In a rising country, politicians point your hopes here and there; in a sinking country, they point your resentments.

In a rising country, a president directs your hopes to the moon, a chicken in every pot, a kitchen and home for every such pot of chicken, a college degree for everyone, a better life for your children generation after generation, a world remade in our image….

In a sinking country, a president directs your resentments instead, to immigrants or old money, to mortgage brokers or first-time home buyers, to the rich or to the poor, to the right or to the left, hither and yon, round and round, anywhere but here, in your mirror.

A president offers stories, not policies; a story of how we began, where we are going, who we are, who’s with us, who’s against us, what just happened, what happens next. A policy may change your life for decades, but you prefer a story for the feeling you get while you listen.

I saw a commercial for fat-burning pills on a cable TV channel. Right, I laughed. Did you put too much in your mouth these last few days, or last few years? Then put one thing more in your mouth. Like the joke about chocolate cake and vanilla ice cream: eat all you like, because black food cancels white.

You see a different pill on prime time channels: a purple pill you ask your doctor about, those of you who have doctors to ask, and doctors with time to linger over such questions.

Between pills and between commercials, the stories medicate us too. Law and Order, CSI crime scene investigators, Special Victims Unit….

You would never guess, would you, watching CSI New York or CSI Las Vegas or CSI Miami, that 40% of murders go unsolved in this country? Not counting the murders that are solved wrong. I picture the murderer watching when the wrong verdict comes down, and the wrong person loses his life for the murder. Two victims for the price of one, he chuckles. Buy one, get one free, courtesy of the US Justice System.

A sickening thought, right? If our best efforts only compound the crime we fight? That makes us worse than helpless. Where else does evil come from, except our zealous efforts against evil? Evil is a hydra. Cut off one head and it grows seven more. Worse, the head is your own. You see the severed head and the seven more in your mirror, and see them as your own, if you know what you are looking at, and can bear to look.

Did anyone ever do evil except to fight evil, as he saw it?

But an episode of CSI will medicate that fear and disgust, chase it clean away, and renew you for yet more campaigns against evils large and small, evils near and far.

Let me take my own medicine, then. Russ Douthat has me in his sights when he writes of The Enduring Cult of JFK in the New York Times today:

… why the J.F.K. cult matters — because its myths still shape how we interpret politics today….

We find convenient scapegoats for national tragedies, and let our personal icons escape the blame.

We like to blame Richard Nixon for the 60 thousand Americans who died in Vietnam, and for the death of our idea of ourselves as a country. But in truth it was JFK’s man McNamara, the visionary, the genius, who let thousands more die while he scraped together the courage to confess that the cause was lost. Behind McNamara and Kennedy were the thousands like me, star-struck and adoring. JFK was our knight against the dragon. But our campaign against evil seeded the world with evil, and multiplied evil.

Douthat lets us off easy:

And we imagine that the worst evils can be blamed exclusively on subterranean demons, rather than on the follies that often flow from fine words and high ideals.

Then let us chase this dragon all the way home to his lair.

Where does the dragon sleep and wake, before and after his rampages in the world?

In those who hunt him. The dragon lives in those who hunt the dragon.

How is the dragon reborn, again and again?

From our quests to kill him.

How is the dragon rescued, hidden, returned to strength, and launched anew?

In our vows to destroy him; when we vow Never Again. In us. In the mirror; the mirror from which Quixote was running all those years; the mirror over his toilet; the mirror that broke his lance the last time and forever.

In The Hero with a Thousand Faces, all the faces are your own, and they are cowards, not heroes, fleeing from the one face behind the thousand.

No, endure the small evils and pass them by, or spawn greater evils.

Could this be what the first rabbi meant?

… resist not  evil: but whosoever shall smite thee on thy right cheek turn to him the other also …

Remedies kill.

I lost my daughter to a well-meaning judge who has devoted her life to the fight against domestic violence, and now commits domestic violence of another kind, of another magnitude, on another scale; domestic violence on an industrial scale, if only she knew. May she see the dragon in her mirror before it devours more hundreds of children.

###

So many lives were closed to me, or I clapped the door on them, because I could not say all day “The key is this…” and “this is key…”

I care too much about words, their sounds, their meanings. Too much. And yet…

All the world came through thee, keyhole one, or two, or three….

 

###

 

What is a sale? A promise.

I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

– J Wellington “Windy Bill” Wimpy, 1932

All his father’s promises ended one way, says a man named Blow.

“You jus’ blew it.”

His father had a sense of humor, at least, telling the Blow boys “You jus’ blew it.”

His father could promise the moon. His father could promise the boys a trip to the fair, a little of his money and a little of his time. His father could promise to come again next week. His father could promise to show them what he loved more than he loved his boys: guitar.

His father never delivered. Instead, he told the boys “You jus’ blew it.”

That was the most attention the boys ever got from their father. When he owed them something, he would squint suspiciously at them until he could say, “You jus’ blew it.” He made his broken promises their fault, not his.

He bequeathed them his failure, and made the failure theirs.

Charles Blow writes for the New York Times now, but he remembers the rare occasions when he had a father; when, for instance, his father took the boys to a truck stop and gave them each a handful of quarters for the video games.

Blow Senior was a guitar player, and played in truck stops. His songs were stories. What sort of story, do you suppose? The story of loss… of shoulda-woulda-coulda… so close… almost. All his truck stop songs said “You blew it,” I’m guessing.

He sang past tense stories all, I imagine, all about the past. Not of the “I want to live forever, I want to learn how to fly” variety, but elegy, lullaby, the song that says Then, not Now… Gone, not Coming… Slow, not Fast… Stop, not Go… Sink, not Fly… Sleep, not Wake…

Why? Because he could do nothing about the past. The past could make no demands on him.

Stories of the future demand something from you. Stories of the future are promises. Blow Senior preferred to sing about promise lost, life’s broken promises to him, promises blowin’ in the wind, promises past. The past makes no demands, except to demand from you your future. For Blow Senior, his future and the future of his boys.

What’s a loser? A loser tells the story of loss so beautifully and well that he turns all his stories in that direction, all his life. You are the stories you tell. You live the stories you practice most and tell the best. You make a script of them, a story of the future.

This is not just Blow Senior, truck-stop guitar player, but Enron and Worldcom and Olympus camera company. Guess what Olympus bought with this three quarters of a billion dollars:

Olympus also acquired three small companies in Japan for a total of $773 million, only to write down most of their value within the same fiscal year. Those companies — Altis, a medical waste recycling company, Humalabo, a facial cream maker, and News Chef, which makes plastic containers — had little in common with Olympus’s main line of business of producing cameras and other electronics. Those businesses had not made money before being acquired, according to the credit ratings agency Tokyo Shoko Research.

New York Times
08 November 2011

For three quarters of a billion dollars, Olympus bought a story to cover their losses.

But in an extraordinary statement issued Tuesday, the company said the panel found that the money for mergers had in fact been used to mask heavy losses on investments racked up since about 1990.

They bought a story to save face. A story.

The same money might have averted failure. They chose to avert shame instead, a story of shameful failure. The same money might have bought them a way to succeed. Instead they bought a better excuse to fail, and failed faster.

Story is everything. You’ll take a poor result inside a good story over a good result inside a poor story. A dignified death over an ignominious life. You, and Blow Senior, and Olympus.

“You jus’ blew it.” What a clever story from Blow Senior! ‘Forget what I promised you. I have found you unworthy of my promises.’

You would feel small if you shortchanged some guy, a stranger or a son. You couldn’t live with yourself. So you insult him first, grandly. Now who’s small? Him, not you.

If life failed Blow Senior, why should Blow Senior come through for anyone? Wasn’t that the moral of all his songs and stories? If life broke promises to Blow Senior, why should he keep promises? Everywhere he went, that was his story, a story just waiting to happen, the chorus of the song, coming around like clockwork.

So what were those promises, life’s broken promises to Blow Senior? Only more promises of his own.What else could they be? Life promises nothing but the chance to make and keep promises, to make the future we see.

When Blow Senior failed, he explained that life failed him. When he promised himself a future and didn’t deliver, he told life “You jus’ blew it,” with a suspicious squint. He found life unworthy of his promises. The chorus of his song: Now who’s small? Life, not you.

Blow Senior was hearing “You jus’ blew it” long before his boys heard it. It was his kind of story, his kind of song. It was the story of his life. The hopeless past was always his future, from the beginning.

For a Blow Senior who one day says No More, songs of loss are not enough for me, see Bread and Chocolate (Pane e cioccolata, 1974), about a illegal Italian guest worker in wealthy Switzerland.

This is all harmless enough, you think?

Add it up though. The mind wriggles out of promises by finding fault in the person owed (“You jus’ blew it”). Aspersions displace promises. Multiplied by millions, such promises darken the world.

Step 1: Promise: Debtor and Creditor

I promise you, and owe you what I promised, whether I promise a phone call, a dollar, or a lifetime of marriage. This makes me the Debtor, you the Creditor.

Step 2: Aspersion: Debtor As Discreditor

I discredit you in my mind, and find faults that make you unworthy of my promise (“You jus’ blew it”). The more I discredit you, the more I can in good conscience shortchange you.

Step 3: Debtor Doubles Down

I imagine wrongs you have done me (“You jus’ blew it”), for which you owe me damages. In this, you are the Debtor, I am the Creditor. Our debts cancel, mine and yours.

If you have not done these wrongs, I wrong you to think so, and owe you damages, increasing my debt to you, the Creditor.

A promise imagines a future, a day brighter than today by the light of that promise. But when the light of the promise turns to smoke, it darkens the day and poisons the air. Now multiply by millions.

I wonder if Jesus was talking about this in the only prayer we hear him say, the one that begins “Our father…,” where translators wrestle with the word debt:

And forgive us our debts, as we forgive our debtors.
And forgive us our sins, as we forgive those who have sinned against us.
And forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who have trespassed against us.

How about:

And forgive us promises discredited…
And forgive us promises turned to slander…
And forgive us promises displaced by aspersions…

This Jesus was sometimes sad and sometimes angry. Do you blame him?

Stop with the promises, he seems to say. Better not to promise, than to promise this way. Clean your mouth of promises and aspersions alike. Don’t promise tomorrow, deliver today. Give now. Bread if not lamb, but bread without curses. One day at a time:

Give us this day our daily bread…

He is not promising, is he? This day, he says, not one day.

Give us, he says, not give them. He’s asking, not promising.

Our father, he begins, not My father. He could have stopped there. That one word is everything.

We have him wrong, I think, if we imagine he would pay off all promises, all the sins of the world, all the promises turned to poison. We have him promising too much. I hear him offering to free us of promises instead. Only that. Offering an end to promises, or poisoned promises.

Money is the root of all evil, he said elsewhere. What is money but promise in its purest form; nothing in itself, but the promise of something else, somewhere else, another time.

I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.

Try it this way then: Promise is the root of all evil.

We talk too much and promise too much, said this teacher who left so few words. Only say “this day” and say no more. Say it now and say no more, and the world turns from dark to light again.

###

Is love forever the poor stepsister of hate, living at the mercy of hate, living only where hate can’t be bothered to crush it?

That’s an illusion, count on it.

All the world is a foolish love. If the world had never been, who would have missed it? There was no requirement, no need. It’s crazy. It’s nothing but craziness.

That makes hate an angry child in the arms of her father, love. She can only pummel him while he holds her. Hate lives by the mercy of love.

Should you get CPA or write tunes? Get an MBA or write lyrics? Sell soap or songs?

People will always need to eat, says the grocer. No, not always. Only as long as they love life for no good reason. They only require what they require because they want what they don’t need.

Song is just a bubble. Can you ride through life on a bubble? Soap is another bubble, and the songs sell the soap. Soap rides through life on song.

Where would all the CPAs and MBAs at Apple go, if Apple didn’t sell songs? The work you hate lives in the arms of the work you love.

