Knifethrust of Thought

“Authentic” celebrity is never the product only of the efforts of the person who is celebrated.  The actor commanding $10 million a picture is able to do so because in his second appearance in a film the screenplay was written by a genius, the director was a wizard, the producer kept his eye on the ball, the studio cut a hell of a distribution deal, or his co-star was a $15 million a picture celebrity whose notoriety (always a career booster) led to a record-breaking opening weekend.   Meanwhile hundreds of thousands of never-will-be’s  strive and sacrifice, “prepare” themselves and writhe with desire and hope until their intestines cycle into spin/dry, yet never get a call-back.  The predicament is too humanly destructive for a glib or frivolous comment about being in the right place at the right time (however apt that may be).  It’s just the way things are.  It’s the luck of the draw.  The only consolation the multitude of disappointed might savor is the knowledge that after that first big success, the celebrity in question gets his choice of five or six of all the good parts on offer at the moment and, more often than not, either exercises terrible judgment or never again receives a smidgen of the good fortune he enjoyed his second time out.  Bye, bye, happiness.  Still, there is a difference in being a 45-year-old car salesman who never delivered a line on screen, and a no-longer-employable leading man with fifty million dollars in the bank and a Gulfstream jet.  That is an irony that calls for sarcasm, but I am sorry—I just can’t seem to find it in me.

I don’t like looking overlong at an acquaintance when he’s not aware I’m watching.  I start imagining outlandish things about him.  I think this is because he’s affectless at such times, so my sensibility isn’t influenced by the familiar prods and kneading we carry on with when we deliberately interact.

Anthropologists say the human race became the dominant species on the planet because it’s the most adaptive species; if this is true, it carries the corollary that we learn by our mistakes.  But I have seen so many cases indicating the contrary that I can’t help doubting the proposition—until I think about money, specifically about how the glee of having a surplus of it or the fear of not having enough short-circuits man’s psyche.  What else might explain why a heretofore successful businessman would purchase an acclaimed restaurant, then proceed to amortize his investment by reducing the cost—-and thereby the quality—of precisely those amenities that made the restaurant popular to begin with?

Values are principles that control behavior.  They derive from a twin pair of evolutionary imperatives: the self-assertive need to achieve goals that are measurable, promoting the self-esteem necessary to continue achieving goals; and the self-protective need to assert oneself without fatally antagonizing other people asserting themselves.  Convictions, on the other hand, are intellectual formulations of values as they relate to the fundamental aspects of external reality at a given time.  Here’s the tricky part: The fundamentals of external reality (i.e., circumstances) are always in the process of altering as time persists.  Maladapted people hang on to their obsolete convictions with the ferocity of a downing man clinging for his life to an anvil.  Well-adjusted people know that dropping old convictions and adopting new ones as circumstances mandate is the only way their values can be preserved.  Soi brave, mon enfant!

A mind-set manifests itself in different ways in different circumstances.  Psychologically, there is no difference between the 1920s small-town reverend and the head of a contemporary women’s studies department.  They are both authoritarian Puritan fanatics.

The institutions that used to support the middle class have either died or mutated into something else.  The middle class we knew is not going to be reconstituted.

My son has an elegantly simple rule for managing subordinates.  He won’t help anybody solve a problem who hasn’t first tried exhaustively to solve it for himself.  When I managed a sales force, I used to instruct my salespeople not to tell me about a problem unless they were also able to propose a solution.

Would you like for me to tell you how to stop worrying, get the kinks out of your behavior, and enjoy life’s richness to the maximum?  Read Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock.  But do it soon, because everything is getting ready to accelerate again.

The Baby Boomers were our first generation to wreck a whole ethos because of perceived parental overkill. First they were required to work for their allowance at the abusive rate of half an hour a week. Later on they had to do some homework. They were even forced to come downstairs and intermingle with the family on Thanksgiving. What with the TV and stereo blasting away in perpetuity, the message just didn’t get through that after adolescence they would be expected to take the reins and fund their own existence. Ultimately their folks refused to buy a Stingray for them on the occasion of their extrusion from high school, and that broke the camel’s back. They hit the road in high dudgeon, only to discover that Dad kept the allowance coming anyway. For the first time in their lives, the Babes were faced with making strategic decisions. They opted to spend their money purchasing 80% of the world’s drug supply. Everything after that was a psychedelic pisshaze with vagrant bouts of sexual activity and sloganeering attended by wine, incense and fingernails-on-the-blackboard music until they woke up in college, still siphoning their parents’ bucks yet acknowledging that the old farts had steered them right all along: the better the grades they made, the more money they would earn to finance their ongoing self-indulgence crusade. Additionally they were pleased to learn that they had Changed the World, a source of immense pride and distinction which they duly acknowledged by still wearing their hair long, growing mutton chops and ‘staches, and not wearing anything special to class. Viva la revolucion.

