The Tea Party for TIME's Person of the Year

Last Friday I recommended that the editors of Time Magazine name the Tea Party its Person of the Year. Not to be vainglorious or anything like that, but I believe that I was the first to make the suggestion. Link here.

Yesterday, Rep. Michelle Bachmann joined the growing chorus of those of us who believe that, for better or for worse, the person or persons who had the most influence on the news in 2010 was the Tea Party. Link here.

What struck me last week was that the Tea Party was not even listed among the candidates that Time was asking people to vote for.

At the time I wrote, Julian Assange was leading the pack. By last Saturday morning Lady Gaga had overtaken Assange. As I write today, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has left everyone else in the dust.

Whoever wins the coveted cover spot, a publication whose business is reporting the news completely ignored what is arguably the most important political phenomenon of 2010.

Those who are bemoaning the declining influence of the mainstream media should take note of this fact. If the mainstream media were doing its job, it would not currently be on a march to oblivion.

"How to Give Advice That Someone Might Take"

My new column at the RightNetwork has just been posted. Entitled "How to Give Advice That Someone Might Take," it's a follow-up to my initial column there.

Enjoy!

Can You Spend Your Way Out of Debt?

It’s has happened so often that it's becoming a cliché. A talk-show journalist, interviewing a Republican about budget issues, will always ask: But where will you cut?

You would think that these journalists are suffering from an advanced case of castration anxiety.

Not to be too Freudian about it, but many people understand the current financial crisis in terms of one or another narrative. We would do better if we also understand that narratives never tell the whole story.

Ethical principles, society’s core values, must count. More so now that the values we have been maintaining for the last few decades have now been proven to be unsustainable.

Take the narrative: Your child spends too much money and he calls on you to bail him out. If you say Yes, you are indulging his bad habits. If you say No, God knows what he might do to himself.

The good news is that every American has come to the belated realization that Ben Franklin was right about the value of hard work and thrift.

How did we lose touch with the old value system? Simply, the mental hygiene profession decided that hard work was self-destructive and that thrift was just a euphemism for repression.

It told us that happiness and good mental health depended on our ability to enjoy a life of leisure while spending our resources freely. By resources, the therapy culture meant your emotional and sexual resources.

Along with thrift, discipline became an obscenity. Thus, in the minds of television interviewers, fiscal discipline, to say nothing of the dread austerity, is simply going to immiserate the nation.

And this is not entirely wrong. Everyone knows that you cannot spend your way out of debt. You cannot keep borrowing on the chance that your credit line will hold up long enough for you to continue to keep making your payments.

And yet, going cold turkey on a spending addiction is not going to make you happy.

You may want to teach your child responsible behavior, but you would probably not cut him off completely and risk seeing him doing something drastic and irreparable.

Besides, if your child is profligate and intemperate in his spending habits, whose fault is it anyway? How many parents will rescue their children from their errant ways because they, the parents, feel responsible for not having taught them, the children, good behavior.

And how many of them will simply not be willing to risk what might happen if they say No. A child who cannot pay his debts might become homeless, might commit suicide, might rob a bank, might start dealing drugs, or might prostitute himself.

Call it tough love if you like, but a parent who gives in when faced with those possible outcomes is not being a moral sellout.

It’s a good thing to be against bailouts. From a moral perspective, they are clearly a step in the wrong direction. And yet, when it’s your child, and the alternatives are horrifying, which set of parents would simply say No, nothing… do your worst.

And yet, many parents do arrive at that point. After having their generosity abused repeatedly, they arrive at the last recourse… treat the profligate son as an adult and cut him off.

This will force him to learn responsibility the hard way. It will offer him a lesson in good behavior that he will long remember.

If he survives it, that is.

All of this to say that either our leaders will find moral virtue on their own or the markets will impose it on them.

We have lost track of the old virtues, of discipline and thrift, of earning your way and working for what is yours.

Our fiscal incontinence is hardly limited to the government. Household balance sheets are in a calamitous state, too.

This could not have happened if we had not, as a culture, decided that debt was not such a bad thing, because it could be redeemed by the joys of spending.

Express all your feelings, we were told, even if they are not really your feelings. More at home on stage than in the real world, therapists have been teaching people to emote on cue, to feel the feelings they are supposed to have, to feel the feelings that might be appropriate for the role they have adopted.

