that Oprah must be a pretty awful person to work for if she doesn't notice, let alone acknowledge, a present from a staff member that's been sitting on her desk for weeks. Even a present in a Tiffany bag. Either that, or she just has way too much stuff.

Which brings us to the next show, which was about having too much stuff. The following day Oprah hyped the new book of her pal Peter Walsh, the decluttering "expert." Like all self-help gurus, Walsh had to find a way to write a diet book even if his area of expertise is clearing out the clutter from our overly consumptive households. He's just come out with a book called "Does This Clutter Make My Butt Look Fat? An Easy Plan for Losing Weight and Living More." (Yes, that's really true — I can't make this up.) His idea: declutter your home and you'll lose weight.

To launch the book, Walsh and his team ambush makeover a woman who is struggling with weight gain in the wake of a late second trimester miscarriage and subsequent kidney failure that requires dialysis and a transplant. The woman is bereft, and exhausted, caring for a husband and two children who don't seem to do much to support her with any of the housework, and don't seem to realize that their wife-mother-housekeeper is seriously ill. Her kids have also gained weight as the family is eating out and ordering in food since the mother is too tired to cook and clean as she once did.

But rather than deal with these complicated family care giving dynamics, Walsh rifles through the woman's stuff, blithely tossing her belongings in bins, until the woman loses it and runs, literally screaming and cursing, from the house. Walsh pursues her and persuades her that all of this is good — exactly the "breakthrough" they needed to get her to get "real" about what's going on in her life.

In the end we see a clean and tidy home — a total makeover for the house — and we're supposed to believe that the family is healed and that their weight issues are solved as well. The woman and her children sat in the Oprah show audience, looking ever bit as awkward and unhappy as they'd been in their home that was overflowing with clutter, still desperately in need of human attention, albeit not the voyeuristic sort one gets from an international television audience. They were still greatly in need of care, nurturance, security, not to mention an organ transplant. None of these much needed phenomena were going to magically materialize simply because they'd wished for them, or because they'd tossed away their extra stuff, or even because they were featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show.

There is one thing that Peter Walsh is right about in all of this . . . that all the stuff around us can be seen as a symptom. Capitalism has made it vastly easier to have more and more things rather than have clearer and better attention. Capitalism's strong point is that it's great at producing lots of things. Its weak point is that it leaves each of us alienated from ourselves, our work, each other, and from our human nature.

Maybe that's why I thought the "Self-help yourself" billboard was for a self-storage space . . . as the demand for mini-storage facilities escalates each year, we're storing away more and more of our stuff as we try to hold on to our selves.

Self-storage spaces, like self-help culture in general, are just stopgap measures for system that's staggering under its own weight, and poised to crumble.


Keywords: The Secret • Rhonda Byrne • Oprah • Dr. Phil • Peter Walsh • declutter

The Secret's Success

This week Micki's critique of The Secret can be found in The Nation. Check it out . . .

Dream Big (And Forget The Secret)

A couple of months ago a reporter from The Wall Street Journal rang me to ask me what I thought about Rhonda Byrne's bestselling straight-to-DVD self-help movie The Secret. I hadn't been paying much attention to it — after all, these folks are telling us that whatever we think about, we attract. You can bet that I wasn't interested in attracting two dozen would-be self-help gurus (and a couple of seasoned self-help pros) in search of paying syncophants.

The WSJ reporter and I marveled at how well the DVD had riffed on the visual vocabulary of another bestseller, The Da Vinci Code, and chatted about how there really is nothing new in the putative "secret" — folks have been selling this "believe it and you will see it" tripe for as long as there have been self-help books and even before.

We talked about the novelty of Bryne's "straight to DVD" marketing approach that's generated a huge book market for her product. And we talked about how tired and desperate Americans must be if they're buying a $34.99 DVD that tells you that the universe is essentially one giant catalog, get your order in any time, supplies are unlimited. And then the Journal ran the piece, using everything I'd shared as background. Good enough. At least word was getting out about the very unsecret nature of The Secret.