It’s crazy. Nothing but craziness. Crazy love.

###

Hi [Mom]:

OK if I copy [Sis] on this?

I learned the hardest lesson for a smart person to learn: intelligence can be a curse. I don’t mean the intelligence of one person exceeding other people, but the intelligence of our species exceeding that of a dog, say, or a mushroom. Human intelligence can be a curse. It has a downside, a cost. Our big brains want to fix everything. When we try to fix what can’t be fixed, we make it worse. Aging, for example. Aging is an issue for me every day now. The big brain becomes a detective and prosecutor, trying to find and stop the perpetrator. But the perpetrator is time, and cannot be stopped. We only make it worse if we trace our troubles to one another. Best just to tell the big brain to desist, it can’t help us this time.

Does this make any sense? It’s hard to say.

I saw a rat experiment that changed my view of life forever. It was in a movie, a love story called My Uncle From America. It went in three steps: cruel, crueler, and cruelest.

1. Cruel: A rat was trained to go from the painful half of his cage to the safe side. A scientist would switch on a light above the cage, and after five seconds switch on an electric shock under the rat in one half of the cage. The rat soon learned to hurry to the other half of the cage as soon the light came on, before the electric shock. The rat learned to unlatch a little door in between, and learned to do it fast.

2. Crueler: The scientist locked the little door. The trained rat could no longer open it. He did everything he had learned, but nothing worked any more. His health deteriorated rapidly, not from the shocks, which were mild, but because of lost hope or a broken heart or a sense of futility. You could see his eyes glaze over and his fur come out in clumps. He died long before he should have.

3. Cruelest: The scientist put two of these trained rats together in that cage. At first he let them open the little door and escape the electricity. One would open the door for both. They didn’t fight, they worked together. Then the scientist locked the door. Guess what happened? Stop and guess before I tell you. This is the surprise.

a) they both got discouraged and lost their health;

b) they fought, hurt one another even worse, and died even sooner; the winner of the fight, however, lived longer than the loser;

c) they fought, and both stayed healthy, the winner of the fight and the loser both; both lived a full lifespan;

The answer: (c). They fought, but not enough to do serious damage. One rat won the fight and one rat lost, but both stayed healthy and lived long, even the loser.

Why? Here’s my guess: They didn’t feel futile. They didn’t lose hope. They blamed one another for the electricity. They fought to stop the electricity, and when it stopped, they thought their fighting did it. Rat One thought: I taught that stupid rat a lesson. He won’t pull that electricity stunt again. Rat Two thought the same of Rat One. When the electricity came again and again, Rat One thought: I need to give that stupid rat a reminder every so often. Rat Two thought the same of Rat One.

So maybe (3) is not cruelest. The rats need someone to blame and attack. It keeps them healthy. Weird, eh? They don’t feel helpless or hopeless, so long as they have someone to blame and attack. Maybe (2) is worse, where the rat has no one to blame and attack (blatt for short), and feels there is nothing he can do, no way his big brain can help.

I wonder if that’s where most of the fighting in the world comes from? From 3(c)?

This is my Story of Everything.

Humans, being smarter than rats, have one more option:

d) they talked, blamed the scientist, and went on strike; the scientist couldn’t get a thing from either of them, and stopped with the electricity.

We are aging, feeling more pain, and losing our powers to time. But we are also talking, and blaming time, not one another. We are moving from 3(c) to 3(d), as only humans can. Right now, as we speak.

Does this make any sense? It’s hard to say.

Or just call me crazy…

Love
[Brother]

 

Elections are upon us. Again. Elections are forever upon us these days.

I wonder if this is what parties and candidates offer us in an election campaign? What we get so fervent about?

The parties are Rat One and Rat Two. They give us someone to blame. A story to stave off futility.

Hang the bunting, thump the drum, raise the victor, dump the bum.

Laa Dee Laa Dee Laa…

Sing it with me.

Or Pasolini’s Chaucer: “The only song that he did know, was O O O O O O O.”

Or just O. This is what Mrs Moore heard in the cave at Marabar, in Passage to India, that took the heart out of her. Just O.

###

“We’re quits,” says the bookie to the bettor. “That makes us even.”

Paid off, it means.

A bookie doesn’t sell. He doesn’t come to you. You go to him. Or not. But a salesman wants to owe you, always owe you some little thing or other: a drink, a pamphlet, an answer, a phone number, a coat left on the coat-rack. Then he can see you again. Owing keeps the story going, the conversation. Owing binds you: keeps you bound to see him, and him bound to see you. After enough of this, over time, you owe him. You owe him the sale. He won’t say we’re even, we’re quits, until he closes the sale.

Why does a movie end where it ends? Any story?

Because a story has beginning, middle, end?

I never had any use for that answer. Beginning and middle are easy, but end? What’s an end? Why makes an end an end? Why is one thing an end but another thing isn’t?

Consult our bookie once more. He told us.

We’re quits, he said. We’re even. We’re done. Nothing owing.

Your balance with him is zero. You can call it quits, until you place a new bet tomorrow or two minutes from now.

A story ends when nothing more is owed between its people (as they see it). Everything that needed saying is said (as they see it). Everything that needed doing is done (as they see it). Every payback is paid back (as they see it). Every question that needed answering is answered (as they see it).

As they see it! Their accounting doesn’t have to make sense to us, or to anyone but them. If we understand their accounting perfectly, and instantly, then we skip their story.

Story ends where:

We’re even.

Nothing owed either way.

Balance zero.

We’re quits.

At balance zero, the scale stops tipping back and forth. Where, in the Lord’s Prayer, debts and transgressions end, others to us, us to others. At forgive and forget: nothing more to write in the account.

Even is the equilibrium where actions and reactions stop, the back and forth. Even is the flat where the bouncing ball settles.

We’re quits. No reason we have to see each other again. Quittance was the old word for payback. Story ends at quittance: All paybacks paid. Or acquittal, in court.

Now that makes sense to me. I can remember that. A story is a story if it has…

a beginning, a middle, and a quittance;

a debt or transgression, a payback (back and forth, repeat as needed), and an even balance.

Not a payback according to generally accepted principles of accounting, but as they account for it, the people in the story.

Isn’t that what we go to stories for: the oddness of their accounting, in endlessly many forms?

The story begins:

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to heaven, we were all going direct the other way…

Add that up. Account for that.

In ends with a man on the steps to the guillotine, settling accounts:

It is a far, far better thing that I do, than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to, than I have ever known.

###

I don’t know how to ease us into this…

So then jump.

Our worst addiction is story; the stories we tell ourselves all day, inside mostly; as short as two words at every corner we turn or every door we step through.

“Of course,” said with a faint disgust, for example. Two words.

“Figures.” One word.

“Sorry.” One word, but a neverending story. A short form of the story “I’m just in the way.” Says: Go right ahead, don’t let me gum it up, whatever you’re doing.

“The story of my life,” you groan. Why is the story of your life so short? Two words, or one? Because you repeat it every minute of every day, like the drummer’s one note, keeping the beat. To yourself, if no one else.

You step through a doorway:

“Yeah, right,” you say, and look away. Says: Count me out. No more of your stories, please.

“Hey!” you say, looking all around, into every eye. Says: Ok, count me in. What can happen?

In the story of your life, this is the beat.

Your beat fits some songs and not others. Your beat shuts out the rest. Shuts you out.

The story of your life has a song with a chorus. The chorus comes back in the song. The song comes back in the story. The beat comes back in them all. In the chorus, the song, and the story, the beat comes back. Your beat picks your story.

Your beat fits in or it doesn’t, like a Scott Joplin at a funeral, a Bolero at a wedding, a Queen of the Night at the Monday morning meeting, a Don Giovanni at a baby shower, The Rose at a bachelor party…

“Count me in” or “count me out,” says your beat, all day, every minute, at every doorway and corner, to every story sweeping around you, on all sides.

If you’re selling, you’re selling to that beat (theirs). If you’re buying, you’re buying to that beat (yours).

At the fair, in the throng of the market square, you drift to the corner where your beat matches, not clashes.

 

Your worst addiction, your worst (or best) craving: not what goes into your mouth, the coffee or chocolate, but what comes from your mouth, your story; or what might come from your mouth if you weren’t telling yourself No inside, at every step and every turn, every hour of every day.

What’s the song in your head between appointments? What appointments does that song make? What appointments will it never make, and never keep?

###

 

A cross-post from PeopleWillKnow.com, where I write to sell as if my life depended on it; about our addiction to stories, our deadly addiction to drama; for “Remedies Kill” try “Stories Kill.”

 

I lost my father the way my daughter lost hers, decades later. Not in an earthquake or hurricane, not in an epidemic of Influenza or Smallpox, not fighting a far-off war, but in a county courthouse.

Is this the best we can do? Decades later?

We don’t make earthquakes or hurricanes, Influenza or Smallpox, and maybe we don’t make far-off wars, but we made that nearby courthouse. If we made it we can fix it, wouldn’t you think?

No, not so fast.

In Jaws, the town lied about the shark. San Francisco lied about the earthquake and fire of 1906.

At the time, 375 deaths were reported; the figure was fabricated by government officials who felt that reporting the true death toll would hurt real estate prices and efforts to rebuild the city

We lie to hide disaster, or hide the size of disaster; thinking that people run to help in a small disaster, but run from a big disaster.

Like the fire, our lies smoke up the air and the light. We can’t find the fire in the smoke of our lies. We can’t fix what we can’t see. We run the wrong direction. We think we’ve fixed what we’ve only hidden.

Our lies feed more children to the shark. Our lies give the fire more space and more time, more of our dwellings to burn. Our lies shelter the fire and feed it. In hiding, disaster grows. What hides disaster also shelters it, feeds it, grows it. Our lies make disaster worse, and we make one disaster in fighting another.

Take that tiny tiny fire at the end of a cigarette. At the end of 474 billion cigarettes each year, 23.7 billion packs in 1995 in the US alone, its deadly blaze burns across the entire continent.

Imagine [if] two fully loaded jumbo jets crashed each day, killing all aboard. Yet that is the same number of Americans that cigarettes kill every 24 hours.

This disaster began as an answer to another, the disaster of disease. The French doctor Nicot first sent tobacco from Brazil to Paris as a medicine. A doctor in Spain then suggested tobacco for pest control. The bubonic plague, carried by fleas and rats, had killed one third of Europe two centuries before, and would kill one fifth the population of London half a century later.

A man-made disaster is hardest to fight. Why? It becomes an industry.

How many families make their living making those 474 billion cigarettes? What a disaster for them, if we closed their industry!

We see the disaster too late. The smoke clears, that clouded our bloodstream and our thoughts, the air and our vision, but by then it’s an industry, the livelihood to a large population, their place in the world.

I was talking movies with three young couples while we waited for our food. What can you tell by a guy’s favorite movie, one of the women asked. Can you tell if he’s right for you?

I mentioned The Insider and Thank You for Smoking, both about cigarettes. The industry was selling an addictive drug, nicotine, and knew it, said a top scientist from inside their industry. The industry spent big research money to increase the speed and concentration of nicotine absorption in the smoker’s brain.

The Insider was a heroic story of reform, of truth cutting through lies, of sunlight and fresh air clearing away smoke. But one of the guys at the table fell silent, and later he told me that his father had been ruined in the course of that reform, when the state of Mississippi sued big tobacco and won; his father, and his family generations back, and the small town where he grew up, and thousands more just like them.

There the urgent reform grinds to halt. The simple question, as clear as day, sinks into a muddy tug-of-war for years or decades.

Nicotine, for example. Is Nicotine addictive?

No, Nicotine is not addictive, said the CEOs of seven tobacco companies to Congress in sworn and televised testimony.

So let’s ask you that question, and ask three ways: easy, hard, and hardest.