Just because you can throw yourself into a paroxysm of rage does not mean that the anger is really yours. If it has not arisen within the right context, then it is pure theatrical display, a form of emotional incontinence.

But once such displays become their own reason for being, once we all come to believe that expressing our feelings will produce some kind of emotional equilibrium and enhanced mental health, then we lose complete track of whether we can afford the expense.

By that I mean that we will not be trying to suit our emotions to the real world of our relationships. When our newfound willingness to let it all hang out seems to undermine our relationships we will double down, express ourselves more fulsomely, and turn ourselves into perfect drama queens.

Eventually we will be alone and isolated, self-absorbed and self-involved, having racked up a string of debts to all of the people we have offended and insulted. We will find ourselves surrounded by the rubble of the relationships we have destroyed and the pain we have inflicted on those who have cared for us.

Once you get to that point, the point where you have not just run out of money, but you have run out of other people’s money, you are going to have a very rude awakening.

The God That Flailed

Dreams die hard. Illusions die harder.

Politically speaking, American politics is having what I would call a “timber” moment.

The lumberjacks have been sawing away at the majestic tree for what seems to be hours. They have finally reached the point where the tree is losing its equipoise and is beginning its descent to earth. As the slow-motion fall begins, the lumberjacks yell: “Timber,” to warn everyone to get out of the area.

We are now watching one of the greatest political illusions of our time, the presidency of Barack Obama, begin its descent to earth.

Some Democrats, among them Doug Schoen and Pat Caddell seem never to have been fooled by Obama. Others have been wiping the fog from their eyes, the better to see that the candidate in whom they invested their hope and dreams has turned out to be a grand illusion.

Lincoln Mitchell of the Harriman Institute at Columbia University still maintains a glimmer of hope. Yet, even he does not recognize Obama any more. Hope and change, he writes, have become timidity and whining. Link here.

The news analysis from Obama’s grand tour of Asia has been devastating. If Obama was thinking that he could compensate for the Democratic electoral debacle by pretending to be a world statesman, his trip seems merely to have shown that he is more pretense than substance. World leaders have taken his measure and do not respect him.  Link here.

See the reports from ABC News and CBS News.

The public good notwithstanding, politicians are in the business of winning elections. If their leader leads them to ignominious defeat, then they are going to start working to replace him.

It begins with the nay-saying, as the party panjandrums  disassociate themselves from their leader. It is not an accident that Joe Scarborough reported having been told by leading Democrats in the Senate that Barack Obama “has no idea what he is doing.” Link here.

Since the description points to people who are easily identified, you can feel confident that Scarborough received permission to reveal the information.

If you watch through the segment from Scarborough’s program you will see that Mike Barnicle admits to having heard the same thing from the same leaders.

These leaders are, dare I say, worried for the future of an Obama-led Democratic party. If they count among the two dozen Democratic senators who will be running for re-election in 2012, they are worried for their own political future.

And yet, they are facing an extremely difficult problem. If Obama is defeated in a primary, then his base supporters in the African-American community will likely not come out to vote for another Democrat.

And no Democrat can win a national election without the participation of the African-American community.

And if it appears that Obama is forced out by a cabal of Democrats, the African-American community will also feel the sting of betrayal.

The only real solution, as Schoen and Caddell explained in the Washington Post yesterday, would be for Obama to decide not to run again. Link here.

But, how can you convince Obama not to run again while at the same time convincing his most ardent supporters to remain loyal to the Democratic party.

Schoen and Caddell have found an excellent rhetorical ploy. They are telling Obama that the road to Mount Rushmore leads through his refusal to run for a second term. As a one-term president, Obama can be one of the greatest of presidents.

The mind boggles at the amount of vanity you need to believe something like that. Anyway, Schoen and Caddell have made their first attempt to get Obama out of the way without destroying the party. Neat trick if you can accomplish it.

Speaking for centrist Democrats, they have just yelled: Timber!

Is there another possible rhetorical ploy here? If they ask me-- they haven’t-- I will recommend that they tell Obama not to run for re-election because the job is beneath him.

Why Are Boys Failing at School?

Somewhere, somehow, someone got the bright idea that the American school system was stacked against girls. If girls were not performing as well as boys, then the system must have been conspiring to lower their self-esteem.

As we were all told, schooling was not about learning, but about enhancing one’s self-esteem.

As you know, some people believe that there is no fundamental difference between boys and girls. They take it to be a dogmatic truth.

