"Angelina Jolie Hates Thanksgiving"

Celebrity is as celebrity does. As we all give thanks for the good things in our lives, as we all count our blessings and express gratitude, Angelina Jolie has cast herself as all-purpose killjoy.

If Thanksgiving needed its own Ebenezer Scrooge, it has now found it in Angelina Jolie.

Politically correct to a fault, capable of seeing the worst in everything, Angelina will forbid her family from celebrating Thanksgiving because, to her mind, it celebrates murder and mayhem. Link here.

In fact, she is not even going to spend the holiday in America. How better to show that she hates American crimes against indigenous peoples.

If America has done bad things then America has never done anything good, anything that is worthy of her presence or her love.

Of course, the fault here is ours and our alone. What kind of country pays attention to the cretinous blather of celebrities?

So here’s one more thing to be thankful for: you’re not Angelina Jolie.

What Makes Karen Owen #&*$?

Alexandra Petri's comments on Karen Owen, stand out for doing a great job analyzing the issue of public exposure. Link here.

As you may  know, I believe that the thoroughly modern tendency to expose your private life is deeply problematical. Many of those who are involved in sexting and other forms of internet self-exposure do not really understand the consequences of their actions. My comments here.

Note how Petri frames the issues: "The universal human impulse to autobiography stems, in large part, from the desire to be the protagonists of our own lives."

She continues:  "Karen Owen's wry, often witty, self-deprecating, self-aware voice takes control of her 'raucous life.'"

And also: "By recounting the story, you claim agency! You craft your own narrative and become the wry, ironic storyteller, rather than the drunk girl doing shots in the corner with Name Redacted, ignoring the whispers as she walks out of Shooters with another guy."

And finally: " Karen is single-handedly giving that girl stumbling down the steps of your dormitory at noon with someone else's socks on a better name."

I hope I have allowed Petri's argument a full presentation, because I am going to take some slight exception to it.

I believe that its brilliance lies in the fact that it  uncovers a connection between what students learn in college classrooms and how they conduct their lives.

If you take a few courses in women's studies or in critical theory or deconstruction or even in some forms of therapy, you will learn exactly the lessons that Petri articulates so clearly and so accurately.

I can think of a serious psychoanalyst, named Roy Schafer,who once argued that therapy should be about becoming the author of the narrative of your own life. See his: A New Language for Psychoanalysis.

If you have been taught that there is, as Petri suggests, a universal human impulse toward autobiography, you can expose your life and feel that you are standing tall with St. Augustine and Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

Of course, there is no such universal human impulse. There is, in fact, a universal human impulse toward modesty, toward covering up your private parts and functions.

Today's professoriat does not accept it, and Karen Owen is suffering the consequences.

Surely, it is possible that Karen Owen also learned at Duke that she should take ownership of her own experience by writing her own narrative, by becoming the protagonist in her own story. After all, Duke used to be the world epicenter for postmodernist criticism.

I hope that Petri is being ironic when she says that Owen has taken control of her own experience. In fact, her life has just spun completely out of her control. Whatever her prior ambitions, the only path that seems open to her now is to make a career of celebrity.

As for her final point, the implication that Owen has single-handedly given that coed on the walk of shame a better name, I also hope she is being ironic.

You may not like it, and you might not consider it to be theoretically correct, but Karen Owen has just dragged her name through the mud. Do you think that her parents are proud of her? Do you think that the parents of a prospective husband would be happy to welcome her into their family? Do you think her siblings are proclaiming their pride in her college achievements?

Just some thoughts for a Friday morning.

The Culture of Celebrity

What does Achilles have in common with Jon Gosselin? What do Jewish prophets have in common with Hollywood actors? And what do Christian saints and martyrs have in common with Paris Hilton and Balloon Boy?

According to Johann Hari, they are all celebrities. Link here.

Which leads us to ask: Who is Johann Hari and why doesn't he know how to draw the most elementary conceptual distinctions?

Moral distinctions are different. Strangely enough, Hari argues that contemporary celebrities are less noxious to our cultural atmosphere than are Jewish prophets and Christian saints. He largely prefers Madonna to the Madonna.

He does however grant that something is wrong when celebrities become actively involved in public policy debates: "... we should drop the mad idea that they should provide us with political guidance."