1. Easy:

Nicotine is addictive.

a) false
b) true

Answer: b) true

2. Hard (unless you’re a doctor):

Which of these is most addictive?

a) cocaine
b) phenobarbital
c) nicotine
d) marijuana

Answer: c) nicotine

3. Hardest:

Nicotine is addictive.

a) false
b) true, and thousands of good families have made their livelihood from it for decades, all across the country, and without it they would be ruined and disgraced and lost, they and their children and their children’s children, and their communities and everyone around them.

Answer: b) truly a disaster

Fixing this disaster would be a disaster. Not to the seven CEOs of the tobacco industry, but to thousands of people whose names and faces we will never know. They and the CEOs fight reform for all they are worth.

Money, not Nicotine, is the craving that drags easy questions into the mud, and delays urgent reform for decades.

What brought down cigarette sales? Not warnings about Nicotine addiction, or pictures of smokers dying from gruesome cancers, but increases in price. Money.

How much money?

Don’t skip over these numbers. You’ll want them a minute from now. We’re coming to Family Court, of course.

The settlement paid by the tobacco industry totaled $206 billion dollars across 25 years, or 8.6 billion dollars per year after the first year.

Got that? 8.6 billion dollars per year.

Let’s compare tobacco reform to Family Court reform (Family Court, divorce court, or wherever children are severed from parents in your county).

Family Court needs reform, everyone agrees.

Yeah, right.

If everyone agrees, it’s not reform. Everyone agrees you pull your hand back from a pan of boiling water. It’s done before you can say “reform.” No, reform is boiling water that burns children decade after decade, by the thousands, while we argue ingeniously and tirelessly to make simple questions unanswerable.

First some rough numbers. People and dollars. People helped or hurt, and price paid.

Customers:

cigarette industry: 64 million

child custody industry: 30 million

Yes, everything about “child custody industry” sounds odd. Customers? The cigarette industry can’t jail customers for quitting; the court can.

The 64 million smokers are 21% of the adult population of the US in 2004.

Some 30 million Americans have been through divorce court or Family Court at least once: that’s 21.5 million children in 9 million single-parent households. Roughly.

Look next at the dollars.

For the cigarette industry, these are only court-ordered dollars, damages in the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA) of 1998, not total sales. Why? More on that in a moment.

Dollars, in billions per year:

cigarette industry: $8.6

child custody industry: $35

How is child custody an industry?

How many people do you suppose are employed collecting that $35 billion dollars?

Counting:

… only the state workers who handle the money;

… not the court staff with civil service benefits and pensions;

… not the attorneys hired by frantic parents, or hired by the court to defend absent children, and, like their clients, never seen or heard;

… not the social workers and psychologists employed solely by the court and otherwise extinct;

… not the guards at the courthouse and the county jail and the state prisons who take away those who can’t pay;

How do you suppose these people feel about Family Court reform, when they look up for a moment from the flow of $35 billion dollars? Like workers felt on the cigarette assembly line, after the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (MSA)?

Now why count only the court-ordered dollars the tobacco industry paid to 26 states over 25 years?

The money was meant to lower the rate of smoking in those states, and the death rate from smoking.

Has it, though? Where has the money actually gone?

The states this year (Fiscal Year 2011) will collect $25.3 billion in revenue from the tobacco settlement and tobacco taxes, but are spending only two percent of it — $517.9 million — on programs to prevent kids from smoking and help smokers quit.

The states have cut funding for such programs by nine percent ($51.4 million) in the past year and by 28 percent ($199.3 million) in the past three years.

The 1998 Tobacco Settlement 12 Years Later

In truth, the money goes elsewhere.

Where? To Medicaid costs and other state budget items.

If officeholders didn’t get this money from tobacco companies, they would get it from you and me in taxes, endangering their popularity with voters and their re-election prospects.

In effect, officeholders sold tobacco companies permission to distribute deadly cigarettes. Those cigarettes still reach children, if only as second-hand smoke.

With the money officeholders protect themselves. They don’t waste this money on smokers, or protecting the health of children from smokers. No, they protect themselves from angry taxpayers. They protect their own longevity in office.

Money votes, children don’t.

 

Can I cure my addiction to stories like The Insider? Brave reformers? I see those heroes differently now.

The tobacco settlement addicted officeholders to cigarettes; not to the nicotine in cigarettes, but to the money in cigarettes. In a way, officeholders made the tobacco industry a government program; promising to help children, government helped itself first, as always; officeholders saved themselves, if not children; life expectancy for rose for officeholders, if not for children; children fall to cigarettes as before, but for a price officeholders look the other way.

Ah, reformers. The boy who cried wolf… Was he the first civil service pensioner?

I think some people have been trying to tell me this all my life. I was far from fair to them; or to myself, I see.

Successful officeholders know the stories we are addicted to, and sell us more. They deal drama. Another deadly addiction of ours: the Damsel-in-Distress.

What do states do with $35 billion dollars in Child Support each year? Support children? Protect children? Or just what they do with cigarette money? Protect officeholders from angry voters? From taxpayers angry about the cost of Welfare?

I lost my father the way my daughter lost hers, decades later. Not in an earthquake or hurricane, not in an epidemic of Influenza or Smallpox, not fighting a far-off war, but in a county courthouse.

If millions of children don’t have fathers in their lives, are men bums? Or are officeholders the bums? Officeholders who offer families a bounty for turning Dad in, and turning Dad into a government check?

When urgent reforms stall, money stalls them, year after year.

When easy answers stall, money stalls them, decade after decade.

Is this the best we can do? Decades later?

###

[ continued ]

From yesterday:

We crave such stories, don’t we? Stories of heroes? Of the one who stands out from the many?

Isn’t every beloved story already false for just that reason? If it were not an exception, who would tell and retell it? But the exception proves the rule, if we could stomach it. We tell and retell the exception at the expense of the rule it proves; in defiance of the rule behind it. We tell and retell the exception, far and wide, time after time, in ever-lasting defiance of the overwhelming truth.

Going fast again, as I said yesterday:

I trained in fiction at Columbia U, and in sales at IBM. When my thoughts race, they race on those two legs.

What do we sell? Stories. Whatever we sell, we sell people stories to tell, stories they use to sell themselves.

At it’s most obvious, when we sell them songs and lyrics, and in the right place, at the right moment, with the right person, they repeat a snatch of those lyrics like a some secret handshake and watch to see if the other person’s eyes light up. Remember the movie Bandits, when Bruce Willis and Cate Blanchett talk in the dark, through a blanket hung from the ceiling, and he says a line from Total Eclipse of the Heart, and she throws the blanket down to see his face…

But also when we sell an old rancher a vacuum cleaner for the Mrs. He’s telling her the story of their life together, proposing the next installment, if she’ll join him in the telling of it.

I could rarely talk novels or even movies with IBM salespeople. They were great storytellers (stories are their job) and would tell great stories about sales among themselves, but only twenty-second stories, stories the length of a joke. Our desks at IBM were crummy. We didn’t spend much time there. Instead we sat at the desks of our customers, across from them, or across a table with them, a conference table or a lunch table. Yes, salesmen sat together to tell stories about sales, but only so they could get up and get on the road again the next morning, and sell stories to customers, a future for those customers.

In my second month at IBM the office took half a day for the funeral of a suicide, a salesman with crushing debts, who failed to sell his customers a story of their future, or his.

A salesman named Cal was late for a meeting with a big customer, a customer we could not always get time with.

A salesman named Jeral grilled me: You told him what and when and where?

Yes, I said; who and why and everything…

Knowing Cal, said Jeral, he drank too much last night and slept through the alarm.

The peaks of Cal’s story were flattening into a straight line. He missed meeting after meeting, week after week, until I had trouble remembering his face, his walk, his voice. Forget him, Jeral told me one day; he won’t be back.

Stories are for losers. Every story is a story of loss. Well, long stories in the past tense. Because when you’re gaining, moving ahead, making a future, you tell quick little stories about where to go next. “Say we stop at Futorian on the way to McQuay, and we take a minute to make Don Rockingham feel important and not forgotten down there, like he’s still happening, moving up…” If we could sell Rockingham a bigger story of his future at Futorian, he would need a bigger box from us.

Say you are the retired father of a young salesman. You call at him home, calculating when he and his wife will be home from work and your two small grandchildren will be awake. But your voice comes to them from a forgotten geologic era, and their voice comes to you from a lightning storm. Yes, the children are awake, but hungry, or fighting bedtime. Do you mention a novel you read or a movie you saw? That gave meaning to your life, and all life? That moved you deeply; that you want to share, and hear others talk about too; people you care about and who think like you? The way you could not stop talking about her to everyone when you first met your wife? Or could not stop talking about this son, when he was three and four?

No. Though she was special. He was special. You were special.

No. Once or twice a year, maybe, at the holidays, an hour in the afternoon of the day. You stop for a moment, and decades past roll over you. You are the horse that pulled a heavy cart up a long hill, and on the far side cannot hold it back.

Isn’t Kahneman’s planning fallacy also a remembering fallacy? About stories of the past too? Recall David Brooks in The New York Times:

Kahneman calls this the planning fallacy. Most people overrate their own abilities and exaggerate their capacity to shape the future.

…

The planning fallacy is failing to think realistically about where you fit in the distribution of people like you. As Kahneman puts it, “People who have information about an individual case rarely feel the need to know the statistics of the class to which the case belongs.”

You were special, the way you tell it; what you made of your life.

Every story is an exception, if only because told, when so much else is not.

Your story says you were special. You were special and this was special for you.

You love it as an exception, for its defiance of “the statistics of the class to which the case belongs.”

Isn’t every beloved story false for the same reason?

Every story is a story of loss, because told by someone with time for stories; someone picking through the past; someone who finds more in the past than in the future.

Stories are for losers. People making a future don’t talk past tense for long; don’t talk long about the past.

At the high point of your life, past begins to outweigh future; losses overtake gains; stories that once began “Let’s…” now begin “Remember …?”

In your life, and every life.

###

We’ll do this at a run today. Sorry if I don’t stop to make sure everyone is keeping up… We can loop back later for loose threads….

I trained in fiction at Columbia U, and in sales at IBM. When my thoughts race, they race on those two legs.

Daniel Kahneman tells a story about top planners. A plan is our story of the future, a story to be made true. Like Kahneman, these planners were world-class planners. They were planning what to teach the next generation; what to teach about planning.

After a year, Kahneman asked a question that made the committee squirm. How long before we finish, do you think?

Oh, two years maybe, they nodded.

How long have other committees taken? asked Kahneman.

Well, someone answered after a moment, some committees don’t finish. Maybe 4 out of 10 give up.

Notice please that ‘give up’ is a choice about how to tell their story. How one committee tells the story of other committees. Just two words. They pass quickly. But two such words render moot entire mountain ranges of words that come before or after; as would the words ‘guilty’ or ‘not guilty’.

Kahneman asked: Well, how long do committees take when they don’t give up?

Oh, seven years at the least, came the answer; but never more than ten.

Kahneman asked: Are we different, or better? Is there some reason we should finish sooner?

No, came the answer; if anything, we have disadvantages…

Kahneman asked: Then we should take longer?

Kahneman concludes:

Facing the facts can be intolerably demoralizing.  The participants in the meeting had professional expertise in the logic of forecasting, and none even ventured to question the relevance of the forecast implied by our expert’s statistics: an even chance of failure, and a completion time of seven to ten years in case of success.  Neither of these outcomes was an acceptable basis for continuing the project, but no one was willing to draw the embarrassing conclusion that it should be scrapped.

So, the forecast was quietly dropped from active debate, along with any pretense of long-term planning, and the project went on along its predictably unforeseeable path to eventual completion some eight years later.

The work of that committee was never used. It came too late. It was forgotten before it arrived. Except here, in this story.

So look again at ‘give up,’ for the 4 out of 10 committees that never finished. Weren’t they the wise and responsible ones? Who went back to their sponsors and said we can’t do what you asked us, and we don’t want to waste more of your time and money?

