Tuesday, February 15, 2011

I hate the music

Dtihatemusic.JPG In my 41st year I've come to a depressing realisation: I hate music. If you'd asked me 20 - even ten - years ago, I'd have said quite the opposite. But as I wander through the cafes and department stores of the 21st century, or surf past Australian Idol in my quest for something to watch, or gnash my teeth in a taxi as the radio farts from the dash, I can no longer ignore the fact that most music I hear is absolute crap. There is fine music out there, to be sure, just as there are Volkswagens and rocket science to be found in Hitler's Germany. But the short answer is that I hate the Nazis, just as I have to admit that I hate music. There's not much that can be done about this on an international level, but should I ever rise to the ranks of Prime Minister (via due democratic process, of course), I'll be making a start by outlawing the following songs, destroying their master tapes and hanging anyone caught whistling them or playing them - even accidentally - on milk bottles.

What About Me
A hymn for the generation of whinging weaklings who ride to triumph not on ability or effort, but "rights". The saccharine combination of thunderous timpani and the bleatings of a titmouse was sickly enough when Moving Pictures first recorded it in the 80s, but when Shannon Noll went for sloppy seconds in 2004 it became the creampie corpse from hell. Also features the burlesque lyric, "I've had enough now I want my share". Greedy little ferret.

You're The Voice
John Farnham's attempt to usurp our national anthem by practicing his scales over a rhythm section that sounds suspiciously like boxes of records being stacked on a truck. This song's as good a template as you'll get for music from the awful 80s, an era of punching the air and singing "who-a-oh!", and what one did with one's other hand was one's own business. Amid a melange of meaningless desk-calendar affirmations sits the immortal line: "We have the power to be powerful", which predates Austin Powers' "allow myself to introduce myself" by at least a decade. And when John sang, "We gotta' make ends meet before we get much older", he might well have been singing directly to manager Glenn Wheatley, the somewhat misleading "Last Time" tour and subsequent 'retirement' apparently confirming Farnham's "not gonna' live in silence" determination. Interested parties may be delighted to learn they can score a framed picture of John, with a button that plays You're The Voice, and get change from $1600.

Down Under
It's impossible to tell whether this song is actually any good or not. I think when I first heard it I might have thought the lyrics kinda' cute, the music that accompanied them at least not annoying. But six Olympiads and several million Aussie wankers later and I'd like to find that flute, travel back in time to when Colin Hay was writing it and permanently distract his attention with a formidable rear action he'll never forget.

Khe Sanh
The ubiquitous "last drinks" tune hollered by drunken blokes who somehow identify with the sentiments (I once had a pimple-faced dork in a pub explain that Cold Chisel "really got Khe Sanh right", the inference being he'd served in the battle itself, despite the indisputable fact that it was a barney exclusively between US Marines and the People's Army of North Vietnam, with no units comprised of Australians, especially not infant children). The confused patriotism inspired by this number was adequately illustrated when the Australian cricket team made it their unofficial anthem during a 1995 tour of...the Caribbean. This isn't really a bad song at all, but earns its place in the incinerator for drawing attention away from Cold Chisel's comparatively superb catalogue.

I Am Pegasus
A completely unhinged tune from 1973 in which Ross Ryan declares, with a peg on his nose, that he is not only known as "Pegasus", but also Genesis, Sagittarius, Demetrius, Simon, Michael, Jeffery and John. Ross's indecisiveness as to what to call himself is only matched by his dithering with regards what he plans to do, his muscular, free-spirited declaration at the outset ("I don't have to leave you, but I shall be gone") becoming less strident in the second verse ("I plan to stay here...unless you want me gone"), until finally descending into confused and pathetic pleas for reinstatement ("It's not too late...do you know who I am?"), his final howls of "I don't have to leave you, no-no-no..." an apparently desperate response to being told to rack off and take Demetrius etc with him.

Throw Your Arms Around Me
The song that will not die, which is testament to the durability of items with fewer moving parts (three chords to this masterpiece). Seems someone just can't believe TYAAM is not the ringtone of choice all over the world, and there've been so many re-recordings of it that the original now has the same ancient charm as Barry Crocker's Neighbours theme. Mark Seymour could (and probably still can) write and perform with the best of them, and with Hunters and Collectors he was responsible for some of the most truly unique and exciting rock moments to come out of this country. Not this one, but.

Hello
The Cat Empire. Aw, crap...I've got to move on to the next song before this stinker gets stuck in my head.

The Ship Song
You know you've engaged the zeitgeist when Dennis Walter covers your song on morning variety television, and it's in this way that The Ship Song finally convinced mainstream Australia that Nick Cave was something other than a little-known seaside tourist attraction. Those already aware of Cave's brilliance before the winter of 1990 saw this ode to "easy listening" for the album filler it was, but those who just can't cop a tune unless they feel they've heard it a million times before were doubtless grateful for the chance to comfortably add a Cave CD to their libraries (between Michael Bolton and Denise Drysdale). When someone claiming to be a Nick Cave "fan" cites this as the song, out of all the extraordinary stuff in Cave's catalogue, get out of there fast, and do not surrender any personal details. And I'll hear no argument about the fact he's singing: "Come sail your ships around me, and burn your britches down..."