Applying that truth to the school system yielded this chain of reasoning: if boys excel at math and science, then that only mean that teachers are creating an environment where boys are called on more often, are allowed to speak out more often, and are judged according to criteria that diminished the intelligence of girls: like objective fact and right and wrong answers.

If boys are better at math and science, if they want to learn historical facts, or if they want to read about heroic generals and great political leaders… well, this must prove that the school system is acculturating them in patriarchal values.

Following this chain to its logical conclusion, these educators decided that the only way they could set things right and enhance girls’ self-esteem would be to liberate everyone from the shackles of right and wrong answers, of fact and information, by introducing notions like fuzzy math, where each answer can have merit. They also decided that it was bad to teach the great male heroes of American history or of world civilization because their successes occurred at the expense of more intelligent women. They also concluded that when it was time to speak up in class or write an essay, the topics should not involve the real world, but should be geared toward the expression of feelings.

Finally, they wanted to do everything in their power to eliminate competitive striving in the classroom or even the playground. Some schools banned dodge ball and spelling bees, lest children learn how to compete with each others.

Girls, they told us, tend to cooperate. Boys tend to compete. Thus, schools prescribed more cooperative circles of love and fewer competitive activities.

To right the perceived wrongs of patriarchy, these pedagogues decided that they needed to reorganize the classroom by making it into a conspiracy against boys.

You may think that this is something of a joke, a strange theoretical brew cooked up by a bunch of radical feminists for their own delectation. The problem is that it has become the norm in far too many American schools, and has been hurting boys.

Of course, it is not news. Christina Hoff Sommers identified the problem ten years ago in her book: The WAR AGAINST BOYS: How Misguided Feminism Is Harming Our Young Men. And here is another article that offers a summary of the salient issues. Link here.

But what are the consequences of this systematic pedagogical malpractice. As Lisa Wolfe wrote in The Daily Beast yesterday, boys around America are underperforming in school, are disinterested in classroom work, and are suffering from a severe self-esteem deficit. Link here.

Is this another victory for feminism?

As it happens, boys are compensating for the way the school are treating them by throwing themselves into areas of competitive striving that are beyond the control of their oppressive schoolteachers: video games and sports.

Wolfe summarizes the successes of this war against boys:
“The rise of girls in academia, from elementary school to college, has been well-documented. Girls are outperforming boys in all subjects except math and science, and even there, they’re closing the gap. There has been a steady 25-year decline in boys’ participation in extracurricular activities as girls take over clubs, newspapers, and yearbooks. For every 100 girls with learning disabilities there are 276 boys. For every 100 women graduating college, there are 77 men.

“But how this shift is affecting boys psychologically is less well-known, perhaps partly because parents and teachers are reluctant to raise the question for fear it will be perceived as taking attention away from girls. But talk to them privately, and many teachers and parents say they worry that the sea change occurring in America’s classrooms is leaving boys feeling helpless and sapping them of their motivation.”

She reports that similar rules apply to behavior. If a boy taunts or teases a girl he is punished for sexual harassment. It is not allowed or tolerated. If a girl calls a boy stupid or hits him, he has no right to fight back or defend himself.

So you are creating a situation where, as Wolfe says: “Advocates for boys say it will do girls no good to come of age alongside a generation of males that feel unheard and unsuccessful.”

Someone might notice that as soon as sex enters the picture, boys find an arena where they can, regrettably, avenge the accumulated insults that they have suffered through their childhood.

The deviant attitudes of schoolteachers seems to lead directly to sexual practices that disadvantage girls… like hooking up. Is hooking up therefore a type of revenge: does it mean that the empire is striking back.

Many of the experts Wolfe cites-- she does not cite Christina Hoff Sommers-- are at pains to say that the problem cannot be solved by rolling back the gains made by girls.

They also note that school should not be a zero-sum game  where the success of one group can only occur at the expense of the other group.

Yet, zero-sum thinking is precisely what created the problem in the first place. Feminist educators decided that if boys were more successful than girls, in school as in any area of life, their success must have been purchased at the expense of girls.

It’s easy enough to propose quick fixes for the problem-- single-sex schools are one solution-- but the educational system right now seems to be infected with an ideology that was promoted and promulgated by feminists, that was enacted in a fundamentally gynocratic world, and that now has the imprimatur of being politically correct.