Maybe those 4 in 10 committees did not give up, they faced up.

Didn’t Parkinson give us the explanation a generation ago, in Parkinson’s Law? Work is like a gas. Work expands to fill the time available to it.

A Parkinson estimate for any task, then: It will finish when not finishing becomes intolerable, and not before.

Says David Brooks in The New York Times:

… Kahneman calls this the planning fallacy. Most people overrate their own abilities and exaggerate their capacity to shape the future.

…

The planning fallacy is failing to think realistically about where you fit in the distribution of people like you. As Kahneman puts it, “People who have information about an individual case rarely feel the need to know the statistics of the class to which the case belongs.”

We are legends in our own minds, that is. Heroes in a sea of mediocrity, every one of us, each of us out of all the millions.

We crave such stories, don’t we? Stories of heroes? Of the one who stands out from the many?

Isn’t every beloved story already false for just that reason? If it were not an exception, who would tell and retell it? But the exception proves the rule, if we could stomach it. We tell and retell the exception at the expense of the rule it proves; in defiance of the rule behind it. We tell and retell the exception, far and wide, time after time, in ever-lasting defiance of the overwhelming truth.

More tomorrow…

###

Shadow Dictionary (n):  A dictionary of shadows cast by other dictionaries.

Dictionary Shadow (n): Something hard for you to see because it’s behind what you see, or in the shadow of something you see.

(You, me, we: take your pick.)

A Shadow Dictionary collects the shadows cast by official dictionaries, bright shining dictionaries, dictionaries in the spotlight, dictionaries that shine like a lighthouse.

Maybe Dictionary of the Dark would be better. You’ve taken a blazing flashlight outside on a dark night, haven’t you, and turned it off so you could see? Or walked towards a roaring campfire at night, where you can see the people around the fire but they can’t see you? Where you see less the closer you get to the light?

Maybe Dictionary of Dread would be better. You’ve slept beside a campfire in wild country? and in the morning found the tracks of a bear that came close enough to see you without being seen? This light kept the bear out of sight. With this light you hide what you fear, and hide yourself. Light to hide, not to find.

Then Firelight Dictionary, maybe, for the shadows of that campfire.

A Shadow Dictionary collects your fear, or dread, or distaste: whatever you don’t want to see. Whatever an official dictionary, like that campfire, keeps from sight.

Or more:

Like the black market in East Berlin in the Soviet era, and exchanges done over a flaming barrel down a dark alley, from mitten to mitten and coat to coat; the shadow of the state-run store; a Shadow Dictionary lists what we want but cannot just say, or say we want but don’t.

Marketing wants the Shadow Dictionary; must find it or be blinded in the light of the official dictionary.

Ambrose Bierce wrote a Shadow Dictionary and called it The Devil’s Dictionary.

A total abstainer is one who abstains from everything but abstention, and especially from inactivity in the affairs of others.

Was this the Prohibition Era? Better, I think:

An abstainer abstains from all the pleasures of the world, the better to meddle in yours.

Let me try.

Contempt of Court:

The court discovers that you have more respect for the court than the court for itself.

The court catches you thinking “They call this a court?” or “Who are they kidding in here?” or “Where is their self-respect?”

PeopleWillKnow.com

You try.

 

###

Internet marketers know more about you every year.

With databases that track and aggregate your purchases and your searches, they may know you better than any person in your life. That includes your mate, who still doesn’t get what to get you for your birthday, and includes you.

Yes, they may know you better than you do.

Diane Ackerman, author of Natural History of the Senses, writes

What does this have to do with “consumer research?” Wouldn’t you know it, five experiments have pinpointed how to capitalize on the findings and connect with shoppers in different moods. Apparently, someone feeling low is likely to respond more to the velvety ooze of a hand lotion, while a cheerful person is likely to respond more to the product’s shiny bottle and festive packaging.

Evolution’s Gold Standard, New York Times, 08 August 2011

Marketers now use scents:

Used-car dealers spray “new car scent” in their vehicles. Malls waft “eau de pizza” around the heads of hungry shoppers. Perfumers weave talcum powder into their aromatic tone poems, hoping to evoke memories of innocence and nurturing. Realtors bake bread or spray “cake bake” around the kitchen before showing a house to a potential buyer.

You are not one whole, you are many layers, and scents pull you all the more powerfully when they bypass your awareness.

Your tot slips gummy worms into your grocery cart while you’re reading nutrition labels, and grocers, knowing that, make tot-friendly carts and hang tot-bait into the aisles where passing tots, though confined to the cart, can see and reach it. In this example, you and your tot are two layers of one many-layered (manifold) buyer, and your nose and your nutrition-savvy mind are two more.

So what if Internet marketers learned your ovulation schedule? Could detect when you were ovulating? Knew as you walked down their aisle? Your wife, if you are the male layer of this many-layered buyer.

Impossible? Wouldn’t your past purchases show a pattern, a pattern that repeats with the ovulation cycle?

Says Ackerman:

According to a new study in the Journal of Consumer Research, when people feel bad, their sense of touch quickens and they instinctively want to hug something or someone. Tykes cling to a teddy bear or blanket. It’s a mammal thing. If young mammals feel gloomy, it’s usually because they’re hurt, sick, cold, scared or lost. So their brain rewards them with a gust of pleasure if they scamper back to mom for a warm nuzzle and a meal. No need to think it over. All they know is that, when a negative mood hits, a cuddle just feels right; and if they’re upbeat and alert, then their eyes hunger for new sights and they’re itching to explore.

In one mood you move farther from the center, from home and family and safety; in the other mood you move closer.

In one mood you are foraging to extend your range; in the other, for something to get you home.

Centrifugal and centripetal in a cycle.

Embrace Tiger, Return to Mountain.

How long before shrewd marketers can track that cycle by month, or by your ovulation calendar?

Meg Sulllivan writes that women are attracted to different men at different points in their ovulation cycle. She distinguishes sexy men from good providers:

“When women were mated to men with low sexual versus investment attractiveness, they were particularly likely to experience increased attraction to men other than their partners at mid-cycle” said Haselton.

Near Ovulation, Your Cheatin’ Heart Will Tell on You

Why, by the way, are Europeans more likely to say “his woman” while Americans prefer “his partner” or “his wife or girlfriend”? Shrewd marketers know, I expect.

These men respond differently when their women are ovulating:

[ The good providers ] appeared to appreciate unconsciously what they were up against. Their wives and girlfriends reported many more acts of mate-guarding behavior [during ovulation] than women who considered their mates to be fling-worthy [, the sexy men].

Unconsciously, she says. Right. How many of these men could tell you whether the woman was ovulating or not? Yet the man knows somehow. Somewhere inside he knows. He knows it’s life-and-death (boldface mine):

“What is at stake is not just the loss of face or the loss of love,” Haselton said. “This is about Darwinian prosperity. Males who did not successfully guard their mates are not our ancestors.“

A daring (death-defying) address to the American Psychological Association explored this too.

Are men smarter than women, it asked?

Yes, came the answer.

Also dumber. Men are both dumber and smarter than women.

Men range far from the mean, women cluster nearer to it.

Men centrifugal, women centripetal.

What can marketers do with this? We look at that here: What Percent of Our Ancestors Were Women?

“It’s not a trick question, and it’s not 50%” says Roy Baumeister, addressing the American Psychological Association in 2007.

Recent research using DNA analysis answered this question about two years ago. Today’s human population is descended from twice as many women as men.

To get that kind of difference, you had to have something like, throughout the entire history of the human race, maybe 80% of women but only 40% of men reproduced.

Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends.

May I repeat that?

Most men who ever lived did not have descendants who are alive today. Their lines were dead ends.

And you can’t sell this man posterity with a scent? Eternity in a breath?

Those who fail at this are not our ancestors.

###

No, I’m not gone.

I’m at PeopleWillKnow.com every day.

Selling for all your worth, selling as if your life depended on it, selling that goes beyond your life into the lives of your children…

See it there, at PeopleWillKnow.com.

###

Whether you sell shoelaces or Tomahawk missiles, first you sell yourself, and trust in you. They trust the laces or the missiles when they trust the source.

Trust is the last scarcity, when all else is instantly available by Internet. Like a hurricane that sweeps bare the grocery shelves in its path, in advance, before it arrives, while still just a stiff wind and a spiral on TV, the Internet makes trust scarce, because trust is bread and water to all our dealings, with strangers over the ocean and with family huddled under the same boarded windows.

Listen to the gravely voice of Stephen Covey and his son: The Speed of Trust. If we trust this voice, we trust its age. We value our words more when age has taken everything else, all but our words and our name. We trust dying words, from those who see death and don’t look away. If we trust this voice, we trust a man who speaks to us with his son beside him, watching. A son who carries the same name. We trust a man leaving a legacy.

Do we trust poets, who have mastered words inside-out, or the plain-spoken man whose words mean just what they say, no less and no more?

Ask it this way:

Have you ever heard or read your words later, years later, and found more in them than you knew at the time?

I have.

Have you listened to yourself later and wondered: Who was he?

Wondered: Will I ever equal that guy? The guy I was?

Wondered: Did he hear all he was saying, all I hear from him now?

Wondered: Could he see what would come of his words, that I now see?

Wondered (stay with me now): Was he his equal even then?

I have.

From that we learn to go back through our own words and look more closely, as if reading the fine print some corporate lawyer inserted.

In time we learn to hear ourselves. Hear all that anyone will hear in our words. Hear all our future selves will hear in our words. Our future selves, our former selves, our better selves.

Do we trust this guy, we ask the mirror.

That was my power as a business coach and life coach: I listened to people better than they listened to themselves. I heard them when they didn’t hear themselves.

How else could you ever help a stranger? If he were not a stranger to himself? More a stranger to himself than to you, where you hear him better than he does?

Where did I learn that, before I went to IBM? From T. S. Eliot and the poets. From John Milton:

When I Consider How My Light is Spent

A man going blind, who can hardly see to write, whose candle that evening would cost a bricklayer a week’s wage, squeezes every word. An aging man cannot wait for a future self to hear more in his words.

…a rush-light, a little twinkling uncomfortable spark, which one is every moment afraid will vanish in smoke, and which the least wind will extinguish.
Anon, Anna Melvil, 1792

Rushlights, Rush Dips, Splint Holders, Nips

That plain-spoken fellow, whose words mean just what they say, no less and no more? He’s fooling himself, and you thrown in. If he’s saying much, he’s saying more than he knows, and less than he thinks.

I write to remember the reasons for everything else I do. Nothing is right until the writing is right.

That’s true of a nation too. Nothing is right until the writing is right. The speeches on television, the lines from our favorite movies, the lines from our favorite ads, about everything we buy and take home, or hope to.

No, words don’t make the world, but words make the world matter; words make all that matters.

I had a conversation about trust with a once and future candidate for Congress. On a long bus ride! Who but a candidate for office rides the bus to send a statement?

He’s young, and I heard more in his words than he heard, I think.

Where’s our future as a nation, he was worrying.

I pointed at an iPod near us. China makes the iPod, but America makes the reason for the iPod. The reason: songs, movies, ads. The words that make what matters to us in the world.

When will poets rule the earth? When we see that they always have.

###

“… sneak in late and blame traffic.”

When we hear that advice, no one has to tell us twice. We’re off!

Is that the refrain to the theme song in the story of  your life?

Sorry. Traffic. You know.

Right then. You’re in the driver’s seat, for all to see. But a thousand other cars are driving yours. If your life goes wrong, it’s not your fault. You’re not driving to, you’re driving from. From blame.

Sorry says: Less than expected.

Traffic says: Same everywhere, for everyone. What can you do?

You know says: As expected. No wonder. Always the same.

A world in four words. Does it even make sense, if we were ever for once to hear ourselves? Expect less than you expect? Is that even possible?

The beaten favorite in the Kentucky Derby always says something about traffic and a rough ride. Horses can’t talk, and don’t make excuses, but vastly-more-clever humans make excuses in their behalf.