Treaty
The soundtrack of an extremely fraudulent episode in Australian history, which saw Mandawuy Yunupingu being awarded Australian of the Year in 1992, coincidentally during the International Year of Indigenous People, his major achievement having been a hit single. The song that did it had little to do with the original piece written by Yothu Yindi, pumped as it was through a DJ's blender until indiscernible from the sounds of your average British rave, but it gave white Australia a sterling opportunity to declare that "great little bunch of blokes" capable of doing what groovy white guys can, before the year ran its course and everything went back to normal. The song is wheeled out whenever an award is presented to anyone with a suntan.

Anything by Slim Dusty or John Williamson
They say that Slim Dusty sold more records than any other Australian, which is total bollocks. A good thing too, because if it were true it would reveal us as a nation of simpletons (if anyone can point me to a Slim tune that couldn't have been written by a 10 year old I'll stand corrected). As for Johnno, I'm prepared to let him off for Old Man Emu, but the best way to get on my ghost's goat would be to get John to sing True Blue and Home Among the Gum Trees at my memorial service - I swear I'd violently haunt every bastard in this country until I was three sheets to the wind.

First published in The Daily Truth January 4, 2007.


Wednesday, November 3, 2010

80 desperate ideas for Aussie TV drama

DTtelevision.GIF Buckley's Chance - The many adventures of Trevor Buckley, a croupier at a high-rolling city casino. Lock, Stock & Barrel - The daily lives, loves and litigations inside the most fortuitous law partnership of Peter Lock, Jonathon Stock and David Barrel. Beat Around the Bush - Tales from the life of a busy uniformed policeman in a rural jurisdiction. Ball's in Your Court - The life and times of rotund prosecutor, Jeffery Ball QC. Every Rose Has Its Thorn - Three girlfriends, all coincidentally named Rose, who just happen to be married to one Thorn brother each. Rock and a Hard Place - Centers around the affairs of rock and roll venue owner, Jason Hard, and the relationships of those who hang out in just one of his happening nightspots. Wood For the Trees - Follows the many dramas of passionate environmental activist, Shirley Wood. Hell or High Water - Climate change researcher Benjamin Hell insists his small community is heading for catastrophe, but will they heed his warnings? Eggs in One Basket - The often comical ordeals that confront Gerald and Jennifer Egg and their children as they travel the world in a hot-air balloon.

