"Every day in every way, I'm getting better and better."

     That's the self-help mantra coined by the French psychologist Emile Coue (1857-1926), the one that caught on in the 1920s, the era of Flappers and Banana Oil.  People recited it like the prayer Coue meant it to be--he advocated its ritualized repetition at least twenty times a day, especially in the morning and evening.  He wanted the message to seep down into the unconscious mind, which would eventually accept the premise as real.  Fake it till you make it.
     The "power of positive thinking" is how the minister Norman Vincent Peale (1898-1993) described the same idea, a career-making slogan that he preached and audiences paid to hear--and readers paid to read. It was a good living.  And people did buy the idea and tried to keep a positive attitude that would rub off on every aspect of their lives.  Visualize good things.  Think good thoughts.  Improve.
     Eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophers spoke about the "perfectibility of man," the same idea, really, but as it represented a shift to man-centered thinking (and away from seventeenth-century God-centeredness), it became a controversial concept, but one that has always had great appeal.  For me at least.
     That's what I've always seen, all my life, self-improvement.  Growth.  Development.  Education.  Moving past limitations.  Becoming better.  Every day in every way.  Nothing sounds so hollow to me as the familiar line by fatalists that people never change.  Not really, they say.  "You can't teach an old dog new tricks.  You are who you are, and that will never change."
     Hogwash.
     People are changing all the time, in fundamental ways.  They grow in taste, in understanding, in decency, in courage, in knowledge--and more.  Every way you can imagine.  We aren't destined to make the same mistakes all our lives; we learn from them, aspire to be better, push ahead.  Yes indeed, every day in every way, I'm getting better and better.
    It's too bad Coue's message was couched in a two-bit cliche--but it's the packaging that's all wrong, not the goal.
   
    

Henry David Thoreau, "Pond Scum"

     Rarely are myths exploded with as much unapologetic, joyful fury as Kathryn Schulz displays in a  New Yorker piece that methodically dismantles Henry David Thoreau, "Pond Scum" (Oct. 16, 2015).  In her hands, Thoreau is reduced to a self-righteous, insufferable, anti-social hypocrite.  It's a thrill to read.
     Thoreau was canonized, Schulz explains, by generations of Walden readers who either read Walden too selectively, separating out all the well-known passages about living "deliberately" and building "castles in the air," or rhapsodizing over individual passages, like the one on black and red ants.  And we also read him when we are young enough to value appealing half-truths.   "It is true," she concedes, "that Thoreau was an excellent naturalist and an eloquent and prescient voice for the preservation of wild places."  And she also acknowledges his courage as "an outspoken abolitionist" who embraced John Brown's raid on Harper's Ferry. 
     But that isn't what Walden is about.  It is, in fact, according to Schulz, "less a cornerstone work of environmental literature than the original cabin porn:  a fantasy about rustic life divorced from the reality of living in the woods, and, especially, a fantasy about escaping the entanglements and responsibilities of living among other people."
     Thoreau, we learn, was "self-obsessed," by which Schulz means that he was "narcissistic, fanatical about self-control, adamant that he required nothing beyond himself."  Walden at root reveals a "comprehensive arrogance," especially when it came to recommending a spartan "life in the woods," the book's subtitle.
     Walden Pond, for one thing, was hardly isolated, with a commuter train line running along one side, picnickers overrunning the place in summer, and ice skaters playing on it in the winter.  His family home was a mere twenty-minute walk from his cabin, and he took that walk "several times a week, lured by his mother's cookies or the chance to dine with friends."  And when he wasn't walking home, his mother or sisters would bring him his dinner.  It was hardly as spartan as he made out.
     Does this matter, Schulz asks?  "Begin with false premises and you risk reaching false conclusions.  Begin with falsified premises and you forfeit your authority."  The biggest failing in the book, she says is that it purports to be about how to live, but it says nothing about living with other people:  "Worse than Thoreau's radical self-denial, is his denial of others."
     In all, he was sanctimonious, dour, unbearable, and self-absorbed, not so much deep as "fundamentally adolescent."
      Amen to that.

Words of Wisdom

On the meaning of life (in 25 words):   Man’s biological imperative is to produce sperm.  It’s what he does, 24/7, all his life.  A  woman's biological imperative is to coax it out of him.       

    

On the Golden Rule:  It's all about sex:  Do unto others what you’d like them to do unto you.

On trusting your preparations:  Enjoy the process.

On taking a breath:  Don’t be afraid. 

On working for a living:  Being an employee is a heavy burden, but you never realize quite how heavy it is until you put it behind you.

On being on time and knowing what fork to use:  The only middle-class virtue more highly over-rated than good table manners is punctuality. 

On self-control:  You’re only as strong as the last thing you said no to.

On child rearing:  The line between giving children just the right amount of healthy self-esteem and stopping short of making them insufferable egotists is razor thin.