Want some advice? Paste this on your mirror.

Secretariat. The Belmont. Sneaking in late and blaming traffic, as always.

What’s the advice? Be Secretariat? In your next life? Your next turn at genetic roulette?

No. Find your Belmont. Make your Belmont. For you and yours.

How else the Belmont might have gone that day:

Right. No race. No track. No horse racing.

What’s harder than making a Secretariat? Making a Belmont. A Belmont Stakes. The track and the cup. Making horse racing, and this track, and this race. It’s harder and easier. Harder and easier than genetic roulette. To win the game, make the game.

###

Early one evening a friend and I were hurrying along a busy sidewalk on the upper East side in Manhattan, hurrying to Home Depot before it closed. The sidewalks were thronged with people hurrying home from work, walking the dog, hurrying to an early dinner. I have often wondered how dogs survive in that throng. To a tiny city-sized dog, one misstep would be the last.

I startled my friend when I stepped into the cross-street and raised both arms. A taxi screeched to a stop, stopping half a block of traffic behind him. A small dark man leaped out and ran at me, leaving his taxi running. He stooped as he ran, and threw out his arms to both sides. He had seen it too: a small duck crossing into the road. It’s a young duck, he called in a heavy accent, over the screech of honking horns. From the pond at the Rockefeller campus. You cannot catch him. You will only chase him into the road again.

He was right. What more could I do? So I looked for my friend and waved to her. Let’s go. Fast. I don’t want to see this, I told her, if he goes under a car. I don’t want to hear it either.

She was puzzled. Her people come from the world’s poorest country. Of course I don’t want some duck to be hurt, she said, but first comes family, my tasks for them.

Why do we tell stories? Like this one? About people we don’t know, people we will never meet, people from the far side of the world, people from long ago, people who never were?

What are they to us? People who take time for a small duck, and people who don’t.

Why do we follow them for a time? Take our time to follow them through theirs?

Why at lunch with friends or dinner with family do we talk about people none of us will ever meet?

Why do we make events in their lives events in ours? From TV, from the news, from books, from movies?

What are stories to us? Why are stories of others everywhere in our lives?

Story? What’s that?

I have just found a new clue, I think.

Before this clue gets away from me again, here’s a whirlwind list of all it will touch today:

Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy…

Eyewitness Accounts…

Entertainment…

Sales and Advertising…

Hypnosis and Hypnotherapy

I have just stumbled upon the strange strange My Voice Will Go With You: The Teaching Tales of Milton H Erickson.

Erickson, who died in 1980, was founding president of the American Society for Clinical Hypnosis and a fellow of the American Psychology Association.

A pioneer of hypnosis, we call him. But what does he call himself? A storyteller.

I had hypnosis all wrong.

At age 17 Erickson was stricken with polio, nearly died, and for weeks was bedridden and only able to move his eyes. From that bed he began to study his large family, watching and listening. To control his pain, he searched his memory for the feeling of walking and descending stairs and the joy of running and swimming. From there he studied the workings of memory.

Memory was therapeutic to him, he found. By remembering how good it felt to run or swim, he learned to walk again and to control the pain of overusing his paralyzed muscles. In that, I imagine, he discovered what he called hypnotherapy, or hypnosis as therapy.

Hypnosis (Greek for “sleep”) is just exactly the wrong word for all of this. In a trance, Erickson showed, people are in state of high concentration, concentrating on one thing to the exclusion of all others.

Trance is everywhere. You are there now. If someone passed behind you and asked about your socks, you would not hear them. Are you asleep? No, just the opposite.

Everyday examples everywhere: Walking through this lobby you are thinking of home, or the salad bar where you will eat, or the lobby of the building where you will meet a client, or the hole in your sock….

A friend says something you don’t catch. To your friend, who laughs, you are asleep, because you are concentrating so thoroughly on something else, something unknown to her. Her words are lost not to the noise of the busy streetcorner but to the map in your pocket and the cafe you have in mind, a cafe you have never seen and cannot find.

How did you “fall” into that trance? The two of you were talking happily about this cafe where you will eat just moments from now. She mentioned a friend who had told her the way to this cafe. Unknown to her, that friend is a lost love of yours, once a great joy and sorrow to you, a wonder and still a puzzle.

You are puzzling again now, at the mention of her name. What went wrong? How did you find her, and how did you lose her? Where is that joy found, and where does it go?

You can feel the heat of her cheek again, and smell her hair, though you have not seen her in years.

From the moment you hear her name you hear nothing else from the friend beside you. You have stepped into a trance, a waking dream. You have not dropped or fallen, you have leaped or climbed or dashed. Your mind is flying, not sinking. Racing, not dozing. Racing for the far away and the long ago and the might-have-been and the maybe-someday.

To that friend beside you, your face is suddenly sad, oddly pulled by your longing and wondering and puzzling. You were so glad a moment ago, about this lunch and this cafe and her and this beautiful day. You were here one moment and gone the next.

At fourteen I studied hypnosis thinking it might raise my success with girls from zero to hero. What is that trance, I wondered, and how do I lead her there? I was as wrong about hypnosis as I was about women. The more I studied the more wrong I was. Unknown to me, that first wonder was the trance already. The trance was wonder.

Eyewitness Accounts

DNA evidence now shows us how often our murder convictions were wrong, and we got the wrong guy.  How do our best efforts so often go wrong? These are the most expensive of all trials, conducted by the best legal and science talent, guided by all the best traditions and methods and precautions of the law. Yet they are wrong at least one time in twenty, we are now finding; and maybe closer to one time in ten, if only we could know.

When we nail the wrong guy, the murderer laughs and proceeds with new confidence.

What went wrong in those trials? Eyewitness testimony. More than other cases, the botched cases relied on eyewitnesses and little else. Eyewitness evidence, eyewitness accounts, sketches of the suspect, a suspect picked from a line-up….

What’s wrong with eyewitness evidence? Why is that our worst evidence, not our best?

Think of Milton Erickson again, bedridden with polio at age 17. He can only move his eyes. He cannot close his ears. He sees and hears his large family, and has nothing else to think about through the hours and days and weeks. He can see and hear them again in the long night while all of them are sleeping in other rooms. He can feel again how it felt to run and swim. But all of this is still just sounds and sights and feelings inside him. Not for many years will he put all this into words, careful words that carry those sounds and sights and feelings from his mind to ours, and tell us why.

Likewise the eyewitness to a crime, describing for us a disturbing event, more disturbing if the eyewitness was also the victim. The eyewitness has only scattered pictures and sounds at first, not words to describe them.

How does the eyewitness arrive at words for those scattered sights and sounds? Through an investigator and his questions. The investigator’s lifework and vocabulary is crime. He speaks fast and well about crime in question after question. The eyewitness is just a beginner, and  knows nothing. The investigator helps, teaching the witness to tell what he knows. He corrects the witness, saying We don’t know that, do we? and We know a little more by now, don’t we? The eyewitness nods, gaining confidence, picking up terms and phrases, going this far and no farther, in this direction but not that. Slowly his story takes shape.The crime took just seconds, but the story takes hours, maybe days. The eyewitness got just a glimpse of the suspect, but knows the investigator well. In his testimony, though, the suspect gets top billing, and the ghostwriter gets no byline.

What crowds the head of the eyewitness as he testifies, long after the crime? If a five-second crime takes twenty minutes to tell, or two hours, or two days? Those first few sights and sounds the witness grabbed at the time, at the scene of the crime? Or the hours with the investigators, the photos they pushed at him, the line-ups they staged, the pictures conjured by that questioning, most of which he shook off and said No to?

The mind remembers with stories, and can’t remember much outside of that, or for long. This place first, that place next, and suddenly the other…. Faces here, faces there, faces when, faces where?

The witness is nervous about testifying. This is public speaking! Public speaking of the worst kind! With authorities listening, watching his face, watching his hands, watching him squirm. With the other side watching for mistakes, to catch him in the wrong. With life and death at stake. The witness is more frightened now than at the scene of the crime. He works hard on a story that might carry him safely through.

Finally how much is left of the scattered sights and sounds he began with, so painful and puzzling, so inadequate to the investigators, so far short of what they would need?

The things he doubts just might be true The things he knows for sure are surely not.

Somewhere the murderer laughs…. Nearby, but not inside….  He marches away with new confidence….  While the witness squirms, and waits to be excused.

How Much of Your Memory Is True? asks an article in Slate.

…emerges from one of the most exciting and controversial recent findings in neuroscience: that we alter our memories just by remembering them. Karim Nader of McGill—the scientist who made this discovery—hopes it means that people with PTSD can cure themselves by editing their memories. Altering remembered thoughts might also liberate people imprisoned by anxiety, obsessive-compulsive disorder, even addiction.

Cure themselves by editing their memories? Ah, now we are back to Erickson, aren’t we?

Hypnotherapy

Cure people by curing the way they remember? Erickson, bedridden with near-fatal polio, cured himself by remembering running and swimming. And saw from his bed how everyone, all his big and busy family with their non-stop stories, crippled and paralyzed themselves.

Maybe I will live, he thought, but how will I make a living?

By teaching them to do what I have done, he decided; teaching them to remember better, and tell their stories better.

Years later Erickson would listen to someone tell her life story in a way she had recited hundreds of times, and he would interrupt.

She would tell a story with a refrain:

“I’m just in the way.”

“I’m not wanted.”

“I will never fit in, and be like them.”

“Something is wrong with me, that everyone but me can see.”

“My mind is not quick but my anger is.”

“My mind is not strong but my spirit is, my disregard for pain and shame.”

Erickson would interrupt her with something silly, anything to disrupt her habitual and well-rehearsed story. The way a mouse on the path might slow a marching elephant, sending it sideways in a funny little dance.

Having interrupted her habitual story, Erickson would teach her to tell a different story. A story of success and satisfaction, to a new refrain. A different kind of story from the same events in her life. Or from a different selection of events. Or from events in other lives.

Events in other lives?

Events in other lives!

Entertainment

Stories of others could supplement and supplant stories of your own, Erickson found, and work upon you more powerfully than your own. Like the way you walk out of an Anthony Hopkins movie (The Edge, for example, or even Hannibal), or a Cate Blanchett movie (Elizabeth: The Golden Age, for example, or Missing, or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button).

Sales and Advertising

Why does advertising hope to reach you at such times, during that Anthony Hopkins or Cate Blanchett movie? When you are feeling strong, ready to move past your doubts and fear of change, and try something new?

Story

What are stories to us? Why are stories of others everywhere in our lives?

Don’t we medicate ourselves by mouth this way, with stories? With Story?

Isn’t that Erickson’s hypnotherapy, and isn’t it everywhere? Look around. Can you see beyond our stories to anything more? To anything outside their non-stop whirr?

###

The refrain here: Whatever you buy, you buy for the story. Whatever you sell, you sell for the story.

Or No?

Daniel Kahneman has some clues in his TED talk The Riddle of Experience Versus Memory. “Thank you for inventing behavioral economics,” the master of ceremonies shouts over the applause at the end. Kahneman won the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2002. His discovery: how poorly we choose, how easily we deceive ourselves, how often we defeat our search for satisfaction, and, above all, how often researchers deceive and defeat themselves when studying this.

Example One: The Colonoscopy

Kahneman compares what two colonoscopy patients reported about the pain of the procedure. But Kahneman compares four reports, not two. Why? Because, he says, a patient has two selves that differ in what they report, the experiencing self and the remembering self.

Patient ABC, when asked every sixty seconds about pain, reported only ordinary discomfort throughout a short procedure. Patient XYZ reported greater pain throughout a far longer procedure.

But when asked later, patient ABC recalled a more painful experience than did patient XYZ. Why?