Cleanliness Is Next To Godliness - Two likeminded individuals, Josephine Cleanliness and Annie Godliness, are brought together by their neighbouring desks in an adult call centre. Doubting Thomas - The police may think they've nabbed their man, but it's a good thing forensic pathologist Thomas Johnston is never too sure they have the right suspect. Freudian's Slip - Hilarious slapstick escapades of the accidental father, Humphrey Freudian. Falling Out of the Ugly Tree (and Hitting Every Branch on the Way Down!) - After researching his family tree only to discover he is related to the notorious Ugly crime family, James Ugly's attempts to disown his roots see his life falling hilariously apart, forcing him into a career as a reluctant but determined bank robber. Easy Pickings - You don't have to try to hard to score with Sharon Pickings, girl about town. From Dawn to Dusk - A gentle look at life when a man leaves a girl called Dawn for an African-American lady. Give a Little, Take a Little - When 40-something career woman Stephanie Little decided to adopt a teenage girl, she had no idea it would reunite her with the very daughter she abandoned when she herself was a teenager! Rule of Thumb - Sitcom concerned with the wacky dictatorship of Roman emperor Octavius Thumb III. Brain's Trust - The heart-wrenching misadventures of Alan Brain, most gullible man in the world. A Little Wet Behind the Ears - Thomas Wet has an evil twin who stopped growing in the womb but now lives in the base of Thomas's skull, from where he whispers wicked plans to his hapless brother. Quacks Like A. Duck - Follows the shambolic career of disreputable doctor Arthur Duck M.D., and others like him. Shoe's On the Wrong Foot - Danielle Shoe's friends insist the other Foot brother is more suited to her lifestyle. Hand Over Fist! - Hard-hitting political drama as authorities try everything to extradite public enemy #1, Isador Fist. Yu Scratch My Back - An insightful and often humourous look at Australian immigrant life as viewed from the perspective of Vietnamese masseuse, Kelly Yu. Heir of the Dog - A young man's father dies leaving him nothing but a lowly racing greyhound. Fat of The Land - The deadlines, love lines and bad dates of hard-working editor of The Land, Gary Fat. Ballpark Figures - Never a dull moment with the guys and gals from the Ballpark Modeling Agency. Scum of the Earth - Endless misunderstandings with riotous results as an alien race tries to come to terms with our first visitor to another planet, Astronaut Peter "Buzz" Scum. Water Under the Bridge - Wartime life in Sydney, Australia, through the eyes of The Rocks resident, Archibald Water. Get Phuck! - Melbourne's Asian crime gangs unite to put an end to the career of out-of-control assassin-for-hire, Choong Soo Phuck. Artsy Fartsy - Is there no end to the mindless workshops indulged by serial community arts addict, Belinda Fartsy? As Luck Would Have It - The history of Australia as one man might have preferred it, hosted by Peter Luck. My Name Is Legion - Barnaby Legion, private eye. Bitter Diatribe - Unhappy indigenous folk go on the warpath. Bull By the Horns - Fans of the bumbling Raymond Bull's first series will be delighted to see him faring no better in an orchestra than he did in the china shop. The Life of Riley - Some guy called Riley, luckily enough, and his life. Coming Home to Roost - A dyslexic prodigal son returns home to the scene of his incestuous ways. Goes Without Saying - The loveable Henry Goes stumbles through life without a larynx. Robbing Peter to Pay Paul - Historical fiction exploring what might have occurred had the Apostles' accounts been mismanaged. Read Between The Lines - The temporary sobriety of Daniel Read, cocaine addict. Queen's English - Effeminate literature lecturer Raymond Queen struggles to keep control of his hysterical students. The Head Honcho - The indomitable Jose Honcho clings to life, but will he ever find a body? Pillar Of The Establishment - John L. Pillar, upper-class twat. Down Pat - The adolescent tribulations of the excruciatingly depressed Patricia Smith. Reign's Supreme - A base of truth with a topping of laughter is life in Eddy Reign's busy pizza restaurant. Enough Already! - He's everybody's mate, but will Robbie Already ever shut up? Scared Stiff - Follows the thought process of a man who awakes to find himself absolutely dead and yet, somehow, still a coward. Like The Plague - This show's pretty bad, actually, and thus best avoided. Start from S.C.R.A.T.C.H. - Espionage and intrigue with Nicolas Start, field officer for the 'Society for Continued Reduction of All Things to a Condition that could at least be regarded as Honest'. Death and Taxes - When an undertaker meets a drop dead gorgeous bookkeeper, he digs her plenty. Stuff That Dreams Are Made Of - As one of the most reliable actors for a dream production company, Gregory Stuff is the unknown star of everyone's nightly visions, but will he ever realise his own dreams? The Final Analysis - The last surviving member of the Analysis clan wreaks his revenge. Wisdom of the Ages - The indestructible Jeremy Wisdom continues his interminable and apparently pointless wander through time. Pay Through The Nose - The daily grind for workers in a depression-era factory, where wages are calculated and distributed by none other than Anna "The Nose" Papadopoulos. Pain and Suffering - Desmond Pain and Denise Suffering struggle to make ends meet in their party plan business. Downe in the Dumps - Madcap entertainer Bob Downe leads us on an outrageous tour of the world's rubbish tips. Young & Foolish - Two more lawyers who couldn't believe their luck when they met. Love Is Blind - A black screen is all you get in this unique drama featuring the ultimately unknowable Peter Love. Achilles' Heels - The single life of Maria Achilles and all her terrible boyfriends. Poetic Licence - It's petal to the metal at the unconventional Haiku Driving School. Last But Not Least - Noteworthy musical arranger James Last was actually a very large man, as this in-depth documentary reveals. Hammer & Tongs - He handled the renovations, she tossed the salad, and together they fell in love. A Good Heart Is Hard To Find - Have you ever seen a pack of arseholes quite like the Heart brothers? The Balance Of Power - Civil court magistrate Gemma Power has an even-handed approach to the law. You, Me, And The Fence Post - Laughs aplenty with a fun-loving outback farming couple and the only durable friend they've got. Money Talks And Bullshit Walks - Set in the high-octane world of the Olympic 10km walking event, coach and manager Terence Money proves a hard taskmaster while athlete Sophie Bullshit goes for gold. Haste Makes Waste - Before Kenny there was Harry Haste, who had absolutely no interest in what happened afterwards. Hook, Line and Sinker - No, really...how do these lawyers meet? Tale Of Woe - The ongoing saga of Sir Alfred Geoffrey Tale, lord of Woe Manor. Short Shrift - The lows and lows of life for Reginald Shrift, midget. Turn The Tables - Unusual dark comedy told through the observations of one Jerry Turn, not so much a singular character as an ensemble of outdoor dining tables. Greater Love Hath No Man - The larger of the two Love sisters just cannot find a boyfriend, sadly. Fair To Middling - In a quest to get in touch with his family roots, second-generation British-Australian Terence Fair is on a journey to Middling-On-The-Marsh and there's nothing will stand in his way. Tales Out Of School - Everyone's favourite truant kid, Tarquin Tales, has graduated at last. Poker Face - Timothy Face, card sharp. Bright-Eyed and Bushy-Tailed - Cop drama that follows the unlikely partnership of one very alert detective and another who, for some reason, has the arse of a possum. Blast From The Past - The continued adventures of Sir Horace Blast, time traveler. Bone Of Contention - More espionage with Kenneth Bone of Contention Global Security Group. The Spirit Is Willing But The Flesh Is Weak - When Paul Willing and Lionel Weak open a steakhouse together, it is decided one will handle the liquor while the other cooks the meat. Pandemonium Reigns Supreme - Things aren't getting any less zany in the second series concerning that pizza shop. Coast Is Clear - The life and crimes of Lawrence Coast, invisible man.