On obsessing over weight control:  “I’m the same weight I was in high school.”  If that’s the best you can say about yourself after thirty years, you’ve wasted your life in gyms.

On the competitive spirit run amok:  There is a disconnect between “winning is everything,” which we admire in our sports heroes, and being in life a self-absorbed maniac who has to beat everyone at everything.

On taking your sweet time:  Thou shalt not rush.  (Also known as the eleventh commandment.)

On Jesus and Columbus:  I feel about Columbus the same way I feel about Jesus:  I can’t believe in either of them anymore, but it’s hard to give them up. 

"Wait for it. . . ."

     I've noticed over the past several years how often people telling stories pause at the end, just before the punch line, and say "wait for it. . . ."  As though the wait will be paid off in spades.  Which it rarely is.  The irony of course is that in real life, no one likes waiting for anything.  If you're driving and make someone behind you wait, even for a slight pause, you'll likely be beeped, fingered, and glared at--at best.  At worst, you may find yourself right in the middle of full-blown road rage.  Patience is not our national strong suit.
     Not so long ago, I was in a hurry at the supermarket when an agitated woman got in line behind me.  She didn't have much in her cart, so I stepped aside and said that as she seemed to be in a great hurry, why didn't she just go ahead of me?  She looked at me strangely, squeezed past me, said thanks, and quizzically asked why I'd done that.  I told her that for me, exercising patience, especially when it was difficult to do, was character building.  She raised an eyebrow but seemed to like the idea--and though I can't be entirely sure I was being honest, it was close enough to the truth.  A little waiting is good for all of us.

When Does One Plus One Not Equal Two?

     I know I'm not actually schizophrenic or bipolar, but I do have two sides that don't add up.  Outwardly, in my relationship with the world-at-large, I try to be amusing and friendly, which too often, I think, gets distorted into a series of compulsively "clever" remarks--or even smart-alecky ones.  The impulse comes from some deep drive to make the perfectly-timed and pitched bon mot, but when it fails, it looks and sounds clownish and sometimes churlish.  And it's embarrassing.  But I do it anyway, because when it works, and it usually does, I like being me.
     At the same time, I've spent my entire life being serious.  I wasn't always a serious student, though I wanted to be, and gradually did become one.  I early on subscribed to the idea that education is a lifelong process, and I've always valued the quotation attributed to Michelangelo toward the end of his long life:   "I am still learning."  Through the years I've thought as deeply as my mind would allow, managed to write down a great deal of what I thought about, and been fortunate enough to have a fair amount of it published.  I've smiled here and there in my writing, but as a matter of principle, I kept humor out.  I wouldn't allow it to compromise my seriousness.   
     Exactly how these two sides coexist within me, I don't know.  But they do.  And on balance, despite being embarrassed now and then by the failed witticism or the over-serious paragraph, essay, or book, I'm content to be represented in this world by my polar opposites.  Consistency is highly overrated.   
     

Three Hundred Million Golf Balls

     In July of 2013 I read an article by John McPhee called "The Orange Trapper" in The New Yorker.  Anything written by John McPhee gets my attention--and if it's in The New Yorker, still one of the meatiest, most literate publications in America, so much the better.
     You can never tell what McPhee will write about, and the unpredictability is part of what makes wandering around with him so much fun.  You just never know what's going to get a share of his attention, which then claims a share of yours.  He's written famously about Princeton basketball star Bill Bradley long before he became Senator Bill Bradley.  He's written about the Jersey pine barrens, cattle rustling, Alaska--all New Yorker pieces that worked themselves into twenty-eight books to date.  One of them in 1999, Annals of the Former World (on geology), won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. And he's been teaching a course that has evolved into Creative Nonfiction at Princeton since 1975.  
     "The Orange Trapper" turned out to be about lost golf balls.  The title is actually the name of a ball retriever golfers use to fish their balls out of ponds and lakes--or perhaps to reach balls resting beyond a fence and just sitting there waiting for someone to rescue them.  McPhee is 85 now and gave up the game of golf sixty-one years ago, when he was 24, though more recently he began stopping by fences separating golf courses from public roads in order to pick up abandoned balls.  Thus his need for an orange trapper.
     I am a duffer and play golf just to get out from behind my desk for a few hours a week.  Sometimes I surprise myself with well-struck balls and accurate putts, but mostly I just like being on golf courses.  I'm happy there, grateful that the game is in my life.
     McPhee's essay taught me two things.  First, that there is a program called First Tee that has taught the game of golf to more than seven million mostly inner-city kids--who need golf balls.  Second, that golfers lose their balls at the rate of three hundred million a year.  (At one hole surrounded by water at TPC Sawgrass in Jacksonville, Florida, golfers put nearly three hundred balls a day into the water.)  To keep up with the demand, Titleist, the manufacturer of what McPhee calls "the Prada golf ball," makes about a million balls a day.
     And so for the past two years, I've been rescuing golf balls around my home course, Scotland Yards  in Dade City, Florida, and giving them to the First Tee kids--over five thousand so far.  And counting.  Happily, I've already worn out two orange trappers. 