Because in the meantime, says Kahneman, the remembering mind intervened, and combined the intervals into a single story. The remembering mind is a storyteller, says Kahneman. He illustrates:

By his own report at the time, Patient ABC had a short and mild procedure except for a spike of pain at the end. At the time, that last was just one interval among many. But in memory, that last interval outweighed the others. Why? We remember by making stories, and remember stories by the way they end. The remembering mind fits all the intervals into a story shaped by the last of them, the ending.

Researchers often garble their results by missing that difference. So do we, when choosing a new dentist or new vacation spot or new car or new job or new President. Or when selling any of these.

Ever watch a movie on Netflix that ticks down the time remaining? Where you know how the shootout or faceoff will go, because there’s time for one outcome but not the other?

The colonoscopy patients could not know, at minute 3 or 6, whether their procedure would go eight minutes or twenty. Patient ABC might remember the procedure more favorably, suggests Kahneman, had the doctor prolonged it to let the discomfort subside. A different ending would make a different story.

Example Two: Vacation

How do we choose a vacation? asks Kahneman.

He suggests two vacations and asks which you would choose. The catch: Memory. Would you choose a vacation full of adventure or joy if at the end you had to surrender all memory of it? Or would you choose a quiet vacation instead, if you could bring home your memory of  it?

We choose for the memories, Kahneman suggests. The remembering mind, not the experiencing mind, makes the choice. We are already trying out stories of that next vacation while we shop the choices. We are shopping  for for stories.

Aren’t vacations better afterwards? In memory? In the retelling? We don’t remember a two-week vacation with twice the satisfaction of a one-week vacation, Kahneman says. As with the colonoscopy, the ending makes the story, not the length.

Maybe the quiet vacation is a time for old stories, not new, he hints. Time for remembering, not something more to remember. A time for all our stories.

###

Sell me what sells me…

…to dates and mates,

…employers and clients,

…colleagues and rivals,

…staff and service,

…police and courts,

…officials and authorities,

…friends and neighbors,

….

###

I saw this in Seth Godin’s blog and thought Yes! From this comes all the best and worst in sales:

The salesperson’s job: Help people overcome their fear so they can commit to something they’ll end up glad they invested in.

Selling vs. Inviting

He’s too kind though. Are we describing or prescribing the job? As we actually find it practiced, or at its best?

We make way for the best by rooting out the worst and sweeping out the rest. So I would shorten this. Blame me not him if I’m wrong.

The salesperson’s job: Overcome your fear of the swap, of the trade, of the deal, of the exchange, of change, of him.

Your fear of him, first. Then your fear of making a move, stepping up, stepping ahead. Your fear of any and all moves.

Remember Al Pacino as Ricky Roma in Glengarry Glen Ross? In the bar with Jimmie, a timid wife-whipped mark? Across the street from the office, rapping with him for hours?

Slowly Roma  calms Jimmie’s  jitters, then builds Jimmie’s daring, praising whatever successes he can conjure in the guy’s mind.

You’ve made some good moves, Roma lets Jimmie think. I admire that, Roma implies, in men of our kind. You’re my equal, Roma implies. Or nearly. Or could be.

Where else would Jimmie get such high regard? All his life Jimmie has been blown this way and that by anyone who breathes on him.

At last Jimmie craves Roma’s approval more than he dreads the wife’s disapproval.

His courage won’t last, won’t hold up outside of Roma’s presence, Roma’s lavish regard, Roma’s spell. His courage won’t outlast his wife’s anger. But, hopes Roma, Jimmie’s courage will last long enough to get something signed, something Jimmie won’t have the courage to take back, whatever his wife’s rage, and whatever his terror of her.

Do we want the fox overcoming the rabbit’s fear?

###

Props, all props.

You don’t buy the phone (the car, the house, the spouse, the dog, the school, the vacuum), you buy the story. The story of you. The phone (the car, the house, the spouse, the dog, the school, the vacuum) is a prop, a stage prop.

The prop helps tell the story, without a word.

• the BMW Albert Brooks wrecks in Defending Your Life
• the old pickup Herb Clutter (In Cold Blood) drove
• the battered convertible in Thelma and Louise
• the car Curt drove in American Graffiti
• Sein und Zeit on your bookshelf, unsullied by time
• the climate-controlled Steinway in your biggest bedroom
• the Harley in your driveway
• the Blackberry that rarely leaves your hand
• Tucker’s bowtie
• the old vacuum you leave out until company comes, an Electrolux canister on sleds

The prop says the story is true

• the white flower Rod Taylor pulls from his pocket at the end of The Time Machine
• the unearthly flowers left behind by The Virgin of Guadalupe
• the bell in Polar Express
• the sled Rosebud in Citizen Kane
• your alumnus rocker

We buy to help us sell ourselves; to prop our story.

###

How to fill your life with whatever you most dread or detest…

What do you avoid?

Can’t think of anything?

That’s avoiding.

No, on second thought….

You fill your life with what you avoid, until for you it’s everywhere (but in disguise and under an assumed name).

How’s that?

Examples (pick one or think up your own):

I’m not smart.

I’m too smart, and not in the right way.

I’m just in the way.

If I stop dancing my past will chew me up.

I’m not funny.

I’m a clown. They laugh but don’t want to be seen with me.

I’m always angry, can’t keep it in.

I can’t fit into family life of any kind.

Why can’t I fit into work life of any kind?

I can never have nice things.

People don’t listen to me.

People swarm me and then blame me when they’re disappointed.

I’m a homebody, lost outside my curtains.

I turn people bad.

I bring trouble to everyone who listens to me.

I embarrass everyone who stands by me.

I’m a party-pooper.

I suck the good and the decency out of people.

I make people want a quick and tidy suicide.

I disgust men (women).

I feel fifteen inside.

What exactly do you avoid, given this story you have about yourself? The story. You avoid showing your story. You avoid adding to it. You avoid any situation that might remind your enemies, or remind you, or reveal you to someone new. That’s most situations, isn’t it?

How do you fill your life with what you avoid?

Avoiding is hard work. It takes concentration. One slip can undo hours of avoiding. Avoiding takes vigilance. You have to keep your radar going. Whatever’s going on around you, you can’t forget that radar. The radar’s no  good if you don’t look at it. Avoid your radar and you’ll be sorry.

You have to teach your radar what to watch for, and always tune it better.

What do you teach your radar? What to avoid. You teach your radar to warn you faster if What-You-Avoid might be coming.

And so…

You are forever looking at what you avoid, until you see nothing else….

###

 

 

 

 

 

Story is the rare oasis in the deserts of No-Story, true.

And yet Story is everywhere, everywhere we look at every moment, if only as mirage: a mirage in the desert, the mirage of an oasis.

Here’s an example from Blur: How to Know What’s True (by Tom Rosenstiel and Bill Kovach ).

Neil Sheehan would write Bright Shining Lie about American leaders selling the Vietnam war to the American public, and the price America paid, beginning with fifty or sixty thousand of its sons and daughters. But when he first went to Vietnam as a correspondent, Sheehan learned what to look for from a correspondent named Homer Bigart.

For weeks, US military advisors had been boasting about the growing success they were having with South Vietnam’s army units (ARVN) and a new “strategic hamlet” program designed to rid villages from Vietcong guerrilla control…. They claimed that village leaders were providing better intelligence in these hamlets and that they were aided by a new crop of combat helicopters.

Homer Bigart pressured the military to show him, and at last a number of reporters, including Sheehan, were taken into the countryside to see and report on the program in action. Sheehan and others were tired of military briefings and “impatient to get out near the action, something the military had resisted…” Homer Bigart, though, asked the military more questions than ever, Sheehan remembers.

‘What do you expect to find? What units are in the area? In what force?’ Endless questions.

…after the trip to the field, dead tired from the stress of combat and slogging through paddies, Bigart was at it again, questioning officials: “What units did you find? Were you surprised? You said this unit would be here? Was it? How many were killed? How many bodies were found?” On and on.

I complained ‘Jesus Christ, Homer, we spent two days walking through the rice paddies and we don’t even have a story.’

Homer looked at me and said ‘You don’t get it, kid. They can’t do it. It doesn’t work.’

So that’s the story: the empty story. Of all they wanted to see and all they watched for, nothing.

Story tries to cross the gap between what you see and what you want to see (look for, watch for). Without the wanting and watching and searching, there is no story, no matter how much happens, or how loud, or how fast.

The queen dies before the king? No story. The queen dies, and the king dies of grief? Yes, story.

A puddle filling in a thunderstorm? No story.

A bear track in the mud, silently filling under your feet? Yes, story. The bear has passed here just ahead of you, and the bear is watching you, whether or not you came looking for him.

A broken bucket left in the rain and failing to fill? Yes, that too is story. Someone wanted water, and way to take water from where they saw it to where they wanted it, and failed.

Forty men in a line, all waiting for the daily briefing by the American military advisors in Vietnam? Maybe.

Homer Bigart standing alone, staring at nothing, a map in his hand? A bad map, that only gets you more lost? Yes, that’s a story, and maybe the biggest story in our history, the story that changed all our stories to come.

A wife furious at a husband, and the husband shrugging “What did I do?” If she can’t tell him, because it’s not anything he did, it’s what he didn’t do? Because it’s the treasure map with no treasure except the treasure she gave for it, the treasure of her youth? A treasure she still looks for though she’s forgotten the map where she saw it? A treasure her husband stole from her, she believes, though she had forgotten the map before she found him? Yes, that story is everywhere, the forgotten story we still look for when we’ve forgotten why.

===

“Move along, people,” call the police. “Nothing to see here.”

Behind our craving for this story or that (Christmas stories, for example) is a craving for story itself, story as distinct from no-story.

Story is an oasis, the rare spot of green in the vast desert of our lives, our years and days and hours. We need it just the way we need water. Vast means waste means empty. Was it Bertrand Russell who laughed at us for wanting eternity when we didn’t know what to do with a rainy Sunday afternoon?

As in Adam Sandler’s movie Click, Story is the ratio of time told (Td) to time telling (Tg), or TaT, time as told. In Click: the TaT is twenty years to two hours, Td is the twenty-odd years when the daughter grows up, from pre-school to wedding, and Tg is the length of the movie, something under two hours.

In Ulysses James Joyce attempted the rare TaT less than 1, a single day (Td) told at great length (Tg), in hundreds of pages, though in fact much more is told (Td) than the theoretical one day in the life of one man, Bloom (and I first wrote such notations in the margins of his Dubliners, where the shifts in TaT are clearer).

Our craving for Story is a craving for high distillations of TaT (20 years over 2 hours in Click). No-Story is the difference between that TaT and 1 (the unedited whole). Even if Sandler had never found the Universal Remote in Click, the two-hour movie would have skipped over vast slabs of time in his life, as for instance in his Fifty First Dates.

TaT shifts like the gears of a car through the journey of the story, loosely corresponding to long and short (close) camera shots in a movie. For example, the long shots of the sailing ship at sea at the end of Fifty First Dates correspond to a high TaT ratio, as we skip weeks and months to arrive on that ship. Close-ups approach a TaT of 1 as the two look in one another’s eyes and fall silent and fall in love in mid-movie. The closing shots pull away into the distance towards a TaT approaching infinity (all the rest of their lives in a last instant). Maybe that’s what they’re seeing, now that I think of it, when they look into one another’s eyes and fall silent: all the rest of their lives in that one instant, a TaT approaching infinity, not 1. The TaT of 1, undistilled, is what we return to when we switch off Click and clear our chips and dip to the sink and the garbage, and clear away our wine, or Jack Daniels and coke, or beer. It’s not a TaT of 1 that depresses us then, but No-Story, what’s left after TaT is distilled, our hangover when TaT is taken away.

Story versus No-Story, an example:

Story: at our tenth high school reunion some of us have been lost, in the sense that we cannot be located, but two cannot be located in another sense, because they have died.