First published on The Daily Truth, May 28, 2007 2:45 AM

Wednesday, September 22, 2010

Reinventing the real

When results of the Body Truths Survey are published in a forthcoming issue of UK Marie Claire, expect to hear a lot of talk about “real women”. The tag “real women” was dreamed up last decade to both describe and flatter those who are not necessarily buoyant of bone and light on flesh - those who slide their bodies comfortably into size 14 and upwards. I suppose such women needed to bless themselves with a new moniker, having grown weary of “plump”, “overweight”, “fat” and “obese”, but I think their choice was a scornful one – more of a Tarzanesque roar from the health farm than any noble redress of a linguistic wrong.

The term “real women” suggests, of course, that there are some frauds out there in the ranks of womanhood, and such counterfeits just happen to be everyone size 12 and under. Apart from encouraging some general misrepresentations (Cheryl Kernot is the genuine article, while Queen Rania of Jordon, social reformer and Muslim feminist activist, is a phoney), the term is a total insult to any woman who happens to be travelling light.

For years we listened as “real women” told us their realness was not of their own doing. Their bodies, they said, were hostages to obstinate genetic schemes and wayward molecular trajectories completely out of a woman’s own control. Hasn’t it occurred to “real women” that the bodies of the bogus are governed by the same biological designs? But even if it isn’t so – even if a woman deliberately outfoxes her DNA – where’s the beef? The “real women” would say that such an imposter has caved in under the weight of meretricious social convention – that such sluts for popularity, had they lived when the brush of Rubens was the truncheon of public taste, would have been feasting furiously on pork and lounging in front of the piano in a desperate attempt to stack on the pounds. It’s interesting to note that, in the same era, “real women” would have been envied for doing exactly that which they do now; nothing.

Which is not to say that “real woman” are all slouches – that biological argument of theirs is valid. But it’s rubbish to claim that one who works towards something and achieves it is a cheat compared to one who surrenders to fate. By that logic, a man who lives and dies in the slums is more gallant than the kid who fights his way out.

Years ago I worked on the nation’s most socially indefensible magazine, The Picture. We poked fun at almost everything, and there are those who could argue the magazine was physically exploitative, but one laugh officially off the agenda was that which was at the expense of a woman’s body. Go through the archives of The Picture (if you must) and you’ll find plenty of large women, but you’ll not find a single one of them being ridiculed. By contrast, flip through the women’s magazines of today and you’ll find them peddling this “real women” nonsense, slandering the thin as “sickly”, “painful”, “anorexic”. I don’t recall it ever being acceptable to vilify the overweight in such a righteous tone. And if anyone should feel outraged and exploited, it’s the slim women on the covers, used to sell magazines by the very same women who spit at them for being hucksters.

It’s no secret that Casey Donovan from Australian Idol – just like Sarah Marie from Big Brother before her – is popular with young girls not because she is beautiful (although some might find her so) but because she makes many feel good about themselves. There’s nothing wrong with that, but it’s not a particularly courageous reason to elevate somebody. It is more honest and natural – indeed, “real” – to exalt those who are what we feel we can’t be.

The “real women” tag is a product of exhaustion. It’s the scream of the drunk at the scurrying commuter – the sound one makes when one couldn’t be bothered, and so despises the one who is. It’s a wonder more thin women don’t stick up for themselves. But then, they’re probably comfortable with their bodies, which is exactly what “real women” purport to be. If that’s the case, they might like to prove it by going silent on the topic of their own flesh, and certainly the topic of everyone else’s.

As for us overweight men, we are what we’ve always been; fat bastards.

Jack Marx
(First published in SMH, December 3, 2004)

Friday, September 17, 2010

Last drinks for AA

aa.jpg
In November of 1999, the US Supreme Court ruled that atheist drink-driver Robert Warner had been “denied his constitutional rights” when he was forced, as a condition of his probation, to attend the “deeply religious” meetings of Alcoholics Anonymous. It was a bitter judgement for AA, a movement which, since its inception in the 1930s, has successfully battled the stigma of religion and thus enjoyed a level of legitimacy in the public mindset not usually afforded to churches.

The damage controllers had barely convened in April 2000 when Audrey Kishline, co-founder of “alternative to AA” therapy group Moderation Management, killed a man and his 12-year-old daughter while driving with a blood alcohol level three times the legal limit. The tragedy might have been a public-relations triumph for AA had it occurred a few months earlier - in January, after successfully moderating her drinking for nearly a decade, Kishline had shocked her peers and supporters by suddenly denouncing MM and converting to the AA program.

As Kishline took the witness stand, and the abstinence-verses-moderation debate found popular forum, unsavoury news arrived from across the Atlantic: an internal AA General Service memo containing information of an extremely delicate nature had been faxed to a wrong number. The receivers made good use of the document – July 5 was a slow news day at the Glasgow Herald.

"There appears to be a growing number of cases around the country of police (and other agency involvement) in allegations of unlawful sexual conduct by AA members," the memo revealed. “There is a small minority of men and women who operate with sick but hidden agendas, and…seek self-gratification, often at the expense of other members or potential members."