But that was all the way back in January — before the Oprah two-episode testimonials about the "miracle" of "the secret." Before the recordbreaking print run for the reorder by the book's publisher. Before the two-hour Larry King Live treatment, which Steve Salerno quips works as a prime time infomercial for this snake oil. Before Cynthia McFadden did a Nightline feature debunking the pseudo-science behind The Secret and I saw my former neighbor Valerie Reiss (Hi Valerie!), who works at Beliefnet.com, talking about The Secret and how it doesn't work well with most faith traditions as there's no place for compassion. Valerie has written an affecting piece about how, as a cancer survivor, the ideas in The Secret roil her.

While all this PR was spinning, I'd been meaning to post about The Secret — because it was everywhere, and because it was so annoying — but I just had better things to think about. I just couldn't focus on it. Didn't want to give it too much attention. And sure didn't want to attract it.

Then Barbara Ehrenreich wrote a wonderful post on her blog about The Secret, and I figured, well said and that's enough.

But today I broke my vow of silence about The Secret. I got a call from NPR's Talk of the Nation to come into their studios in New York and chat with host Neal Conan and Crown Book publisher Steve Ross about self-help publishing and The Secret. NPR is always fun, so I set out in the unseasonably warm March day to talk with them. You can listen in here.

All the while that we were talking about the Byrne bunk that promises if you dream it, it will be, I was thinking about another sort of dream, that "I've got a dream" sort of dream that Martin Luther King, Jr. evoked so eloquently from a podium in the shadow of the Washington Monument nearly half a century ago. That's the sort of dreaming and visualizing that I'm interested in hearing about. That's the sort of "believe it and it will be" that one hopes would make a difference, though we all know that it wasn't just the dreaming and believing, but the marches, the sit-ins, the meetings, the blood, the toil, the sweat and the tears that got us the civil rights legislation that was won.

Still, dreams to do matter, and that is what Stephen Duncombe argues so eloquently in his new book Dream: Re-Imagining Progressive Politics in an Age of Fantasy. Duncombe shows us how progressive activists can harness the power of imagination and fantasy to see our values realized in the world. No self-help book, but genuine help for all of us, check out Dream at a bookstore near you.

Keywords: The Secret • Rhonda Byrne • Oprah • The Wall Street Journal • Steve Salerno • Larry King Live • Valerie Reiss • Barbara Ehrenreich • Cynthia McFadden • Nightline • Stephen Duncombe

Good News for Belabored Professionals

Labor Day came and went, but not without some good news for belabored Americans. Bestselling author Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickeled and Dimed, Bait and Switch) has launched United Professionals (UP), a new advocacy organization dedicated to assisting working professionals.

With the support of a grant from the SEIU (Service Employees International Union), Ehrenreich and friends aim to develop a national voice for the professional employees whose job security, benefits, access to health insurance, and possibilities for a secure retirement have steadily eroded over the past two decades.

In Self-Help, Inc I argued that anxious American workers turn to self-help culture to quell their economic insecurity. Here's an opportunity to turn to political advocacy and organizing instead.

The Long Silence

They say something about silence being golden, but that is so not so in the world of blogging, where hits are golden, and new content on an hourly basis is the most golden of all.

This site has been as silent — as moribund — as the lonely folks I wrote about in February who'd come to Barnes and Noble to die.

It's not that nothing has been going on with Self-Help, Inc. On the contrary, it's been a busy productive time, with a heated back and forth with WNYC's Brian Lehrer in March, and a dialogue with Ellen and Julia Lupton about life as a work of art at Design Your Life, and a chat with journalist Linda Formichelli about ending self-help addiction.

But certainly not so busy that I ought to have grown totally silent in this space.

So what happened? Why the lull?

I had been meaning to write about the deleterious effects of red-baiting after the Brian Lehrer interview — where the dialogue swerved toward a not very interesting (from my point of view) — discussion of whether this writer has a soft spot in her heart for the economic and social theory of one mid-nineteenth century political economist. When so much is at stake with the political apathy that self-help culture breeds, who cares — really, who cares? — what one sociologist thinks about Karl Marx? But that's the path we went down, and for some reason I just couldn't bring us back.

Red-baiting on The Brian Lehrer Show? What has this world come to? I guess it makes for better radio to go on the attack — Rush and the rest of those folks on the far right have taught us that.

All of this got me thinking about civility and silence — about how the bombastic and accusatory can silence (however temporarily) even those among us, like myself, who typically have plenty to say.