One of them we don’t remember anyhow, most of us, even when we squint at the yearbook picture. Ed, let’s call him, killed in the war that filled the news in those years, the war we all debated and fought over and fought to escape. Ed made almost no news even on the best day of his life, in the halls of the school in his senior year. Still we in the prime of our lives shiver a moment at the thought that we can disappear so completely.

The other who died was co-captain of our state champion football team, an end who caught some spectacular winning passes under the Friday night lights that autumn, at the start of what we expected would be our glory year, when that expectation alone was already an electric effect coursing through us.

That glory came to us through Ed, let’s call him, whenever we saw him, even in a quiet corner of the library, because he spoke or smiled or nodded to everyone, even those of us he could never be expected to know or remember.

He was President of the Honor Society, and we expected great things from him, more than we could yet imagine. Because he nodded to all of us, we would share in whatever glory he found. We would all have stories to tell, stories people would stop to hear years later, if only stories of him, not us; if only stories of some glance he tossed our way one morning in our last year there, early one morning when the walks were empty, thronged by long shadows. We were amazed to see him alone. We had imagined him forever surrounded by a noisy crowd. If nothing else, that’s story enough: story slipping into silence.

Late that year he won an appointment to the Air Force academy, and we all shared the news. After graduation that May we scattered in all our different directions, and most of us did not hear when Ed left the academy for some reason or other. His longtime girlfriend had married someone else in his absence (was that the reason? no, no, if she steps into this story it will never end; but what a beautiful pair!). Ed became a fireman, and a few months later he fell through the floor of a store in a strip mall blaze. His story would never again rise or fall from there.

No Story: A fullback on the same team was ejected early in the fourth quarter of the last game. Ed, let’s call him. Our own coach ejected Ed. Our passing game was not working that night and and we thought the season was lost. Coach sent Ed crashing into the opposing line again and again, punching out a yard here and a yard there. We groaned in the stands. Ed again? What’s wrong with us? Ed slammed down his helmet and walked off.

What did he say, we wondered? We couldn’t imagine. Ed rarely said anything to anyone, one way or the other, ashamed of his twisted teeth maybe, or his thick tongue.

On the next play Ed pulled down a long pass out of nowhere and took it all the way home for the win and the trophy.

Ed left school and did not graduate. As our fortieth reunion approaches we find Ed again after decades lost. Or our research finds a likely Ed at a nursing home, a Medicaid nursing home. We call and write and get no answer. Is that the same Ed, we ask, pen poised over the list, click-click-clicking impatiently? Our Ed? Our other Ed? We move down the list without settling the question. Whoever this Ed is or was, no more news will come from him, and no more news will penetrate to him. His story has flatlined. Not when he slammed down his helmet and stepped out of the lights, but somewhere in the trackless desert between that night and this morning. A loose wire in the dark…

An eternal flame is a high-tech gadget now, reliable like a pacemaker, made to flicker like a breeze rather than beat like a heart, even in the most adverse of environments. The story of Ed-Two flickers like that, as breath shortens and minds dim. We will tell the story of Ed-Two and the championship pass and the mall fire at every reunion until everyone who knew him is gone. His story ended suddenly, with our questions unanswered, but worse in a way is the story of Ed-One, because his story hardly began, and he himself did not raise the question when he could.

Ed-Three could still surprise us. He could still give another ending to his story, another answer to his questions and ours. But he doesn’t bother, for whatever reason, now or in all those years, and at last we quit asking. At last, I wrote, but no, that’s wrong. That’s what’s missing. There is no last, just open questions no one cares enough to close out, one way or another. We shiver in a different way, and worse, don’t we, at the story of Ed-Three? At a story that evaporates, leaving only a vapor in still air, a haze we can’t see, except that we can’t see much through it either?

That still haze is No-Story, and we dread No-Story worse than the worst or least of stories, and we will tell and buy and sell almost any lousy (tiny, lice-ridden) story sooner than settle into the still haze of No-Story.

Let’s call our craving for story an oral addiction, though various tele- technologies (from the invention of written language to television) deliver the load by eye instead, as Rosentiel and Kovach tell it so well in Blur: How to Know What’s True…. The Iliad was recited by a blind poet long before anyone wrote it down, and Jesus could not read, but knew the scriptures from hearing and repeating them. In one of his last cries to God he was singing a Psalm to himself, the one we number 22.

But that’s the mass audience, isn’t it, addicted to story at all costs? The blockbuster audience sliced and diced by advertising demographics? Surely our scientists fight that addiction for us all, don’t they?

Sorry, no. The addiction to story is worse in them. How often have you read the phrase “A recent study has shown…” as you collect tips from the Health column of your favorite newspaper?

No, a recent study has shown that most recent studies fail to pass the test of time. Recent studies trumpet results that somehow cannot be found again or repeated, and that slip from view within a few years. The New Yorker calls this The Decline Effect, but to me it sounds like our addiction to story.

… an article in the Journal of the American Medical Association … looked at the forty-nine most cited clinical-research studies in three major medical journals. Forty-five of these studies reported positive results, suggesting that the intervention being tested was effective.

Because most of these studies were randomized controlled trials—the “gold standard” of medical evidence—they tended to have a significant impact on clinical practice, and led to the spread of treatments such as hormone replacement therapy for menopausal women and daily low-dose aspirin to prevent heart attacks and strokes….

The situation is even worse when a subject is fashionable. In recent years, for instance, there have been hundreds of studies on the various genes that control the differences in disease risk between men and women. These findings have included everything from the mutations responsible for the increased risk of schizophrenia to the genes underlying hypertension.

… the decline effect is largely a product of publication bias, or the tendency of scientists and scientific journals to prefer positive data over null results, which is what happens when no effect is found.

For “positive data” insert “story,” and for “null results” insert “no story.” No story “is what happens when no effect is found.”

The bias was first identified by the statistician Theodore Sterling, in 1959, after he noticed that ninety-seven per cent of all published psychological studies with statistically significant data found the effect they were looking for.

Sterling saw that if ninety-seven per cent of psychology studies were proving their hypotheses, either psychologists were extraordinarily lucky or they published only the outcomes of successful experiments.

Well, you say, big pharmaceutical companies crave breakthrough news of breakthrough drugs, and profit for years before we drop the story. No, that’s not the whole story:

In recent years, publication bias has mostly been seen as a problem for clinical trials, since pharmaceutical companies are less interested in publishing results that aren’t favorable. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that publication bias also produces major distortions in fields without large corporate incentives, such as psychology and ecology.

So no, it’s not that newest purple pill we crave, or its inhibitor of neurotransmitter inhibitors. Our addiction is story itself; an addiction to something in place of nothing.

Pop this:

Click this:

===

Juries today are wimpy, too wimpy for the Sidney Lumet movies we love, The Verdict, say, or Twelve Angry Men, and too wimpy for a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.

Wimpy is attorney Thomas Geoghegan’s word in the fascinating See You in Court How the Right Made America a Lawsuit Nation.

One professor complained about the difficulty of setting off a debate even in among the combative types in law school.  None of these kids have opinions, he said. They don’t read like we did before the Internet, he guessed.

Maybe. But on a blog called I Could Never Sell I have a different guess. More people go into sales when the economy is bad, for lack of anything better, and every opinion offends someone among your buyers. Opinions hurt sales. Maybe that’s what we mean when we say “she’s got an attitude.”  She has opinions.  In a bad economy, no one can afford opinions.

As detectives say, qui bono? Who gains from that? Who sees gains from a bad economy and an electorate with no opinions?

===

Christmas Eve outside Nairobi.Grandmother gives the small children glue to sniff while they wait for their twelve-year-old sister, a prostitute, to return with money. Until then, Grandmother has no food for them and the glue takes away the pain of their hunger. The story is X-Mas Feast in Say You’re One of Them by Uwem Akpan, the rare book that requires courage to read. And what courage to write!

How much of what we buy and sell is scent? Scent in place of food, scent in place of all else?

Here’s Garrison Keillor at Writer’s Almanac on the origins of Coca-Cola:

From nicotine to caffeine: on this day in 1886, John Pemberton brewed the first batch of Coca-Cola in his backyard in Georgia. It was first sold at Jacob’s Pharmacy in Atlanta on May 8th of that year, as a patent medicine for the treatment of, among other things, morphine addiction, dyspepsia, neurasthenia, headache, and impotence. The name reflected its two key ingredients, which were cocaine, from the coca leaf, and caffeine, from the kola nut.

Oh, but that was long ago, you say, before we knew.

Not so fast. What do we buy when we buy Coca-Cola today, minus the cocaine, and with or without the caffeine? Keillor again, the master of song and story:

The brand has become inextricably tied to the American identity; ads were painted by Norman Rockwell, the Andrews Sisters sang about it, Ozzie and Harriet endorsed it, Andy Warhol painted its trademark “hobble-skirt” bottles, which were so designed to make them easy to find when a thirsty customer groped for them in a bucket of ice water. The American depiction of Santa Claus is often credited to a Coke ad from 1931. Forty years later, in 1971, a group of fresh-faced, multicultural young people joined hands on a hilltop and sang, “I’d like to buy the world a Coke and keep it company” in a TV commercial, and the song went on to become a hit single.

Doesn’t the scent of Coca-Cola stir an echo of all these songs and stories in the attic of your mind (if you’re old enough)? Just the scent, not the sip? Just the sight, not the scent?

Can’t you smell the fizz of freshly poured Coca-Cola now, reading this? And smell the X-Mas tree in the front window, this moment at the end of March? So do these Kenyan kids, I’m guessing, sniffing Grandmother’s glue.

Isn’t the X-Mas Feast the grand finale of all our buying and selling each year? The day that shows what our life is worth? More even than tax day each year, mid-April? Making a full accounting of our place in the economy?

What would Coca-Cola do for the Kenyan kids in X-Mas Feast? Just a sip, a sniff, a glimpse, a gleam? Wake all the dreams of the wealth of the West, wouldn’t it? Dreams, songs, stories. So they dream of a place with food to spare, a place that throws out more food in a night than these kids see in a year. A place spilling over with story.

With or without cocaine and caffeine, isn’t that what Coca-Cola sells? Dream, song, story?

Suppose the advertising is the product. The song and story of Coca-Cola sells us a bottle shaped like the curves and waist of a young woman, a shape we can find in the dark with one hand; sells us the history of Coca-Cola and our history, all the occasions when we had a Coca-Cola, or wanted one, or thought of one; sells us the song and story of Coca-Cola again, from the best years of our youth, even now when we have not tasted Coca-Cola in two decades. The Coca-Cola advertising sells us the song and story of Coca-Cola, a reprise of all their advertising through the years. The advertising sells us the advertising.

What Sold You This Won’t Sell You That

This title is a play on Marshall Goldsmith‘s title What Got You Here Won’t Get You There (get this classic if you haven’t). In each story, Goldsmith spends a year with a candidate for the top job at a top company, interviewing everyone in the candidate’s life from wife or husband down to the clerk at the dry cleaner and the valet in the parking garage (besides of course colleagues at work, peers, superiors, staff, rivals, underlings). Companies gladly pay Goldsmith a million-dollar fee to make sure they have the right candidate and the candidate stays on course to the top job. The future of the company may be at stake.

The title? Neither these companies nor these top candidates know exactly what brought them their success. The wrong answer could derail the future. What Got You Here Won’t Get You There.

Same with sales. We don’t always know what wind lifted sales. The wind in our sails is invisible, and can vanish in a sigh.

The wind goeth toward the south, and turneth about unto the north; it whirleth about continually, and the wind returneth again according to his circuits.

Ecclesiastes 1.6

Take the boy who cried wolf. Battered by recent years, I can now guess the rest of the story. The boy was lobbying for a job as watchman. A job paid from public funds. A job protecting the public. He told a crude early version of Beowulf’s pledge (in the movie): I will slay your monster.

A smarter boy might have lobbied for a job as mill inspector, and told a better story, knowing that the public buys the story if not the service. The story first and last, if nothing else. The advertising for the service. Even where the advertising is the service.