Good People Need to Learn How to Duck.  It did me good one morning when I entered the building of a prospective customer—a man-and-wife start-up operation—and discovered in the receptionist a young lady who was happy as a tick to be working there.  She enthused: “They called us into the warehouse last week and said that we are all a family.  They said that if the business succeeded and they succeeded, so will everybody here.  They’re like the mother and the daddy.”  Well the company did really well—thanks in no small part to all the energy and infectious volubility of this young woman—but a year and a half after we met they let the receptionist go.  “Why did they do that?” I asked her and, not too happy now, she replied: “I don’t know.  He just said the Corporation decided it needed someone more polished. I didn’t even know that we’d become a corporation.”

You never need to wonder whether your lover loves you.  If she‘s not trying to please you and she doesn’t talk in a way that tells you she’s been thinking about you, she does not.

What do you call a defunct zombie?  When a relationship is over, admit it and throw your energy into your next new start.  Don’t drag the corpse around, don’t try to revive it.  The kids will be dandy unless the two of you eviscerate each other; and you’ll soon get used to a five-room pad.  Meanwhile, you know what they call a resurrected corpse, don’t you—it’s a zombie.  You ought to acknowledge and confess that what you really want—to go back to the pastel-marshmallow time before you royally screwed the pooch—is simply not an option.  Let’s say you hang in long enough to cobble up a brand new relationship post-mortem.  Neither the lady’s passions nor yours are ever again going to leap to the ecstatic pitch of your original We-Are-the-Greatest-Lovers marathon, because there’s nothing left to discover about each other.  Every glance that passes between you will remind you how incredibly fabulous it was the first time, and how pallid and hollow and grotesque it is now.  There you two will be, a couple of zombies chained together in the bone yard, though only for a time, because the bitterness and resentment that will corrode your souls are already seeping into your breasts.

Carrying a grudge is tantamount to feeding your soul into a cheese shredder, not to mention that you’re aggravating and perpetuating the injury inflicted by your victimizer. I am sure that if he knew how you’ve unmanned yourself, he’d laugh his ass off.  Is that what you wanted to happen when you swore your vengeance?

You make a mistake, and the consequences force you to recognize the error of your ways.  You see yourself differently now, and you don’t like what you see.  You want to improve, and you start to become a new person.  You work hard at this, and you find that you are sensitive to details you never noticed in the past.  Eventually you are entitled to say that you have made yourself a new person and a good person.  Does that mean that you can reacquire the state of grace you cost yourself?  No.  You were not the only person changed by your mistake.  The ingredients of your state of grace, I’m sorry to say, are no longer in the mix, at least not in the same proportions.  Your hard work and new-found empathy, however, suggest you might do better next time provided that you stop looking forward to the past. ⁽ I write this directly from the heart having today destroyed through my stupidity a relationship I was grateful to have and cherish, in the process doing terrible damage to the feelings of an excellent man who trusted me without demur and was therefore particularly acutely vulnerable to the unintended offense.)

Overheard at the Intersection of Hollywood and Vine: A woman is using the payphone. I don’t have his pants. Why would I be walking around Hollywood holding Peter’s pants in my hands? Jesus…. So I’m the bad guy?…. The last time I saw the goldfish it was in the refrigerator door-rack.…. Hey this grungy-looking weirdo is staring at me. He’s checking out my tits. Wait a minute…. Okay, he’s gone. Are you saying I didn’t pick her up from school yesterday? Fuck that. Who’s got her?…. Oh shit. Look, can you go down and get her out for me? You can act like you’re me…. I would act like I was you, if you…. What’s the big deal, Breanne? Don’t you give a shit about my daughter?….

Home­ is a memory and a dream, and a nexus of associations that motivates our most vital actions.  Child psychiatrists say that the love a child receives in its first 5 years stays with it afterwards as a component of its personality all its life.  Thus most of us “remember” that we came from a good place, one of ease, contentment, security, fun, warmth and well-being, which we left either because we grew up or—for the vast majority of the race—because we saw our homes destroyed, were violently uprooted from them, or looked on as their goodness vanished when adulthood led us to see the blight we hadn’t known about in our innocence.  And then we spend the rest of our lives wanting to “go home again.”

Our basic difficulty is that the reconfiguration of our culture through technology is taking place so rapidly that evolutionary adjustments to the new rate of change have not had time to grow into our makeup. Think of a New Guinea pygmy conscripted without a lick of warning to undertake the principal bassoon part in a presentation of La Traviata this afternoon, supervise the making of Pariser Schnitzel mit Bratkartoffeln und Rotkohl for seventeen tonight, then climb inside the cockpit of the Space Shuttle tomorrow as its flight commander.