But how do you glory in the innocuous nature of celebrity-worship and declare that they ought to shut up about politics?

And why is there no harm in emulating people who earn money while apparently not doing anything resembling work? In a time of financial turmoil the example of celebrity tells us that we can solve our economic problems by winning the lottery or making of ourselves a sufficiently compelling spectacle.

People become celebrities without making any significant personal sacrifice. That is their appeal. That is the reason people want to be like them and do not want to be like Christian martyrs.

A martyr gains fame more than celebrity.A martyr who refuses to trade his faith for his life gains a stature that will forever escape Britney Spears.

People whose celebrity involves being constantly exposed in tabloids, whose most significant activities are shopping and partying are not on the same level as prophets and other wise people.

Johann Hari would do well to keep his trendy anti-religious bias to himself. Unless, of course, he and his fellow co-anti-religionists want to extol the virtues of the world's great anti-religious leaders, great men like Lenin, Stalin, and Mao Tse-tung.

We should understand that you can be famous without being what we call a celebrity. A celebrity is, as Daniel Boorstin said, known for being well-known. By contrast, a great leader is famous for having accomplished something.

Renee Fleming is famous, but she is not a celebrity. She may have been profiled on "60 Minutes" but she allows her work to speak for her. She does not need to have herself splashed across the tabloids. People will want to hear her sing even if she has not made a spectacle of herself at a night club.

As Hari notes, famous people are role models. In the best of circumstances celebrities should not be. You might say that celebrities enjoy more infamy than fame, but the more important point is that if you mistake fame for celebrity you are more likely to drop out of school and turn into Levi Johnston. Fate that I would not wish on anyone.

Hari believes that we should not disparage the cult of celebrity. But doesn't it matter who our role models are? Do parents want their daughters to grow up to become like Paris Hilton or Michelle Obama or Laura Bush?

As opposed to famous people, people who attain celebrity are basically involved in entertainment. Through the medium of tabloids they make their lives into entertainment, into diversion, into distraction.

A society without entertainment would be very dull indeed. Yet, celebrities should be considered anti-role models, exemplars of what can happen when too little talent meets up with too much money. We should look at celebrity and think: There but for the grace of God, go I.

Christian saints do not entertain. They offer living witness to the power of their faith. Prophets do not entertain. They offer words of wisdom and occasional predictions about the future.

Saints, prophets, and heroes earn their fame. To become a celebrity nowadays you do not have to sacrifice very much beyond your dignity. And, from what we can see of celebrities, most of them did not have very much of it to begin with.

The Scarlet Letterman

Surely, Maureen Dowd is right. The dalliances of clowns do not rise to the same level of moral urgency as do those of public officials. Link here.

Yet, the commentariat is currently consuming itself with questions about the sincerity of David Letterman's apology for his several intra-office dalliances. For a collection of these remarks, link here.

I hope that I am not the only one who finds the question strange.

Does anyone really expect that someone who puts on a mask to tell jokes can show the proper expression of shame? When you are always hiding your face, you cannot be expected to worry about whether or not you are losing it.

When it comes to celebrities, there is no way of knowing whether he is ever sincere.

We pay celebrities to embarrass themselves. Beyond how entertaining they are on stage, their off-stage lives are tabloid fodder. That is what makes them celebrities.

After paying celebrities to embarrass themselves, we should not be shocked when they do.

If we are too shocked, we should consider what it means to be an enabler.

Why is it different when we are dealing with a politician? Largely, I would say, because his we are far more likely to emulate public figures.

As basketball legend Charles Barkley so aptly put it: "I am not a role model."

Public figures set a standard for good behavior. Their actions spawn imitators. They do not just show us what is right or wrong, but they show us the path to worldly, not just monetary, success.

Public figures have responsibilities and authority; they have prestige and status in the world. When members of a community want to better themselves, they try to emulate these people.

Normally, people do not emulate celebrities. First, because your life is that much more difficult when you believe that every time you are invited somewhere you are "the entertainment."

Some people become celebrities because they fear anonymity or because they crave financial security. But celebrity success comes always comes at the price of respectability.

With Letterman, as well as with Clinton, the problem was not so much the behavior as it was the exposure.

Dowd was right to that when famous older men get involved with very young women, whether Monica Lewinsky or Stephanie Birkett, there is no real expectation of discretion.