Noticing a rash of unexplained teen pregnancies in the village, or some prosperous couples having trouble getting pregnant and breeding an heir, the boy might have pointed a finger at the mill owner and his new waterwheel. It’s hard to blame a wolf for anything more mysterious than a bloody sheepskin, but “It’s something in the water” is a story that might sell. Why? Even the parents of the pregnant teens in town, who know well enough where their troubles began, might buy the boy’s story, might buy a story they don’t believe, if enough other people would believe it, if gossips would buy that story in turn. One story to silence another, one scandal to drown another, one claim to turn us from another…

In its familiar packaging and colors, the sight of glue might be enough to still the hunger of the Kenyan kids on Christmas Eve. Just the sight, after the scent is gone. Just the empty packaging, when the glue is gone. What do these kids see next, when they close their eyes? A Western Christmas, with every kind of wrapping under a lighted evergreen. A snow-clad evergreen in Egypt, in the garbled script we’ve repeated a thousand thousand times, and camels crossing deserts of snow. The sound of Christmas carols, the songs and stories. The scent of pine. The gleam of the lights. The splashes of color. The echo of echoes. All that we buy and sell in the wealthy West. All in a sniff, a glimpse, a gleam….

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Rat Scrabble

The hard thing about stories:

1. They never come alone, they always fight other stories for their chance.

2. Most stories are invisible, like the map in someone’s pocket when they look right through you, looking lost, or hurrying after something only they can see.

3. Most stories are Rat Scrabble.

I choose the name Rat Scrabble in memory of a movie that still haunts me, My Uncle From America by Alain Resnais (1980). Wow, has it been so long? Three decades?

In French the title is Mon Oncle d’Amérique, meaning of course My Uncle’s Monocle.

A doctor in a lab coat interrupts the heart-wrenching story of a love triangle to show us his rat experiments. Rats are plenty smart. Like us, too smart for their own good. The doctor puts a rat in a cage that has the shape of every story: two rooms and a door in between.  He teaches the rat to open the door and cross to the other room. He electrifies the wire floor under the rat and the rat jumps awake. The rat in his frenzy soon learns that the floor of the other room is safe, once he gets through that door. The doctor warns the rat with a large green light a few seconds ahead of the electricity. Soon the rat jumps into action at the light, jumps through the door ahead of the electricity, and hunches with relief in the corner of the other room.

Cruel, yes, but not as cruel as life, is it? Not as cruel as the love triangle where we trap ourselves and those we love, is it? Torturing the rat is a relief to tortured lovers.

This is the three-step shape of every story:

1. Life is good, or at least untroubled.
2. Here comes trouble. Must jump, must fight.  Flee or fight, try this, try that…
3. We settle into sameness again, for better or for worse.

For the rat:

1. Room One

Safe and warm, with wire walls to keep out cats, and a steady supply of food from the guy in the white coat and monocle.

2. The Green Light

Trouble. The light, the jolt, the dash to the door.

3. Room Two

Safe again, except for bad memories and the weight of lessons learned.

For Tolstoy:

1. Peace.

2. War.

3. Peace.  Some tears for death, some tears for birth.

But no, that’s too easy. That’s the story you can see. The Green Light. As Eudora Welty said, stories are also maps of what we are looking for but never find. Those are the invisible stories, the ghost stories that haunt and knock over and fling aside all the tiny bric-a-brac stories we say aloud. Why does Prince Andrei so eagerly leave his new wife for war, for the slog and slaughter in mud and ice? Leave her pregnant in that huge house on a hill? Story. His story and hers hardly touch. His story of the future and hers go different ways, on paths that barely cross, on paths that only glimpse one another across vast distances.

But most stories are still to come: The Rat Scrabble stories, the stories that swarm the mind of the rat when that door won’t open.

Anyone can teach a rat to open a door. This doctor takes the experiment two steps further.

When the rat has learned his lesson well, the doctor locks the door. At the Green Light the rat leaps into action but cannot open the door. He noses and taps and bangs at the door until the electricity subsides, then sinks motionless  to the ground.

Soon the rat begins to die inside. No, not from the electricity. Though painful, the electricity is harmless. The rat begins to die from… from… from what? That’s what the doctor wants to know. What kills the rat? The rat’s hair falls out. His eyes glaze over. He gets fat. Poke him and he hardly moves, hardly notices. Why? He no longer lives in a world with the shape of story, where he can flee or fight the trouble and get to the other side. The rat has food and warmth and safety, as always, but he dies for lack of story. He decides to die, that is, because he now lives in a world where his decisions make no difference. Yes, rats are clever survivors. Too clever. They can’t survive where cleverness has nowhere to go. Sensitive rats, starved for meaning!

Now the third and last step of the doctor’s experiment: Rat Scrabble. For this the doctor puts two smart rats together. Both have learned to open that door and escape when they see the Green Light. What happens when the doctor locks their door? Both rats thrive. Not merely survive, but  thrive. Why? At the locked door the two rats fight. They turn on one another. One wins the fight and one loses but both survive and thrive, though their door no longer opens and their escape no longer works. We can only guess why. My guess? The rats blame one another. When their door won’t open the rats blame one another. Now there is an action for them to take, a decision to make, a use for their cleverness, a way to make a difference. Their cleverness makes the shape of story again:

1. Room One:

Life is good.

2.  Green Light.

The jolt, the locked door. “That rat makes my life hell,” think both. They fight.

3. Room One (Again, Still)

Between jolts, the rats congratulate their cleverness. “I taught that rat a lesson,” think both.

Let’s call one rat Kutusov and the other Napoleon, after Tolstoy. I thought I knew everything, but listen to this. Kutusov was sixty years old when Napoleon invaded Russia. He had nearly died thirty years earlier, shot in the head while leading a charge. He went to London for treatment. Only the world’s best medical care could save him. There he met a General George Washington who had just beaten mighty England in the wilds of America with a rag tag army and guerrilla tactics. The year: 1776. Thirty years later the aging Kutusov with his one good eye and horrible headaches would defeat Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in much the same way, striking and retreating, striking and retreating, refusing to stand and face the grand army of the French, retreating even from Moscow when the younger generals wanted to fight to the death for their capital.

Our rats Kutusov and Napoleon need one another. Alone they will not survive the locked door. If one should kill the other, both die. They need one another for story, for meaning, for a course of action to take in the face of trouble. Their survival demands an enemy.

Ours too. We survive on a diet of Rat Scrabble, under all the stories we buy to sell one another….

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Maybe there’s a tidy little pattern to all the ways we go wrong?

• That last home equity line of credit, the one that sunk you.
• The car you bought that gets you to work half an hour early every day so you can park in the showcase spot, and wonder all day who’s wondering about that car.
• The franchise business you put your savings into, and quit your job for.
• The steel-ab machine that folds neatly into the corner of a closet.
• The woman you married because you wanted another child, a daughter.
• The woman you married because she hadn’t quit her job when you quit yours.
• The online dating ad you placed when you heard your employer would be downsizing.
• The rechargeable pepper grinder.
• The stories you floated to the rest of the senior class when your dad couldn’t afford braces or college, stories about taking a different path, an unmarked path, a bold new path across the wilderness of a bad economy.
• The PhD program instead of the job offer.
• The job offer instead of the PhD program.
• The stories you floated when you left the PhD program.
• All the interlocking tubs you bought because you decided you had been buying too much junk.
• The guy you slept with that killed your longest-ever most stable relationship.
• The guy you told No because surely he would soon find out you weren’t good enough to keep.
• The President you voted for.
• The local judge you campaigned for, the friend of a friend, who later kept a friend from talking to his daughter by phone for eleven months; when, the girl tells you, she cried every day.
• The private school you sent your stepson to, when neither he nor his own parents could see why it should cost so much.
• The divorced mother of three you married because it was time life gave her a break; who then broke you.
• The divorced dad you wouldn’t go out with because his ex-wife had put him in jail for a night, until you found that she and her two sisters had put four more men in jail.
• The divorced dad you wouldn’t let drive your daughter and his daughter to girl scouts after school because the court had not let him see or speak to his daughter for a year.
• The worthless car you sold for a good price at your sister’s house in a nice neighborhood, where a nice black man and his son bought it as a graduation present and off-to-college investment.
• The book you bought and then shelved to read later, right beside the copy you bought and forgot two months before.
• The franchise opportunity you bought because the founder did business in accordance with the will of Jesus Christ.
• The Judging Amy show you watched for years, sighing fondly, until the bitter hacks at Family Court hacked up your family and children in a trice.
• The Adderall you took when you had a big paper to write, and the Shantaram you read instead, because both make you feel the same way: fighting evil is easy and grand (Bring it on!).
• The gym membership you used twice in the twelve months.
• Your surprise, after years of reading the news, that mass rape as a weapon of war was widely used against men, not just women, but men are more ashamed to report rape than women are.
• Your surprise, after years of reading the news, that men who are slapped or punched by a woman in the home are one-third less likely to report it as violence.
• And a thousand more…

If there’s a pattern to the ways we go wrong, maybe Don Quixote explains it best. He got the world wrong again and again because he was looking so hard for his favorite stories, stories of damsels in distress and knights fighting over them. He hurt himself chasing good and evil that was nowhere to be seen except behind his own eyes, while clenched and rubbed in devotion. Others hurt him too, because he was blinded by his stories, and saw his nag and theirs as steeds, his hut and theirs as castles, his lady love and theirs as angels. They bullied him, mocked him, robbed him. So did his lady love, the washer woman he saw as Dulcinea, the fairest of damsels. When people meant him harm he did not see it coming, and when they meant him no harm he saw evil and enemies among them.

I have an idea. Let’s collect those favorite stories. Let’s collect those stories we chase after, the snipe hunts, the fake treasure maps that get us lost or lead us into ambush. Let’s collect stories we love too much, as Don Quixote did. The way Francis Bacon cataloged all the mistakes the mind can make, calling them Idols, Idols of the Tribe, of the Cave, of the Market, of the Theater. Stories I would say, instead of Idols. I am the idol in such stories, the way I crave to see myself.

In One Writers Beginnings Eudora Welty talked about car trips with her father and mother when she was small. She laughs that her clever father taught her and her little brother that if they were ever lost in a jungle they should look for the brightest spot on the horizon, because the glare from the nearest river would make a bright spot, and the river would lead them to civilization. So Eudora was aware that we go through life with a map in our lap or mind at all times, a map of what we’re watching for, a map of the story we hope to tell later. Even where you have the right map, and the map matches the land, you can read it wrong. Even your wise and loving father can.

Send me your stories too. Every story is at least three stories: the story we expected, the story we wanted, and the story we got. The story cubed, or the story to the third power, you could say.

There have been great attempts at putting every genus and species of story on a tree of life. The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell. Anatomy of Criticism by Northrop Frye.

But every story is three stories at war, three or more stories at odds with one another, and I don’t recall that Campbell or Frye said enough about that.

Maybe we can win the next Knight News Challenge:

The Knight News Challenge is a media innovation contest that aims to advance the future of news by funding new ways to digitally inform communities.

As much as $5 million will be given away this year.

The contest’s slogan is “You Invent. We Fund it.” And we mean it. Anyone, anywhere in the world can apply.

Applicants must only follow three rules. The project must: 1) Use digital, open-source technology to 2) Distribute news in the public interest and 3) Fit into one of four categories.

Our chance is in the Authenticity Category:

Authenticity category: Looks for projects that help people better understand the reliability of news and information sources. We’re hoping to identify promising ideas for helping citizens negotiate our oft-chaotic media world. How can we help news users better evaluate the validity and trustworthiness of news and information? How can we better filter and assess the credibility of what we read and watch?

How? Look for news stories that fit one of our own favorite stories too well. News stories we most want to believe. News stories that sweep through the population like a brush fire before proving false; and start again soon after. The ones we most crave are the ones most likely to be wrong, the stories of suspect Authenticity.

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