The memo concluded with startling candour: AA, it warned, had the "potential to become a breeding ground for predatory behaviour".

By the end of the year, American self-help bookshelves, once dominated by tomes spouting AA and 12-step therapy wisdom, became home for ideas that only months before had seemed like heresy: Marianne Gillian’s How Alcoholics Anonymous Failed Me, Ken Ragge’s The Real AA, Charles’s Bufe’s AA: Cult or Cure? and Stanton Peele’s The Diseasing of America, prodigiously sub-titled: How We Allowed Recovery Zealots and the Treatment Industry to Convince Us We Are Out of Control. Alcoholics Anonymous, the self-proclaimed “20th century miracle”, staggered into the new millennium under siege.

~

“It’s like any religion,” says Dr. Stanton Peele, a New York psychologist and undoubtedly AA‘s most vociferous medical critic. “If it works for you, then fine. Plenty of people go to church on Sundays, they’ve been doing it for years and I don’t have a problem with that. But in America, AA is institutionalised. We have a 12 step Government whose courts are sending people to AA as a form of policy. It’s medically wrong and ethically reprehensible and completely against our constitution. And I have a big problem with that.”

Jack Trimpey, the 60-year-old Californian founder of anti-12-step therapy group Rational Recovery, is even less diplomatic.

“It’s a dangerous…religious…cult,” he says, dumping the words like burdensome sacks he’s been carrying around for years, “and one that has become a potent political force because of its uncanny ability to present a pious exterior. The truth is, these people are hucksters with carney mentalities, and what they’re selling you is absolution from moral responsibility, which in turn absolves them of theirs.”

While Peele and Trimpey form the vanguard in the American rebellion against AA, they are by no means drinking buddies. They openly dislike each other (Trimpey regularly refers to Peele as “Dr Beast at Large”, Peele to “Jack’s inability to play with others”), and their respective agendas are so different as to be hostile.

For Peele, author of several scientifically applauded books on addiction, AA is flawed therapy whose hymnal supplication to the “disease” and “denial” concepts and ironclad edict of abstinence spell disaster not just for those who seek help, but those who seek to provide it. The solutions to addiction are mercurial as addiction itself, and Peele sees AA’s refusal to acknowledge this as tantamount to malpractice.

“If you go to a hospital and you say you’re sick,” he says, “they’ll give you penicillin or something. If it doesn’t work for you and you don’t get better, they won’t keep plying you with penicillin – they’ll try something else, then something else again until you’re well. In AA, if you say the treatment isn’t working for you they tell you that you’re the problem, not the treatment, and that your ‘denial’ of the treatment is a symptom of the ‘disease’ and you therefore need AA even more. It’s this crazy kind of all-or-nothing attitude with 12-step therapy that is actually setting us all back.”

Trimpey, something of a moral crusader by contrast, cares little for the adventures of medical science, which knows “exactly zero about addiction”. He cares even less for those who hand over responsibility for their addiction to AA and thus “deserve all the mistreatment and misguidance they will get”. For Trimpey, himself a former addict, it’s a simple matter of “taking control of one’s hands and feet” and not doing that which is “plainly stupid”.

“The founding principle of AA is: ‘we are powerless over the desire to get shitfaced drunk! We are exempt from the moral standards that apply to all others, because we are alcoholics.’ That’s just stupid, and there is no justification for calling stupidity a disease.”

One instinctively feels Trimpey’s explosive declarations should be treated with caution; they have that soapbox ring to them. At the same time, in an argument beleaguered with bickering doctors, fragile theories, flaky statistics, loose-limbed hypotheses and bubbling beakers of psychobabble, the vulcanised simplicity of a Trimpey analogy seems to sledge through confusion like the original blunt instrument.

“I always ask people to try to imagine that initial meeting between Bill Wilson and Bob Smith,” says Trimpey, referring to AA's founding fathers. “One says, ‘You know, just between you and me I can’t stop drinking.’ And then the other says, ‘Well, you know what? Neither can I.’ ‘Well, I tell you what: I’ll watch you if you watch me.’ ‘OK, because I sure can’t trust myself.’ So they look over each other’s shoulder, taking responsibility for each other’s behaviour rather than their own conduct, and they call the whole thing a disease. Now, whatever else was discussed in that meeting, whatever grew from that initial spark of an idea, is the product of a perverse mentality of moral irresponsibility taking place between a doctor and a stockbroker who are both, by their own definitions, constitutionally derelict.”

~

When New York stockbroker Bill Wilson and proctologist Bob Smith sat down in Akron, Ohio, in 1935 and promised each other they’d never drink again, they gave birth to the single most famous lay-treatment in the history of the world. Its doctrine, mapped in The Big Book of Alcoholics Anonymous (1939) was simple enough: stay sober “one day at a time”, attend meetings regularly, methodically ascend the “Twelve Steps of AA” and the house will not only stay dry, but be spiritually renovated.

And therein lay the catch: “recovery” could only be possible when one put one’s life “in God’s hands” and followed “the dictates of a higher power”. A “daily reprieve” was all that was promised (“we are never cured of alcoholism”), contingent on the daily prayer: "How can I best serve Thee, Thy will (not mine) be done." For the “spiritually sick” alcoholic, it was clear this would be no trivial conversion.