A 22 year old intern is going to blab to all her friends about her sexual encounters with the president of the United States. It is very close to inevitable that she do so.

Stephanie Birkett was older than 22, but her young person's habit of keeping a diary and a photographic record of her affair provoked the crisis.

The Unbearable Anguish of Apology

Heard enough apologies?

What happens when you take a perfectly respectable public ritual-- like apology-- and hand it over to a bunch of celebrities? They use it and overuse it, to the point where it is drained of its meaning.

Such were the observations of Eric Felten and Rabbi Irwin Kula. For Felten's article, link here. For Rabbi Kula's link here.

The term apology comes to us from the ancient Greek courtroom. There, after a defendant had been accused of a crime, he would have the opportunity to offer a defense against the prosecutor's charges. That defense was called an "apologia." Later, the term morphed into Christian apologetics, which was a branch of theology devoted to defending the faith.

Nowadays, in what must certainly count as a great intellectual reversal, apology is normally used as an admission that one's behavior has been indefensible.

This form of apology is widely used in what are called shame cultures. These cultures use the sanction of public shaming as a means to promote good behavior. Shaming was basic to the culture of early America.

As Felten explains, rather glibly: "Early colonial America was big on dealing with misbehavior through shame-- the old scarlet letter routine. And abasing oneself through the humiliation of making a public apology was a prime punishment."

Felten suggests that the practice fell out of favor because people grew cynical about the ability of apology to change behavior. He does not believe that Serena Williams will change her behavior because she apologized for her outburst at the U. S. Open.

This is a step too far. Felten is observing that once apology falls into the hands of celebrities it loses its power and its meaning.

Nevertheless, when it comes to changing behavior the practice of apology is central to twelve step programs. These programs use shaming as a means to change behavior. And they are far more effective than psychotherapies that rely on guilt-trips.

Nonetheless, Rabbi Kula offers a good observation of celebrity apologies: "As we watch these apologies, whether offered as tearful ramblings, pro forma admissions, or awkward justifications we inevitably feel that these apologies are cheap and facile."

He continues: "These celebrity apologies are eroding an already deteriorating public culture as they are turning one of the most important human virtues-- the ability to seek and grant forgiveness-- into public relations stunts."

Perhaps this slew of empty apologies brings a saving grace: we now have a better chance to understand what is involved in the ritual of apology.

Rabbi Kula refers to the 12th century sage, Maimonides, to outline the four steps that must be part of a sincere apology.

First, recognition of what we did wrong.
Second, regret for having done it, accompanied by a resolve never to do it again.
Third, repair the damage and make amends.
Fourth, reconciliation following forgiveness.

The first sign of a sincere apology is its emotional accompaniment: unbearable anguish. If you do not feel such anguish, you do not really understand your mistake. A person who is relaxed about an apology does not get it.

More importantly, an apology contains an implicit or explicit vow never to do it again. If you apologize for beating your wife, and then beat her again, your apology becomes insincere. For having gone back on your word you deserve never again to be trusted.

Serial apologizers are frauds. That is why we tend to feel discomfort when we see too many public apologies.

Repairing the damage and making amends are more difficult. When a public figure makes a grievous error, he repairs the damage, makes amends, and vows not to do it again, by resigning his position.

When you take responsibility, you voluntarily pay a very high price. If you do not pay more than an emotional price your apology becomes insincere.

For those who do not have high offices to resign from, apology should be accompanied by a temporary withdrawal from society. If you understand the meaning of apology you know that it should be accompanied by a time of self-isolation.

The simple act of apology, in and of itself, does not wipe the slate clean. It is the first step on the path to recovery.

Take an example.In 1993 Attorney General Janet Reno ordered an assault on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. The result was a holocaust that killed dozens of men, women, and children.

Clearly, Reno was not culpable in the strict legal sense of the word. She had not started the fire. Yet, she had given the order that led to the catastrophe, so she bore responsibility.

While testifying before a Congressional committee Reno later declared that she accepted full responsibility for what had happened. Anyone who remembers that statement would agree that she seemed to be suffering unbearable anguish.

But then, she did not resign. She simply went back to work. However heartfelt her apology appeared, it was insincere. It may mean that she has a character flaw, but it may also mean that she was really covering for someone else.