The first step in changing it is to notice that it represents a systematic oppression of boys. These brave new educators, in their thorough-going and willful ignorance of reality, have been indulging in a form of institutionalized child abuse.

My Candidate for TIME's Person of the Year

Bummer! I was going to cast a ballot for Time Magazine’s Person of the Year, when I discovered that my candidate had not been nominated. Link here.

It wasn’t a total loss. Time’s editors state clearly that your vote doesn’t really count for anything-- they themselves will make the ultimate decision-- but at least you can have some fun casting a meaningless vote.

How do you get to be Person of the Year? The editors explain: “TIME's Person of the Year is bestowed by the editors on the person or persons who most affected the news and our lives, for good or ill, and embodied what was important about the year.”

The magazine’s editors choose the candidates, and the voting will show, if nothing else, who still reads Time.

That’s where it all becomes a little scary.

As I am writing, the leading vote gatherer is none other than… Julian Assange. If that does not dampen your optimism about America, nothing will.

At least, it tells us why the editors do not trust their readers to make the selection.

Julian Assange did have a moment or two in the spotlight. He dumped tens of thousands of stolen, classified American military documents into the media. Beyond that he had a secondary media moment when he was accused of sexual assault in Stockholm.

Beyond that, he has disappeared from public view and from public concern. 

His was a here today/gone tomorrow story. His efforts have had no real affect on American foreign policy.

None of it seems to matter to the great minds who read Time Magazine. Then again, it does tell us something about how well informed Time readers are.

Obviously, some of the other vote gatherers did affect the news. No one doubts that Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert were influential, to say nothing of Lady Gaga, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Steve Jobs, and Mark Zuckerberg.

One does wonder how Recep Tayyip Erdogan made it into fifth place. Maybe people still read Time Magazine in Istanbul.

But how did the editors leave off the list my candidate, the one “person” who was really the most important new story this year. That would be: The Tea Party.

If you’re thinking that The Tea Party is not a person, keep in mind that the Person of the Year is no longer limited to persons. A few years back Time named "The American" as Person of the Year. In 1988 it named "Endangered Earth" the Planet of the Year. In 2006 it outdid itself by naming your, and my, mirror image the Person of the Year.

To summarize, Time Magazine is supposed to have its finger on the pulse of America, Yet, it does not know that the Tea Party had the most influence on the news and our lives in 2010.

Could it be that it is living in a mainstream media bubble that spares it the indignity of having to deal with reality?

It’s easy to blame the internet for the decline of the mainstream media, but now we know that the editors of Time Magazine are completely out of touch with America.

Someday perhaps they will wake up to realize that their business model is not working because they think they are too good for the American public.

Having marginalized themselves, they only attract readers who are living in an alternative universe where Julian Assange dominated the news in 2010.

[Update: As of Saturday morning, Lady Gaga had overtaken Julian Assange to occupy first place in the minds of Time's readers.I suppose that Time readers are showing us that they recognize enduring celebrity when they see it. In something of a surprise, Recep Tayyip Erdogan has moved up to third place.]

Leaders Need a Good Coach, Not a Shrink

Actually, Steven Tobak seems to believe that leaders need a good shrink, not a coach. Links here and here. I am happy to correct his rather strange idea.

As you may know, therapists have been having difficulty competing against coaches, whether they be life coaches, relationship coaches, or executive coaches.

For reasons that escape me, Tobak seems to find this to be a bad thing. So, he is trying to market psychotherapy to people who know exactly what it is and what it does and who do not want to have anything to do with it.

After examining the bad behavior of executives who are either psychopaths or philanderers-- without noting that the two are not really the same-- Tobak seems to suggest that criminal executives would have done better to go into therapy than to seek out an executive coach.

I have no idea how he knows that these criminal executives availed themselves of the services of coaches. Or that they did not see a therapist.

And I cannot imagine where he got the idea that executives call on coaches to help them control their criminal impulses.

Tobak does not really define what kind of therapy he is talking about. I assume that he favors introspective insight-oriented psychotherapy. If he were talking about one of the variants of cognitive therapy or solution-focused therapy, then he would be referring to something that is akin to coaching.

Therapy has been around for quite some time now. It has been tried and tested by many people for many different conditions. It is fully accepted by our culture; there is no great stigma to consulting with a therapist.

By now, most Americans have had an experience with therapy or know someone who has. They have concluded, based on experience, that therapy is largely ineffective.