Does one need to know tae-kwan-doe to do a radio show?

No Place to Die

Early on in my research on self-help culture — back when I was poking a little fun at quantitative sociology — I'd gone into the Barnes and Noble on Union Square in Manhattan with a tape measure and calculated the total length of the shelf space devoted to self-help titles.

Back then B & N had those fantastic overstuffed arm chairs where you could park yourself and read for hours, or pull a set together for a chat with a friend. It was the most inviting of retail spaces, and I bought a lot of books there, in gratitude for that sort of public comfort.

Today I was back at that store, searching out a warm, indoor space where my daughter could amuse herself while her godmother and I caught up over coffee. (For out of town readers, we Manhattan apartment dwellers rely on such public spaces when we can't open up our apartments to guests for one reason or another.)

To my surprise, there weren't any chairs on the selling floor — no overstuffed comfortable arm chairs at all. Not even any stiff wooden ones. So we leaned against some displays and chatted while my daughter read some books and took part in a kid's story hour.

When I went to pick up my kid from the story hour, there were parents gathered around, many sitting, none too comfortably, on the floor.

"Wow," I said to one B & N employee, "It'd be great if you had some chairs so the parents had a place to sit."

"Yes," she said, pausing as if to consider whether to say more, "We had to get rid of them."

For a moment I was trying to imagine how the chairs could create some kind of inventory control problem.

Then another employee, someone new to the store, said "Yeah, how come we don't have any chairs?"

The first employee looked pained, and replied quietly, maybe so the kids wouldn't notice, "Too many deaths."

Employee number two and I fell silent, trying to comprehend the magnitude of this disclosure.

"Too many deaths?" I asked. "You mean people came in and sat down and died?"

"Yes, it got to the point where we had one a week."

I could feel my eyes welling up, so I made some off-handed remark about being grateful I'm well enough to stand.

Now I'm not sure what to think. If the B & N employee is to be believed — and she didn't seem to be making this up — then one has to wonder . . .

In a world with miles and miles of books on how to care for your inner child or win friends and influence people or become an automatic millionaire, we've come to a point where not only do some of us have no place to sit for a chat, others, the less fortunate among us, don't even have a comfortable, comforting place to die.

To help the homeless in New York City, contact the Coalition for the Homeless.

Keywords: self-help • homelessness • public space • retail space • New York City

When Self-Help Can Help

Last week bestselling self-help author and pastor Rick Warren joined with other evangelical leaders in signing an Evangelical Climate Initiative calling for federal legislation to limit greenhouse gas emissions.

Warren's influence counts. He's the head of the Saddleback Church in Lake Forest, California, a mega-church with some 22,000 weekly congregants, and the author of The Purpose-Driven Life, with 25 million copies sold, a mega-seller among bestselling self-help books. In fact, Warren and the other evangelicals may well sway the stalwart Bush administration, which has denied the relevance of green house gases in global warming.

Here's a moment when a self-help author recognizes that individual bootstrapping (buying green, driving hybrids, and so on) just isn't going to do the trick. Hallelujah.

Keywords: self-help • global warming • Rick Warren

Resolute We Are . . . Some Thoughts on New Year's Resolutions

Resolute we are, usually from January 1st, until just about now, right around Martin Luther King Day. Perhaps it is no coincidence that our individual, personal resolve founders just as we're celebrating a holiday commemorating one of America's great heroes—a man who was committed to combating the systemic forces at the heart of so many individual troubles.

Take weight loss. According to 43 Things, the online home of lists and resolutions, losing weight is the all-time top goal of all resolution makers visiting their site. Apparently we are more desperate than ever to fight the putative battle against obesity, a war that supposedly begins at home. But let's think about it. Even if there is an obesity epidemic—an idea which is thoughtfully disputed by fellow-OUP author J. Eric Oliver in his recent book Fat Politics—why would it be that Americans would suddenly be so hefty?