While I certainly agree with Felten and Rabbi Kula that celebrity apologies cheapen the exercise beyond recognition, I would also assert that the misuse of the ritual by high public officials has an even more deleterious effect.

Most people, I continue to hope, do not take their moral cues from celebrities.

And, of course, sometimes celebrities get it right. No one is going to excuse Kanye West's interruption of Taylor Swift's award acceptance speech last week, but later in the show Beyonce did her best to make amends for his rudeness by inviting Swift back on the stage to finish her speech.

Beyonce's gesture was elegant and ethical. She did not have to do it. Strictly speaking, it was not her responsibility to make amends for someone else's mistake.

And yet, because West's outrage was ostensibly committed in her name-- to her horror, we must say-- she must have felt a need to distance herself from it definitively.

Beyonce reminded us that some celebrities do have good character and do know how to do the right thing.

Clearly, reconciliation and forgiveness can only happen with time. When you apologize you are asserting that your offending action was not true to your character.

But it takes time to forget truly bad behavior. Only a series of virtuous actions can restore your good name.

Thus, reconciliation and forgiveness take time.

Of course, most celebrities do not make a living based on their good names. If they are actors their work involves pretending to be someone they are not. If they want to be noticed in the tabloids they will have to act out in public.

When someone who is far from being reputable makes a showy declaration of his good character we are right, in most cases, to look askance and to refuse to accept the apology.

Michael Jackson, R. I. P.

Decorum dictates that we not speak ill of the dead. Yet, at a time when the media is indulging an unseemly display of fawning adoration for Michael Jackson, we do well to recall both his extraordinary talent and the abjection of his life.

If Michael Jackson is an icon, an image that merits adoration for its spiritual perfection, then the world needs more iconoclasts.

Among our more eminent iconoclasts I count the unfailingly decorous Emily Yoffe. Clearly and succinctly she blogged what we should all be thinking. Link to her post here.

Our culture needs be more careful about whom it elevates to the status of icon. If an icon is someone to be adored and admired, even worshiped, then the icon should present behavior that is worth emulating.

At a time when the cult of celebrity has reached obscene proportions we need all to take a step back and recalibrate our moral compass.

We should recall that the King of Pop was Peter Pan, a man who refused to grow up, and who created his own amusement park so he could surround himself with and exploit vulnerable boys.

The only difference between Michael Jackson and ordinary pedophiles is that Jackson never bothered to hide his attraction to children.

The world gave Jackson fame and fortune. He used them both as a cover for some very unsavory pleasures.

And how better to attract children than to appear to be one? As several writers have remarked, to their chagrin, the King of Pop was also the King of the Extreme Makeover.

Surely, there was something freaky and creepy about the persona that Jackson had crafted out of his addiction to plastic surgery.

Michael Jackson possessed a ferocious will to force his physical appearance to conform to an image and to make his life replicate a fiction.

His extraordinary musical talent was inviolate. Yet, we should not overlook what he did with the rewards that that talent gained him. And we must be clear that his is an example that no one should ever seek to emulate.

Naomi Wolf's Iconomania

Icons are made to be loved and adored. When your rational faculties are overwhelmed by your passion for an icon, you suffer from iconomania.

Witness Naomi Wolf's now famous article about Angelina Jolie in Harper's Bazaar. Link here.

Willa Paskin has captured Wolf's iconomania well. Writing on the Doublex blog, she called the piece: "...an absurd, overwrought, swooning, love letter to Angelina Jolie, the woman who, in Wolf's analysis, most fully embodies 'having it all.' It is just about impossible to read this piece and simultaneously remember that Wolf is a serious feminist and a thinker." Link here.

Virginia Postrel took issue with Paskin, for being too charitable to Wolf. She wrote: "...I do not regard Wolf as a 'serious feminist and a thinker.' She's a feminist, certainly, but neither serious nor a thinker. She's an emoter whose work typically generalizes from her narcissistic neediness to the 'female experience.'" Link here.

Is there anything left to be said?

Let's try. First, Naomi Wolf is a celebrity intellectual who pretends to be able to grasp great ideas and who then disseminates them to a larger public.

In this role she is definitely influential. Point that I noticed when I first started hearing women drawing life lessons from "The Beauty Myth." See my blog post here.