And where the spirit was weak, the flesh was ailing: alcoholism was “an illness” of “mind and body”, a “fatal malady” as unfathomable to medical science as it was to the individual unfortunate enough to fall prey to the “hopelessness of alcoholism”.
“Doctors are rightly loath to tell alcoholic patients the whole story,” said the Big Book, and thus “many are doomed who never realise their predicament”.

The “disease concept” was not new – Dr Benjamin Rush, a founder of the Temperance movement, had tabled it as early as 1784 in Inquiry into the Effects of Ardent Spirits on the Human Mind and Body – but it was far from accepted, with a 1943 poll by the Roper Center for Public Opinion Research showing only six per cent of Americans believing alcoholism to be anything other than lousy behaviour. The success of AA as both a treatment for the individual and a movement to be taken seriously would require a successful mutiny against accepted scientific and public opinion.

In 1944, Marty Mann, a professional publicist who became the “first woman to stay sober in AA”, organised the National Committee for Education on Alcoholism (now the National Council on Alcoholism and Drug Dependence), the public-relations arm of AA “resolved,” as Mann herself declared, “to let America know that alcoholism is a disease.”

According to the official NCADD history:

"She knew it would be an enormous undertaking that would need the support of an established academic institution so she turned to her friends at Yale University where E.M. Jellinek--father of the modern disease concept--and some of the most progressive minds in the country had been working to transform alcoholism from a moral problem into a public health issue."

It was a tidy quid pro quo: Mann offered Jellinek “the public relations skills she had developed while working at Macy's department store” in exchange for “the support of an established academic institution.”

This uneasy relationship, in which supply and demand seemed to travel like a secret code between the two parties, resulted in Jellinek’s papers, "Phases in the Drinking History of Alcoholics” (1946) and “Phases of Alcohol Addiction," carried in the Quarterly Journal of Studies on Alcohol in 1946 and 1952 respectively. Both were widely publicised (a 1957 Roper poll yielded a healthy 58 per cent in favour of the “disease concept”) and by the time he published his seminal work, The Disease Concept of Alcoholism in 1960, Jellinek had given Mann her rebellion, as well as a place for himself at the scientific table (alcohol science's most prestigious annual prize, the "Jellinek Memorial Award," commonly known as “The Bunky”, is presented each year in the U.S. for outstanding research in the alcohol field).

There had always been doubters within the medical community, but the first public criticism of AA to be widely distributed appeared in Harpers Magazine in January 1963. Under the headline “Alcoholics Can Be Cured – Despite AA”, Dr A. H. Cain, himself an ex-member of the Fellowship, claimed AA had become “a dogmatic cult” and urged “a thorough investigation of Alcoholics Anonymous in the interest of our public health”. A few months later, Bill Wilson, addressing the AA General Service Conference in New Jersey, coaxed titters of amusement when responding to the controversy:

“It is a mark of maturity on our part that members of the Fellowship seem to have been less disturbed by the critical article than our non-alcoholic friends have been."

With that comment, Alcoholics Anonymous turned a corner: there was something patronising in Wilson’s allusion, a self-satisfied purr in his reference to “our non-alcoholic friends” and their inability to stay cool under pressure. Suddenly, it seemed, AA members were being invited by the Fellowship’s founding father to view themselves not so much as damaged individuals forced to seek repair, but as Fellows of an enlightened elite – indeed, a “higher power”- that dwelled somewhere above the Pickwickian lumpenmasse.

But it was the unstoppable “self-help” phenomenon of the 70s and 80s that truly engaged AA with the Zeitgeist. This neurotic epoch, characterised by the logically burlesque notion of the “self-help group”, saw twelve-step therapy – a wisdom designed specifically for people with alcohol dependency – franchised from one notional asylum to the next, ‘assisting’ everyone from victims of rape to those with an unhealthy enthusiasm for community arts projects: Narcotics Anonymous, Over-Eaters Anonymous, Gamblers Anonymous, Sex and Love Addicts Anonymous, Shoplifters Anonymous, Suicide Anonymous, Emotions Anonymous, Parents Anonymous, Debtors Anonymous, Molesters Anonymous, Abortion Survivors Anonymous, Addicted Jews In Recovery Anonymous, Homosexuals Anonymous, Clutterers Anonymous, Dollars Anonymous, Fear of Success Anonymous, Media Anonymous, Shame Anonymous, Vulgarity Anonymous, Professional Artists Anonymous and, for those who may feel suffocated by so much anonymity, Fellowships Anonymous and Recoveries Anonymous. These groups – just a sample of hundreds - are neither inventions nor parodies, but actual twelve-step organisations (the addresses and phone numbers of which can be found on the Internet today).

If proof was required that AA and its doctrines had been warmly received by society at large, here it was at last, the ultimate evidence of embrace: AA and 20th century culture had reproduced, the names of their offspring fluttering from community noticeboards all over the world.