There are social and economic forces at work here. As Barbara Ehrenreich points out, for many Americans weight gain is an occupational hazard. Confined as they are to their cubicles for 8 to 10 hours a day, and then in automotive or mass transit commutes of another couple of hours, white collar workers are hard-pressed to fit in the 10,000 steps each day that fitness experts urge we take for maintaining a healthy level of functioning. While some of us are fortunate to live in urban areas like New York City, where shoe leather is still among the commuting options, in most American cities the rise of the automobile, fueled not only by gasoline, but also by state supports for the automotive industry in the form of highway subsidies, has made walking not only difficult, but dangerous.

Then consider our national food supply, laced as it is, with corn syrup, a diabetes- and obesity-inducing additive that is a consequence of the glut of corn on the market. Why the corn glut? Because the USDA subsidizes the cultivation of corn.

Finally there is the matter of sleep deprivation. American working people, in particular mothers (and occasionally fathers) who are working second shifts at home, are chronically sleep deprived. Sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1989:10) writes of working mothers who "talk about sleep the way hungry people talk about food." And interestingly enough, recent research suggests that sleep deprivation can interfere with weight-loss because the adrenal glands in the bodies of the chronically-stressed and sleep-deprived churn out too much cortisol, a hormone that encourages the body to hold onto fat, in case of impending famine.

In reality, the famine is already upon us. On the average American workers are earning less today than in 1972. Don't just take it from me. [To read more, visit Oxford UP's blog . . .]

Keywords: resolutions • weight loss • diets • social activism • sleep deprivation • current affairs • Martin Luther King Day

Why Believe "Self-help's Big Lie"?

Steve Salerno got himself a Los Angeles Times Op-Ed piece on New Year's Day, denouncing self-help culture as a big lie. While he and I agree on some things, we don't agree on others.

Here's my Letter to the Editor that the Times elected not to include in their line-up of responses . . . I guess no one likes to think about the economic underpinnings of the anxiety that sends folks to read self-help books . . .

To the Editor:

Steve Salerno rightly points out that much of American self-help culture is a mass deception. ("Self-help's Big Lie," 1/1/06). But his analysis begs the question of why Americans are hooked on self-help. If Americans aren't just gullible or plain stupid, why are they turning to the likes of Tony Robbins, Stephen R. Covey, and the good doctors Phil and Laura?

The answer is simple: faced with declining earning power (real wages are about 20 percent less now than they were in 1972) and unstable, unpredictable employment opportunities—not to mentioning destabilized families and soaring divorce rates—Americans are searching for answers. Contemporary Americans are not just overworked, they're belabored: they're at work on themselves, struggling to remain not just employed, but ever re-employable; not just married, but also re-marriageable.

Americans turn to self-help culture for advice on how to minimize their economic and interpersonal risks in an increasingly competitive global context. Helping Americans actually minimize these risks is the important work of the sociology, social activism, and social policy that Mr. Salerno so blithely dismisses as "sociological junk food and a culture of victimization."

Micki McGee

Speaking of Oprah

Speaking of Oprah, I'm reading a quite dazzling work of cultural criticism by sociologist Eva Illouz. Oprah Winfrey and the Glamour of Misery (Columbia University Press, 2003) is Illouz's analysis of how Winfrey has fashioned an empire out of suffering and moral certitude. This is a must-read for students of culture and fans of Oprah. Illouz, along with Steve Salerno—from a quite different vantage—have made me rethink my position on the role of victimization in self-help culture.

Steve Salerno and Mr. "Chicken Soup" Hansen

Check out Steve Salerno's blog for the back story on how he wound up talking with Mr. "Chicken Soup" Hansen instead of that giant of the self-help industry, Tony Robbins.

Soup Slurping: Wrong, Wrong, and Wrong

One more slurp regarding the Chicken Soup expert's "facts" . . .

In his CNN Anderson Cooper 360 interview, Mark Hansen says that only Americans have self-help culture and that Andrew Carnegie started it all.

Wrong on both counts.

Ben Franklin's book The Way to Wealth (1758) predates Carnegies' The Gospel of Wealth (1900) and The Empire of Business (1902) by well over a hundred years.

And Scottish author Samuel Smiles' Self-Help (1859) was the first book ever with "self-help" in the title.

And Hansen has the gall to call Steve Salerno incompetent.

Make that wrong on three counts.

"Chicken Soup" Cockfight

Mark Hansen, co-founder of the bestselling Chicken Soup for the Soul inspirational book series, faced-off with Steve Salerno, author of SHAM: How the Self-Help Movement Made America Helpless last week on Anderson Cooper 360.