Feminism aside-- because no man is qualified to enter the debate over who is or is not a good feminist-- I consider Wolf a major figure in promulgating the values that define the therapy culture.

As her Jolie piece makes clear, she follows the basic therapeutic principle that getting better means rewriting our personal narratives and making our lives into enacted fantasies and dreams.

I will not burden you with references to the eminent psychotherapists and psychoanalysts who have been hawking these ideas. Any therapist who has suffered the influence of psychoanalysis has likely bought into them.

What matters is that it is Naomi Wolf, not the graybeards of the therapy world, who is selling these ideas to American women.

Take Wolf's assertion of Jolie's iconic status: "Her persona hits an unprecedented level of global resonance... because she has created a life narrative that is not just personal. It is archetypal. And the archetype is one that really, for the first time in modern culture, brings together almost every aspect of female empowerment and liberation."

Or this: "...Jolie's image is not just a mirror of one woman but also a looking glass for female fantasy life writ large."

Not only does Wolf traffic in images and illusions; she is proud of it. Worse yet, she is such an accomplished mythmaker that she completely ignores reality.

Iconomaniac that she is, Wolf simply forgot to think.

Do you believe that Angelina Jolie's "global resonance" matches that of Princess Diana?

And does Wolf seriously believe that a pretty-boy actor with bad skin is the ultimate alpha male? More than the future King of England? More than the President of the United States?

As for the Jolie narrative, Sadie Stein of Jezebel.com sets us straight: "Brangelina are totally enigmatic; we don't know anything about them except the Harlequin-worthy synopsis."

But... why Angelia Jolie and why now?

Apparently, feminism is losing some of its luster because its mythic promise of "having it all" seems beyond the reach of mere mortals.

So Wolf counters by transforming a mediocre movie star and homewrecker into the woman who has it all. Thus, Wolf is telling young women that they can have it all, because Angelina does.

If they do not, the fault lies with a patriarchy that forces women into choosing one life path to the detriment of another.

In Wolf's mind, here's the deal the patriarchy offers women: "The deal is that they may realize one aspect of their personality, but at the expense of many others. And the deal is usually that if they choose 'too much,' a terrible punishment one way or the other awaits them."

Say what? I assume that Wolf is not telling everyone to go out and develop a multiple personality disorder. But if she is saying that women who choose "too much," who overreach, are punished, this sounds awfully familiar. It is the stuff of tragedy. The Greeks called it hubris, and applied it equally to men and women.

All human life involves choices. When you choose one path you are usually closing off your access to another. An individual who can choose all paths at all times is simply not human... she is a goddess.

But when you tell women that they should aspire to being goddesses, you are telling them that they should strive for perfection. Unfortunately, this is going to make them chronically dissatisfied with what they have.

Remind me of why this is desirable?

But Wolf knows that Angelina Jolie is not real. She is a fiction. As Wolf says: "Her icon status now has more to do with our dream life as women than it does her career choices solely as a film star."

Icon is a nice word for it, but Wolf is working with caricatures and stereotypes. When she praises Jolie for taking another woman's husband, she justifies it by saying that "self-entitled... males ... have traditionally taken what they wanted and let the emotional chips fall where they may."

Have there been men who have done as much? Yes, there have. And have there been women who have trampled on custom and gotten away with it? Yes, there have.

Does that mean that we should all behave that way? I think not.

More pertinently, are those who behave this way exemplars of the truth of human nature? Not at all.

Even if amoral men have been doing this from time immemorial why does that make it a right and desirable way for anyone, man or woman, to behave?

Susan Boyle Melts Down

We should have seen it coming. Flush with the thrill of seeing a woman's life transformed before our eyes, we did not see that Susan Boyle was in serious psychological peril.

For my part I was suitably impressed by Boyle's voice, but I tuned out the discussion as soon as it entered the makeover zone.

To tweeze or not to tweeze... that is not a question about which I have anything interesting to say.

Susan Boyle was a rustic, an original, a perfectly natural woman who seems to have been untouched by modern life, by contemporary civilization, and by the beauty industry. The inimitable Tina Brown described her as: "that scrunchy-faced, eyebrow-enforested, dumpy representative of anonymous humanity...."