Even if therapy worked with some happy few patients, no one believes that it can have any salutary effect on narcissistic sociopaths and psychopaths.

No one who is even minimally informed about therapy would suggest that a criminal will be cured if he discovers the childhood traumas that set him on the road to crime.

Besides, people who are fundamentally dishonest are going to lie to their therapists, anyway.

None of which prevents Tobak from diagnosing these criminal executives-- people like Jeff Skilling, Bernie Ebbers, Dennis Kozlowski, Richard Scrushy, et al-- as suffering from personality disorders.

In the same article he says that they are suffering from arrogance and greed, which are not personality flaws, but are character flaws.

I appreciate that therapists are trying to drum up more business, but still, having character flaws does not make you sick and does not point to a personality disorder.

People make mistakes. Sometimes they make grievous mistakes. That does not make them sick. It means that they are suffering from moral failings.

Let’s understand the difference between character and personality. Character involves how you behave toward others. You may or may not be responsible, reliable, trustworthy, honest, honorable, disciplined, loyal, and generous: these are character traits.

It is certainly fair to say that a narcissistic psychopath is lacking in good character.

Yet, he may still have a pleasant, even an engaging personality. He may be gregarious, charming, sweet, and cheerful, but that does not mean that you can trust him. His personality says little if anything about his character.

Be that as it may, all of the executive-level criminals Tobak cites are of the masculine persuasion. The same applies to a second group of men that Tobak seems to want to lump with the first: philanderers like Eliot Spitzer, John Edwards, and Tiger Woods. He might have added Bill Clinton and Mark Sanford.

Of course, there is a difference between embezzling corporate funds and cheating on your wife. Running a Ponzi scheme is not the same as getting involved in an orgy. Falling in love with a woman who is not your wife is not the same as having sex with a bevy of beauteous groupies.

Of the men Tobak identifies as philanderers, the only man who we know underwent therapy was Tiger Woods. The result of his therapy: he got divorced, lost his family, and forgot how to play golf.

One doubts that his example will lead too many executives to run straight to the couch.

Besides, why does Tobak select out a group of corporate criminals, add on a group of philanderers, and then generalize to all corporate executives? This feels like an exercise in sloppy thinking.

Though Tobak does not mention this point, it is more likely that a therapist will be a woman and more likely that a coach will be a man.

One cannot read Tobak without suspecting that he believes that these men will be cured of their testosterone-driven behaviors if only they get in closer touch with their feminine side. In certain segments of the culture, this passes as an article of faith. It is plausible that Tobak has absorbed it, even unwittingly.

Yet, no man in America today has not heard that he needs to become more sensitive, to get over his aggressive and competitive behavior. The culture scolds men for being men. It does so through sensitivity training, many forms of therapy, talk shows and the movies of the week.

Some men have reacted by becoming more sensitive and caring… more metrosexual, if you will. Others, however, have reacted by becoming more defiantly manly, more aggressive and more competitive… even to the point of testing the limits of legality.

When you advise people to go into therapy, you have to consider that these same people have been saturated with what the therapy culture counts as correct thinking. This means that therapy might be the problem more than the solution.

As for the men who have cheated on their spouses, we should notice that these men are not the kinds of corporate criminals who are currently occupying various penitentiaries across the nation. Tiger Woods excepted, they are all politicians.

A trendy psychiatric classification might lure you into thinking that an embezzler should be linked with an athlete who has a few too many groupies, but no one gets fired or arrested for acting like an alpha male.

Corporate executives who have been done in by their amorous dalliances usually fall afoul of insider trading or conflict of interest rules. It’s one thing to have a mistress; quite another to share inside information with her.

Before consigning corporate executives to the world of psychiatric dysfunction, one must recognize that most of them, the vast majority, are high-functioning individuals.

They did not rise to the summit of the corporate hierarchy by consuming themselves with mental anguish or by getting in touch with their feminine side.

Most of them know that for the most part, therapy will not provide them with the kind of guidance they need when faced with difficult leadership or management issues.

Most therapists do not know very much about the business world. Reality is not taught in psychology or psychiatry graduate programs. Their bailiwick is the world of feelings and fantasies, cognitive function and dreams.

When executives seek out coaches, they are looking for people who have had business experience, who can grasp the essentials of their problem, and who can offer helpful and directed counsel.

It is fair to say that some therapists are, by virtue of experience, savvy about certain types of business. As I see it, these professionals work more as coaches than as therapists.