Hansen came out claws a-swinging, spurs a-flashing, calling Salerno "incompetent" for not expecting SHAM to be a #1 bestseller. It's just amazing how these saccharine-soaked-self-help authors go for the jugular when anyone dares to suggest that their advice might not be all that helpful . . . or worse, that it might be damaging.

Read more here or download a video clip to check it out!

The People Who Brought You the Weekend

Earlier in the month I spoke with Newsweek.com reporter Dan Brillman about self-help culture, and last week that interview ran. Dan and I had an incredibly interesting conversation that lasted more than an hour, so I didn't envy him the task of distilling it to a 1,000 word Q & A.

One of the things that didn't make it into the Newsweek.com article was our discussion of how the rise of self-improvement culture also parallels the decline in the strength of organized labor. Entrepreneurial up-from-under striving becomes an appealing idea when more collective and community-based solutions are absent or in decline.

We talked about how a revitalized labor movement that takes its model from Hollywood's guilds could help Americans re-engage with their colleagues in the interest of mutual aid and support. We talked about the Freelancer's Union, and its importance in promoting the idea of portable benefits.

People feel that they have to think of themselves as the CEOs of Me, Inc. when there is no social safety net: no health insurance for 46 million Americans, evaporating pension funds for workers who still think they even have pensions (reported in The New York Times Magazine, 10/30/05), ongoing attacks on social security, and a minimum wage that won't support a single person, let alone a family.

It's not surprising that Americans have embraced a culture of entrepreneurial uplift and fantasies of rags-to-riches, but a revitalized labor movement would offer a more sturdy solution. Remember, as the bumper sticker says: these are the people who brought you the weekend.

Thanks to Barbara Ehrenreich . . .

. . . who mentioned in a recent interview that she's found Self-Help, Inc. to be interesting reading . . .

Self-Help Authors—For 'Em or Agin 'Em?

Yesterday a young Harvard graduate who had written a self-help book approached me, introduced herself, and said, in a decidely confrontational voice, "You're against me."

"I'm not sure what you mean," I said.

"I read your web site," she said. "And you're against me and what I do."

I paused to consider her. She looked genuinely angry.

"No, I'm not against you," I said. "I'm against a culture that tells us that we can do it all alone. And I'm against a society that provides not even the most minimal safety net for its citizens."

She looked puzzled.

Sometime later she said, "I want to offer you some advice about your web site. I'm a smart person—at least I think I'm a smart person—and I couldn't tell what your book is about from your web site."

Apparently. As to whether she's a smart person, I can't say.

So let's set the record straight, at least on the topic of self-help authors and self-help books: Am I for 'em or agin 'em?

Neither, actually. I've met a number of self-help authors and it seems to me that they are mostly well-intentioned. A couple seemed downright brilliant. And most seem to want to help people while making a living doing something they themselves like doing—writing, giving talks and lectures, running workshops. So I'm not against them. Never have been. Doubt I ever will be. Heck, on a good day, that's almost the same thing I do.

What I'm against is a social order that offers only individual solutions to problems that are global, economic, and systemic. And I'm not wildly enthusiastic about an industry that makes people feel as though all their problems are consequences of poor "choices," bad judgment, or lack of willpower.

The Hidden—and High—Costs of Makeover TV

It's a little-known fact that reality television had its genesis in the Hollywood writers' strike of 2001. As writers threatened a strike that would have shutdown the sets of popular sit-coms and dramas, network executives turned to the non-union, almost writer-free genre, the reality TV program. Makeover television, along with the various survivalist dramas, became a growth industry.

But there is a hidden cost in makeover and other reality TV: the costs to the contestants (or "makeover winners") and their families. The New York Daily News (9/18/05) reports that one family has filed a complaint against ABC and its Extreme Makeover program in Los Angeles Superior Court when a promised makeover that wasn't completed resulted in a family suicide:

The producers of "Extreme Makeover" promised Deleese Williams "a Cinderella-like" fix for a deformed jaw, crooked teeth, droopy eyes and tiny boobs that would "transform her life and destiny."