To Brown, Susan Boyle represented all the forgotten women, all the invisible aging women out there. In Brown's eye, Susan Boyle had picked up the mantle of sexlessness from none other than Hillary Clinton. Link here.

You will forgive me for being somewhat confused. In the old days we were told that the patriarchy was so threatened by female sexuality that it had built up its institutions for the precise purpose of repressing it.

Remember how much energy the patriarchy put into repressing the sexually attractive Sarah Palin.

Now it turns out that this same patriarchy is even more threatened by an anonymous and dowdy spinster who has never been kissed.

More seriously, we were all thrilled for Susan Boyle. After all, she had, in an instant, won fame and fortune beyond what most of us can ever imagine. And isn't that what life is really about... living a dream and becoming a rich celebrity?

Then we woke up one day to discover that it was not as easy as it appeared. We had failed to estimate the psychic cost of such a life-wrenching transformation.

And we did not see that it would end in a hospitalization for what the Victorians called neurasthenia, nervous exhaustion. See my post of last Saturday. Link here.

People suffered neurasthenia when they lost their bearings in the fast-paced modern world. Uprooted from their normal life, thrown in the teeming world of the cosmopolitan metropolis, stressed out by inhuman levels of competition... neurasthenics took to their beds.

So we did not see that while Susan Boyle will gain fame and fortune, at the same time she has lost nearly everything that mattered to her.

And she lost whatever it was that made her what she is. I cannot agree with Tina Brown that Susan Boyle rose up from terminal anonymity. The fact that your comings and goings are splayed across the tabloids does not rescue you from anonymity. It turns you into a fictional character, someone who is perfectly alien to who you are.

Susan Boyle was not anonymous in her local village. Her voice was not an unknown quality in her local church. Perhaps she did not have as dramatic a life as your average celebrity, but she did have a life. It had its rhythm; its joys and sorrows; its routines and ceremonies.

Susan Boyle had friends and relations in the small Scottish where she had spent her life. Everyone knew her and she knew everyone.

The life that she lost was not a story; it may have been somewhat limited, but it was real, and it was hers.

Now she has traded it all for celebrity. She has set off to live a dream. And yet, she is surely tormented with the question of whether she will ever be able to recover her life? Has she been seduced by the goddess of success into sacrificing her life for something aleatory and chimerical?

How Matters

Tom Friedman did not have to work too hard to convince me that How matters. See his op-ed column: "Why How Matters."

After all, when I described the difference between therapy and coaching on my website I said that therapy was about the Why while coaching was about the How.

Therapists want to know Why you get things wrong; coaches want to show you How to get them right.

My approach there, and throughout this blog, has had a strong ethical component. What matters in life is how we treat other people, how we conduct our relationships, whether we are loyal, trustworthy, and responsible.

So I was also pleased to see Friedman directing our attention to the work of Dov Seidman, CEO of LRN, a man who is in the business of promoting ethical behavior in the workplace.

Seidman wants to improve how people behave. See link. He emphasizes the importance of connecting with other people, treating them with respect and courtesy, and making them feel valued. In Seidman's view, and in Friedman's and mine, behaving ethically is an essential element in any business transaction.

At one time we had it. We do not any more.

Many people in the financial services industry were so interested in pursuing their own self-interest that they forgot their duty to maintain the viability of the financial system. They forgot that they had a responsibility to the the business community and to the community at large.

Most of them did give gobs of money to charity. But that could hardly make up for the fact that they were running the financial system into the ground.

Certainly, this is not true of everyone in the financial world. Yet, if you play a perfect game and your teammate fumbles the ball you are still on a losing team.

Having discussed these points on this blog, I immediately found Friedman's argument persuasive: "You cannot tell tens of thousands of people that they can have the American dream-- a home for no money down and nothing to pay for two years-- without that eventually catching up with you. The Puritan ethic of hard work and saving still matters."

Indeed it does.

Friedman is also correct to offer this prescription: "We need to get back to collaborating the old fashioned way. That is, people making decisions based on business judgment, experience, prudence, clarity of communications, and thinking about how-- not just how much."

This is a radical prescription. For decades now the culture has been drumming it into everyone's head that the Puritan ethic leads to sexual repression, neurosis, and cancer. To say nothing of imperialism, colonialism, and oppression.

The therapy culture has contributed mightily to this effort, but its more important contemporary manifestation is the cult to celebrity.