The Long and Short of It

     It isn't easy being short in America.  Not for a man anyway.  The country loves tall men.  Women love tall men.  "Tall, dark, and handsome."  We "look up" to people we admire--and "look down" on people we disapprove of.  A singer named Randy Newman had a hit song in 1977 with "Short People" who "got no reason / to live" and "nobody / to love."  The Atlantic magazine published an article in May 2015 that said four or five inches in height can be worth an increase of up to fifteen percent in salary, which translates into tall people earning hundreds of thousands of dollars more than short people over their work years.  No, it isn't easy--and that doesn't even take into account the smug smirks of tall people as they look down and shrug you off as a defective specimen.
     And yet there are long and impressive lists of short world leaders through history--Alexander the Great (5-6), Napoleon (5-6), Gandhi (5-3), James Madison (5-4), Josef Stalin (5-6), among many others.  The lists of short athletes, musicians, painters, writers, movie stars, and so on are similarly impressive, like Yogi Berra and Floyd Mayweather; Beethoven and Mozart; Picasso and Stravinsky; Martin Scorsese and Tom Cruise; Charlie Chaplin and Harry Houdini.  My personal favorites are recent NBA stars Muggsy Bogues (5-3) and Spud Webb (5-6), who barely made it to the waists of seven-foot, two-inch, wide-body centers.
     Lists like these, even abbreviated ones like mine, can be impressively long and may suggest that things aren't so bad for short people after all--but short men in America know better.  There is a silent, persistent prejudice against us built into our national mindset.  It's a discrimination hardwired into our common psyche, into our very hearts, into the language we use every day.  Call it a shortcoming. 

Update:  From the Tampa Bay Times, March 11,2018:  There is a "mountain of evidence that we really look up to men of physical stature.  Americans tend to see taller men as more competent and intelligent.  We're more willing to hire and promote them than we are shorter men, and more likely to elect them to high office.  We like them more."

    

Post Obama

     The nation will have a new president in January 2017, which means the election will be in November 2016, some thirteen months off.  The political season these days actually stretches through the whole calendar year, or so it seems, with no time off for candidates or voters to catch their breath.  It's exhausting for everyone.  The more so if you happen to watch television news featuring talking heads screaming at one another.  Partisan politics has become a full-contact blood sport, not for the faint of heart, either those running and serving or those voting and hoping for the best.
      The energy-sapping futility of it all is suggested by a set of statistics published recently, most notably that five billion dollars is about to be spent to sway ten percent of the voters in a handful of "swing states."  That's astounding.  Think of all that energy about to be spent.  And the frantic spending.  And the media feeding-frenzy.  It's not going to be pretty--though in all honesty, if you can keep your head, it may be very entertaining.
     There are other crazy numbers.  As for example that no matter who runs and no matter what platforms they run on, forty-five percent of the people will vote straight Democrat and forty-five percent will vote straight Republican.  What's left is the ten percent of undecided voters in the so-called "swing states" who are up for grabs. And as only little more than fifty percent of the total voting age population actually voted in the last presidential election, all that time and money will be spent on five percent of the voters in the swing states--and they tend to be located in a handful of counties and often along a stretch of interstate connecting major cities, like the I 4 corridor between Tampa and Orlando..
     Maybe we should just hold the national presidential election in those swing counties in the eight or nine swing states.  None of the rest of us seem to matter.  And we wouldn't have to put up with the unfolding political circus over the next full year.  And maybe we could use four and a half of the five billion dollars on things that really matter.  Fill in the blank with your favorite charity.
     

Zoroaster, Heaven, and Hell

     I'm no expert on any of these things, but recently I read a book by Harold Bloom called Omens of Millennium (New York, 1996) that claimed Zoroaster, the Iranian prophet who may go back as far as 1500 BCE, "invented the resurrection of the dead."  Before him, says Bloom, most of the dead passed to an unpleasant underground existence, except for a few chosen by the gods for something better.
     Zoroaster apparently refined this notion by inventing heaven and hell, as we think of them today, with true believers going to the "skies" and unbelievers being punished in an underground after-life.  The prophet believed in a "divine fire" that was expected in his own lifetime to change "nature" into "eternity."  Thus far, this sounds like the same theological hogwash we're all so familiar with.
     But I do like how this concludes, for Zoroaster prophesied a savior, Saoshyant, who "will prevail against all evil forces, and who will resurrect the dead."  It's hard to know what to make of this, but one thing seems clear enough:  the Christian invention of Jesus as the savior who could resurrect the dead wasn't even an original thought.