But when the ABC reality show dumped the Texas mom the night before the life-changing plastic surgeries, it shattered her family's dream and triggered her sister Kellie McGee's (no relation to your blog host) suicide, says a bombshell lawsuit filed in L.A. Superior Court.

As part of the premakeover hype, producers coaxed McGee and other family members to trash Williams' looks on videotape, the suit alleges. When they suddenly pulled the plug on the project, and the promised "Hollywood smile like Cindy Crawford," a guilt-ridden McGee fell apart.

"Kellie could not live with the fact that she had said horrible things that hurt her sister. She fell to pieces. Four months later, she ended her life with an overdose of pills, alcohol and cocaine," said Wesley Cordova, a lawyer for Williams.
"This family is shredded. There is a human cost to this," Cordova said.

[ . . . ]

For years, Williams' friends and family "didn't notice or pretended not to notice" her homely looks, but once she got picked for the show, they were coached to focus on nothing but her physical flaws, the suit says.

In McGee's taped interview, she tried to play up her sister's good points. But the hard-nosed producers "peppered Kellie with questions about her childhood with the ugly Deleese . . . and repeatedly put words in her mouth," the suit says.

To please the producers, Williams' mother-in-law also laid it on thick. "She said things like 'I never believed my son would marry such an ugly woman.' " Cordova says. The family's comments never aired on TV, but Williams, who was in an adjoining room, heard them all.

The experience ruined her family life. "Now that she returned in the same condition in which she left, there were no secrets, no hidden feelings, no reward," the suit says.show's producers sent her sister packing. "These programs are cheap to produce - there are no actors or screenwriters to pay. But there is a very high human cost," Cordova said.

This isn't the first time that a participant in a reality TV program has taken his own life. Najai Turpin, a contestant in the boxing reality TV program The Contender, shot himself in the head when he learned that he would not advance to win the million-dollar jackpot. Turpin left behind a two-year-old daughter. And in 1997, Sinisa Savija, a participant on the Swedish version of the show "Survivor," committed suicide after he was voted off the island.

These are just some of the hidden—and high—costs of makeover television.

Spectacular Vulnerability

Usually we associate spectacles with displays of strength and coordination — parades, marching bands, air shows with fighter pilots soaring high, stadium half-time shows. But Katrina offered us spectacular displays of vulnerability, desperation, and political impotence.

Poverty at home — not the swollen-bellied poverty of far-off Darfur or tsunami-ravaged Indonesia or Thailand, but American poverty — was rendered telegenic. And the racial class and caste system that is usually glossed over came into sharp and undeniable focus.

Economic vulnerabilty that is usually private and invisible was made spectacularly public. Like the fingerprints rendered into evidence at a crime scene — for this sort of poverty in a nation as wealthy as the U.S. can only be thought of as criminal — the storm waters traced the usually invisible lines into stark relief.

As the waters rose, the frayed and threadbare social safety net was all too apparent as tens of thousands of people fell through, stranded on roofs, in a squalid convention center and sports arena, or wading through chest-deep vermin-infested and toxin-ladden flood waters.

I had a chance to speak with business journalist David Schepp about these issues earlier this week.

"Help Yourself"

The idea of helping oneself is deeply ingrained in American traditions and idioms. God is reported to help those that do.

And this week people in New Orleans needed God’s help because the federal government ensured that there was little else available.

The expression "help yourself"—the quintessential American expression of hospitality—would be the height of rudeness elsewhere in the world. Take Japan, for example. In a land where drinking companions routinely refill each other’s glasses, no host or hostess would ever utter the expression "help yourself." There is no Japanese equivalent.

But here in bootstrapping America, helping oneself is applauded. Except when those who are helping themselves are poor black Americans.

Much has been written and said about the racially charged captions of black and white refugees wading through chest-deep floodwaters with necessities salvaged from local stores. The white flood survivors, we were told, had found food. The black survivors had looted them.

But let’s take it a step farther. I liked what Jesse Jackson said—If you look at $6 a gallon for gasoline in Atlanta, that’s looting too.* And when the Gulf Coast clean-up contracts are awarded to Vice President Dick Cheney's pals at Halliburton subsidiary Kellogg, Brown, and Root, I think we can call that looting, too.


Note: Jackson made the remark during a television interview on his arrival in New Orleans that has not emerged online.