Celebrities do not earn money the old fashioned way. They do not get rich by a lifetime of hard work and savings.

Their culture disconnects work from wealth; it tells us all that we can all be rich because we might all hit the jackpot or win the lottery.

Celebrities are rewarded because they do not work hard and do not save. They earn the most for doing the least. After all, didn't Alex Rodriguez earn $25,000,000 for playing Kabballah with Madonna? And how many of those who were going berserk over the pay received by executives batted an eye at the millions celebrities were making for being entertaining?

Today's celebrity is a model for profligate spending. Now, you might not have enough money to spend like a celebrity, but the banking system has been kind enough to give you enough credit to make a good go of it. You too can live beyond the value of your productive labor.

In a world that drools over celebrity notions like showing respect, being trustworthy, and tempering emotion feel retrograde.

Celebrities live out psychodramas. They are supposed to have conquered repression; in fact, they have merely numbed themselves to shame. They do not set an example of good behavior, respect for others, or even respect for themselves. Celebrities will never be pillars of the community.

Friedman asks the right question: How did we lose touch with the values that made for a functioning financial system and a functioning national community?

My answer is simple: we became postmodern. We learned in the best universities that everything was a social construct. Deep thinkers taught us that there was no such thing as intrinsic value. An object was said to be valuable when a lot people or a lot of influential and powerful people said that it was valuable, and acted accordingly.

Apply the same principle to creditworthiness. Wasn't it just another social construct? Your credit score, your income, your savings, the evidence of your responsible monetary behavior... these were merely what the power elite took to be measures of value. They had been constructed to discriminate against people who had no money. Clearly, the situation had to be rectified.

And it was, in subprime mortgages, liar loans, zero down payments, and so on.

Now, the number on the mortgage was also a social construct. Pieces of property did not have any intrinsic value. If the bankers said the house was worth a million dollars, it was worth a million dollars. Value was what these powerful people said it was.

And when the worthless mortgages that had been given to people who were-- by fiat-- declared creditworthy, and that were collateralized by properties that were declared to be worth as much as the mortgages, were repackaged into debt instruments... lo and behold, ratings agencies were so postmodern in their thinking that they declared these packages to be AAA. With that imprimatur investment banks could borrow against them, with 40-1 leverage.

So, the current crisis is simply a reality check. It does not mean that capitalism has failed. It should be the death knell of postmodernism and social constructivist theory.

Obviously, the people who hold to these ideas will not accept that the crisis is a reality check; they believe that reality is a social construct... especially when it contradicts their precious ideas.

Happy Thoughts

Many years ago a friend was explaining the effects of Prozac on brain chemistry. If you look at primate research, he said, you see that when a male primate gains an enhanced status in the group, his brain chemistry changes in ways that resemble what happens when people take Prozac.

He concluded that we were going to have a society where everyone thinks he is an alpha male, only he isn't.

Of course, it is not just Prozac that is fostering this modern illusion. Misguided educators, talk show hosts, the media, and the therapy culture has told people to think happy thoughts, the better to auto-generate enhanced self-esteem, regardless of the evidence.

This dovetails nicely with a point that Steve Salerno made in a Wall Street Journal op-ed last Friday. Link here.

Salerno asks this question: How many business people are so pumped up on happy talk, on positive thinking, on mindless optimism that they have no sense of their strengths and weaknesses and no sense of whether their business is good or bad?

It is not entirely fair to lay this entirely at the recently burgeoning field of happiness studies. Derived from cognitive-behavioral therapy, happiness studies have become increasingly important in today's psychology. In many ways it was a change for the better.

To counter Freud's unremitting pessimism, Aaron Beck invented cognitive therapy to train his patients to engage more balanced judgment.

Beck would tell his patients to take disparaging self-judgments-- "I never get anything right," "I am worthless"-- and to write down three facts that would validate the thought and three that would disprove it.

Thus, patients gained balance. They learned to see both the good and the bad, the positive and the negative.

Now, what began as a necessary corrective to Freudian thought has been transformed by the culture into bad advice. Working their rough magic, the media, the educational establishment, and the therapy culture have brought pie-in-the-sky optimism into the American workplace.