~

“It’s an evangelical movement about saving souls,” says Dr James Bell, a Sydney physician who specialises in addiction. “You can look at it as an intelligent, well thought-out approach to people with alcohol problems, but the underlying motif is still recovery through spiritual enlightenment.”

Bell, former director of Sydney’s Langton Centre, has seen many addicts come and go – and come again, for “none of the treatments we have today are terribly good.

“But AA is not a treatment and shouldn’t be regarded as anything to do with treatment,” he says. “It tends to be very confronting: ‘I can do it, therefore you can do it.’ In a lot of people that actually generates some antagonism and feelings of failure. It confirms their badness for them. The approach that most professionals would argue is more appropriate is a much more accepting, non-judgemental approach whereby one works with someone to try and find out what’s going on, rather than to set up two black and white alternatives.”

One of the most worrying examples of AA’s dogmatism can be heard in any one of the city’s remaindered halls every evening: the gateway to Chapter Five of The Big Book, read aloud at the opening of most AA meetings:

“Rarely have we seen a person fail who has thoroughly followed our path. Those who do not recover are people who cannot or will not completely give themselves to this simple program, usually men and women who are constitutionally incapable of being honest with themselves. There are such unfortunates. They are not at fault; they seem to have been born that way. They are naturally incapable of grasping and developing a manner of living which demands rigorous honesty. Their chances are less than average.”

“Terribly judgemental!” says Bell. “That’s like saying, ‘If you’re a loser, it won’t work for you’. Despite the overtly non-judgemental design of AA – the belief that alcoholism is a disease, that it’s not a matter of guilt – there remains this spectre of, ‘You’re getting this one chance and, if you don’t take it, then you’re basically a very flawed person with some serious character defects.’

“Like many evangelical movements, AA has become a victim of its own excesses in terms of fundamentalism. And fundamentalism is a narrow church, a church of blacks and whites. Of course, life is full of greys and soft edges and tolerance and forbearance and humour, all of which are conspicuously lacking in a world of fundamentalist zeal.”

~

That AA is a religious movement is a truth so self-evident it’s a wonder debate still exists. References to “God” – a proper noun always – appear in The Big Book 136 times, with a further 348 references to “Him”. Prayers ride on language more suited to the King James Bible than a manuscript from post-Volstead New York:

"God, I offer myself to Thee - to build with me and to do with me as Thou wilt. Relieve me of the bondage of self, that I may better do Thy will…Thy Power, Thy Love, and Thy Way of life. May I do Thy will always!"

Chapter Four, entitled "We Agnostics", goes to pains to reassure the “anti-religious” that the higher power need only be “God as you understand him”, then very clearly refers to agnosticism as “prejudice”, experienced pre-recovery by the authors who “often found ourselves handicapped by obstinacy” before “casting aside such feelings” to become “open-minded on spiritual matters”.

“We hope,” says The Big Book, “no one else will be prejudiced for as long as some of us were.”

It’s a persistent theme in AA, the notion that any feeling or thought that may arise within the mind of a newcomer – no matter how complex or wrought by individual experience – is already notorious to the Fellowship. The new AA member is thus a thoroughly predictable unit, whose doubts or reservations about any aspect of the Fellowship can be dismissed as products of a monstrous symptom of early recovery – a psychological bogeyman made famous in the 1960s by Elizabeth Kubler-Ross: “denial”.

“There is no such thing as denial,” declares Jack Trimpey. “Problem drinkers always know they’re problem drinkers, which is why they go, often quite trustingly, to AA in the first place. Denial is a semantic ratchet with which to wrench people into AA and keep them there. And let’s not forget it’s also a tool with which they forgive themselves. They say, ‘For the 29 years that I drank outrageously, spending my family’s money on alcohol to the tune of $300 a week while my kids didn’t have any shoes, I was unaware!’ Their ‘denial’, which is a ‘symptom’ of the ‘disease’, becomes the medical absolution of moral culpability.”

An example, no less typical for being asinine, can be found in the Rutgers University doctoral dissertation of Dr Janet Woititz, author of the bestselling Adult Children of Alcoholics (1990). Attempting to show that children of alcoholics benefited from 12-step programs, Woititz in fact found that those who attended Alateen had significantly lower self-esteem than those who did not. Finding her own evidence somewhat burdensome, Woititz concluded that "the non-Alateen children are still in the process of denial."

The dangers of this type of thinking should be palpable to anyone familiar with the controversy surrounding “Repressed Memory Syndrome” in the 80s and 90s.

But such criticisms of AA and 12-step therapy are primarily cosmetic. One might just as well cite the maddeningly infinite list of slogans with their cheap, meaningless magic (“Live simply so that others can simply live!”), or the inherently tedious biographical tales of inebriated excess (every bit as engaging in a scout hall as they are in a pub) as reason enough to stay away.

The crucial questions about AA that beg to be answered are “does AA work?” and “does AA do harm?” Another must precede both of these questions: “Can we trust our information?” Unfortunately, while the answer to that question might not be a definitive “no”, it certainly isn’t “yes”.

~

“The whole notion of AA belongs to a different realm of discourse to the realm of empirical science,” says Bell. “It’s not about evidence, as in controlled trials or statistical analyses. It’s about testimony.”