Steve and I

SHAM author Steve Salerno and I didn't set out to be the "his and hers" of self-help criticism, but here we are, partnered up in nearly a half-dozen reviews, seemingly destined to operate in an inadvertent point-counterpoint, the yin and yang (or I guess that would be yang and yin) critics of self-improvement culture.

Publishers Weekly praises Self-Help, Inc. for being "gracefully written" and "less caustic" than Salerno's Sham, while Psychology Today says Sham is more "fun to read" but that his "critique gives way to contempt."

Salon.com’s Laura Miller lauds Salerno's "solid shoe-leather reporting" but prefers my "tough-minded analysis" and "formidable grasp" of the philosophical underpinnings of self-help culture.

Steve and I have never met, but if you're out there reading this, Steve, I want to say, pleased to meet you, partner. Let’s dance.

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One place where a little contact improvisation between our arguments might be helpful is on the question of victimization.

Salerno argues that self-help culture fosters a pervasive sense of powerlessness. He observes, as did Wendy Kaminer more than a decade ago, that Twelve-Step programs ask participants to focus on their powerlessness. Meanwhile other sorts of self-help programs promote an impossible sense of omnipotence—the idea that you are completely and personally responsible for every aspect of your life. This "either-or" world of abject impotence or absolute omnipotence, Salerno says, fosters helplessness.

Salerno has taken up the problem of what social theorists would call the limits of human "agency." Just how much of what you do in your life is up to you, and how much is a function of historical forces—social, economic, and other conditions that are well-beyond your control? The trouble is that he doesn’t know exactly where to take this problem of the pairs, so let’s pick up where he left off . . .

As a species we humans prefer the world of absolutes—the either-or, the black-white, good-evil, red states-blue states, or what a freshman writing instructor might call the unfortunate tendency to dichotomize. This preference for the binary started early on for us . . . back when as infants we had to figure out what was what, (m)other or me.

Most of us—with the exception of those mired in some sort of psychosis—sorted out that there was a difference between mom (or whoever was serving up breakfast and changing our diapers) and me. But the trouble is that, little ones that we were, we didn’t really have the capacity to understand that the distinction between self and other isn’t absolute. And to cope with the incredible frustration of being so dependent—so powerless—we came up with a fantasy that we were all-powerful and omnipotent. Seems as though this same fantasy is still rattling around in self-improvement culture.

One antidote to this yes-no, black-white thinking is to see that we are not fully bounded individuals, cut off from each other and the environment. Rather there are multiple overlaps and couplings: we come out of others, both figuratively and literally, culturally and corporeally.

Doesn't it seem that this sort of commonality is the real source of our power?

Cindy Sheehan: Mother, Metaphor, Mat(t)er

One argument that I make at the conclusion of Self-Help, Inc. is that our culture is in need of a revitalized metaphor of motherhood. Not the insular version of motherhood that one finds in the literature of recovery—taking care of the wounded "inner child" that each of us supposedly carries around. Instead we need to invoke a more robust metaphor (and reality) of caring for each other, our children, our culture, our nation, our environment.

George Lakoff has been making a similar case in his role as advisor to the exiled Democratic party. (I've been a fan since first reading his Metaphors We Live By, co-authored with Mark Johnson, in the early 1980s.) Lakoff argues that concerned Americans need to mobilize the image and metaphor of maternal care to counter the radical, conservative right who won the White House and Congress by appealing to the metaphor of the strong, disciplining father.

Enter Cindy Sheehan, Crawford, TX, August 2005.

Sheehan has captured media attention because she embodies what the media calls "the ultimate sacrifice." Usually we understand the "ultimate sacrifice" as being giving one’s own life. But motherhood, with its incredible capacity to blur the boundaries between self and other, allows Seehan to make the "ultimate sacrifice" yet live to tell—and ask—about it.

Mother-mater-matter asks vacationing-vacate-vacant father for an explanation: how to make meaning from her loss. In the process, Sheehan makes her own.


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Self-Help, Inc.: Makeover Culture in American Life

Metaphors We Live By

Welcome to Self-Help, Inc.

Welcome to Self-Help, Inc.— a place to think about makeover culture, and a place to imagine ways we might make over our culture.