There, it has become, Salerno said, "a crusade for all-out positivity." Employees have completely bought it. Today, most of them "prefer celebrity-driven inspiration over skills-intensive training."

Call it an escape from reality; call it mindless idolatry; it is wishful or magical thinking. Lately the guru most associated with it is Rhonda Byrne, author of "The Secret."

As Salerno says: "It is intriguing that 'The Secret' came to prominence during the same year as the mortgage meltdown. For what was the subprime lending crisis if not a large scale conspiracy of wishful thinking."

I have not read "The Secret." Nor will I ever. I am opposed to self-abuse, especially when the self in question is mine.

I am persuaded, however, that Byrne is a genius ... at marketing. For having trans-substantiated a trite piece of childish reasoning into a major fortune she deserves some grudging praise.

Better yet, she has convinced people that learning a secret that is now known to countless millions of people puts them in the company of a privileged few.

Part of her genius is to have inoculated herself against criticism. So many people have taken leave of their senses to plunge into the abyss of Byrne's mind, that if I were to say that she is peddling cretinous blather they would immediately take offense... and rush to her defense.

Criticizing the book threatens their self-esteem. Since their self-esteem, thanks to Byrne, is now based on wishful thinking, it has no basis in reality. Thus it is now hanging by a thread, which makes people very sensitive indeed.

Happily, there is no need to read this book. Any review will tell you the secret: since like attracts like, thinking happy thoughts will attract other happy thoughts and will necessarily produce happy events.

Despite all evidence to the contrary, Byrne declared that if you imagine something, if you want it badly enough, it will necessarily happen. "The only reason a person does not have money is that they are blocking money from coming to them with their thoughts." She advises: "See yourself living in abundance and you will attract it. It works every time, with every person."

Byrne is saying that if you put your head in the sand, dream a happy (and rich) thought, you need merely camp out in front of your mailbox. The checks will start rolling in.

Or take it a step further. Byrne says that it is a good thing to pretend that you are really rich: "A shortcut to manifesting your desire is to see what you want as absolute fact."

This is wish fulfillment run amok. Worse yet, people who believe their wishes are real are properly considered to be delusional.

Let us say that you decide to live by these principles. You want to be rich. You know that hard work, diligent effort, education, and training are not going to do it for you. In fact, you have always known this. That is why you are a slacker. Now you are happy that your chronic lethargy has been vindicated as a path toward the secret.

You discover that in order to become rich you need merely work on visualizing yourself as rich, and on believing that you are really as rich as you think you are.

Fortified with this pseudo-delusional belief, you go out and buy whatever your rich self needs to possess. You charge it to your American Express card.

Then, the bill comes due. You cannot pay it. What do you do?

Of course, you open up your copy of "The Secret" and it tells you that you did not want it badly enough. Buying the book was insufficient; you need to buy some notebooks and the movie version and sign up for some seminars.

You have not given yourself over completely to magical thinking; you are worrying too much. Thus, as Byrne says: "the only reason people do not have what they want is that they are thinking more about what they don't want than what they do want."

Salerno is right that this mimics, on a micro level, what happened in the subprime mess. After all, at the root of the problem is the average American who believed, despite the evidence, that he was as rich as Croesus, and who went out and bought a house that fit his puffed-up self-esteem but not his budget.

The moral of the story: never underestimate the damage that cretinous blather can do to otherwise intelligent people.

Say What?

Remember Harrison Ford, aka Indiana Jones, Han Solo, Jack Ryan, and Dr. Richard Kimble. Well, he's back in the news with a gesture that is more than passing strange.

You probably know that a new Indiana Jones movie is opening in about a month. To market the movie without appearing to market the movie Ford chose to make a grand gesture to support the environment: he got his chest waxed, on national television. He reasoned, if you dare call it that, that this would raise awareness about the pain of deforestation in the Amazon.

How much more love for the environment can any man show than to undergo the agony of waxing? How much more of a sacrifice can any man make than to give up his chest hair? I'm sure the rain-forest feels better already!

The most important point is the interpretation. How are we to grasp the meaning of Harrison Ford's gesture? In three parts, it means:

1. That Ford does not have any self-respect.

2. That nothing is going on between his ears.

3. That a shortage of dignity and intelligence does not prevent a person from becoming a mega-star. In fact, it qualifies him or her to be a celebrity.