What happens inside a man between the time he gets up and reluctantly leaves his sweet toasty sex-accomplice so he can shower and shave, and twenty minutes later when he walks into the kitchen dressed for work praying she hasn’t got there yet so he can depart before she comes to say goodbye?

Long Time Gone.  I was a good-natured youth with promise during the early years of our marriage, and my young wife was adorably energetic and a boon companion.  Recalling our “extended honeymoon,” and aware of how terribly I defiled it later on, I feel as though I’m a murderer going back to the locale of his misdeed to lament his guilt and seek to be absolved of it.  Fearfully expectant, he creeps palpating through the lashing branches in the shadows to the picture window, where he hardly pauses before his heart constricts as he beholds his darlings there in the lighted room, still alive and hale as they linger tenderly over the dinner they were engaged in when he’d lurched inside the house that blighted night and plunged it into pitch-blackness.  The killer is yearning more than he has ever yearned for anything to enter through the window and abase himself and crave forgiveness from the couple, but a power he can’t argue with warns that if he shatters the glass in the window the room will not be lighted any more nor gloriously suffused with the young couple’s melded spirits, that it will be as black and void as his own withering soul.  It is easy to understand but hard to bear—the people we used to be are not accessible any more.

SUMMA THOMPSOLOGICA

As a nation we will solve our problems as soon as we figure them out, and we will figure them out as soon as we learn to think in terms of radical new concepts enabling us to see reality neither as it used to be nor as we wish it to be (those are one and the same in slightly different dress) but as it is.  In fact I think we’re already on the way to solving our problems and are not able to realize it because we lack such concepts; I also think that if we don’t find them soon, we’re going to lose our gains.  My first contention is that we Americans, who inhale and exhale success the way the citizens of other countries breathe oxygen, have managed to realize the exceptional ideal of Existential Creativity.  My second contention is that the reason this is so is that after we discarded objective standards of evaluation and behavior c. 1970, we immediately began to replicate our obsolescing mores in novel ways that yet entirely satisfy our primary psychological needs—the same needs that had resulted in our reliance on the old forms of individual and common existence. We have created new family-analogs, new workplaces and new forms of work, new ways of socializing, a new lexicography of romantic and sexual interaction, a new reliance on our experiential judgment that liberates us from dysfunctional relationships and enterprises, a new embrace of changing circumstances, a new religious-like faith (founded on ourselves) in an evolving technology geared to and guaranteeing our preservation (synthesizing the artificial and natural habitats our species is uniquely expected to adapt to), and a new multiplicitous pluralism; we are even transforming popular culture—although this is a much longer process than the others—into a culture that possesses as much artistic integrity as entertainment value.  In short we have created new varieties of all the old forms that fell away.  My third contention is that the engine that has made this work is our economy, rendered fully accessible via easy credit.  Americans are pragmatists par excellence; so why have we not been able to realize what we’ve accomplished?  Because certain of our institutions have maneuvered into positions of insidious influence and have shown that they are not above abusing power in order to control us for their own benefit, economic and otherwise.  Politics, the media and academia plus the educational system are locked in a three-way death struggle to determine which is going to call the shots in this country.  All three despotic entities depend on old-style propaganda and indoctrination, exercised through technologically highly advanced methods that are proving unprecedentedly effective (either because they bypass the brain or because we persist in thinking in the old terms) in manipulating minds and tastes. The first two elites propound the same conventional outmoded terms of reality, while the third propounds merely contrary mirror-versions of those terms.   I repeat: Our defense against the victory of any of them or of any combination is a free-market economy that operates without either mandated controls or greed-induced corruption facilitated by politicians, and we absolutely must tame and dominate these bodies before they seize hold of our economic magic lantern.  The important point is that if we continue thinking in the obsolete terms we are doing the anti-humane forces’ bidding instead of our own, and we are defeating ourselves, for we simply face too many obstacles to maintaining the yes/no morality in the absence of the circumstances that gave rise to it without bleeding away our energy and creativity.  Therefore the new standard of judgment and behavior should be this: “Will it keep me free or make me freer?”  If we choose to act materialistically (“Will it make me feel better?”), they win. If we choose to promote liberty, we win.  And don’t worry about morality, which in any case does not encourage or force people to behave well; it results from good behavior, which derives from decency.  The proto-existentialist Dostoyevski taught us to understand that murder is sometimes another way of expressing man’s highest yearnings.  But that was under the old terminology.  When we adopt the new terms of reference, we won’t be driven to kill in order to live, or to die to gain our freedom.