After over a century of attempted identification, the disease known as alcoholism remains quite the phantom. While almost all human ailments, from cancer to constipation, can be accurately diagnosed using blood tests, biopsies, scans or any number of invasive physical examinations, alcoholism – by any other name – exists only in the testimony of the sufferer. And verbal testimony constitutes wayward science at the best of times, let alone when the witness may be little more than a ventriloquist dummy for the types of psychopathology commonly associated with alcoholism: paranoia, self-loathing, delusion, or, indeed, “denial”.

Ironically enough, the futility of this situation is no more strikingly evident than in the Michigan Alcoholism Screening Test (MAST), a diagnostic questionnaire developed by Melvin Selzer, M.D. in 1971 and still widely used today. Question #8 of the test, for which an affirmative answer rates extremely high marks, is: “Have you ever attended a meeting of Alcoholics Anonymous?” Which is surely akin to ascertaining whether someone is dead by asking them if they have ever attended their own funeral.

So what of Jellinek’s famous “disease” papers? How did one man do in the 1940s that which nobody has seemed capable of doing since? Ron Roizen PhD, a doctor of sociology from the Berkeley University of California, has spent the better part of 30 years studying the social history of post-repeal America.

“Jellinek's data came from a survey he did not design,” he says. “It was generated by Marty Mann and distributed to AA members through its newsletter, The Grapevine.” Not being of scientific stock, Mann approached Jellinek and asked that he process the data into scientifically acceptable form. Jellinek did his best – of the 158 questionnaires returned, many, he discovered, had been answered by groups of Fellowship members who had pooled and averaged their responses, and no questionnaires from women were used at all.

“In the paper itself,” says Roizen, “there is a fascinating introduction in which you see the apologetic nature of Jellinek – not apologetic towards Mann, but towards his scientific audience - for the fact that he’s dealing with such crappy data.”

Before his death in 1963, Jellinek would state that "…Alcoholics Anonymous have naturally created the picture of alcoholism in their own image."

In 1996, Roizen noticed that one of the Jellinek’s early papers was signed "E.M. Jellinek, Sc.D. (Hon.)", the parenthetical "Hon." indicating that his doctorate was honorary rather than earned – “a specification which magically disappeared from later papers”.

Curious, Roizen obtained a copy of Jellinek’s curriculum vitae from the Historical Register of Yale University, as well as a later-in-life c.v. Jellinek had given to Stanford University. The two documents did not match, with Jellinek completing degrees and doctorates almost simultaneously at an assortment of universities from Europe to Central America.

“Let’s just say,” says Roizen, “that if Jellinek’s c.v. was a piece of evidence in a court of law, if someone had prodded it, it wouldn’t have stood up.”

Further investigation of the student transcripts from University Registrars at Berlin and Liepzig Universities – the two solid entries on both c.v.s - reveals that Elvin Morton Jellinek did not even complete a degree, but had, in fact, been dropped from University rolls for failure to attend lectures or take classes. His subject preferences displayed a taste for linguistics.
The “father of the disease model of alcoholism” was, in anyone’s language, a fraud.

"It is now clear,” wrote Nick Heather and Ian Robertson in Problem Drinking, “that the disease perspective was not based on any sound scientific knowledge but on the folk wisdom of alcoholics and their helpers, on hearsay, myth, tradition, rumour and ex cathedra pronouncements of prominent alcoholics and alchologists.”

~

One of the the world's most respectable studies regarding the value of AA is that detailed in The Natural History of Alcoholism (1993) by Dr George E. Vaillant, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. The book is based on a 40-year study of about 600 men from two “social groups” – a college group and an “inner-city” group - along with 100 men and women from Vaillant’s own Cambridge Mass. Clinic. Vaillant’s extraordinary efforts produced a dense and baffling forest of data, but two important results stand out: more than half of the alcoholics in the inner city group “naturally evolved” out of their drinking problems without the assistance of treatment, while 95 per cent of the patients treated at Vaillant’s own clinic, where AA attendance was compulsory, had relapsed in the eight-year period following treatment, showing no greater progress than comparable groups of untreated alcoholics.

Vaillant’s findings – all the more credible for the fact they present evidence that counters Vaillant’s own interests - seemed to support the gloomy statistics revealed at the 1989 Triennial Alcoholics Anonymous Membership Survey, which stated that only five per cent of newcomers continued with the Fellowship past the first year, with a 50 per cent dropout within 30 days.

“There is compelling evidence,” writes Vaillant, “that the results of our treatment were no better than the natural history of the disease.” Sensationally, Vaillant goes on to warn the recovery community "not to interfere with the recovery process," for “it may be easier for improper treatment to retard recovery than for proper treatment to hasten it."

“Anything that has the power to do good also has the power, one must assume, to do harm,” says Dr Bell. “For me, one of the serious concerns about AA is the notion that sobriety is absolute – that you’re either recovering or you’re a drunk, even when you’re not drinking. This has a tendency to become a self-fulfilling prophesy for many people, who may have been sober for a while and then one day – perhaps because they’re simply finding things a bit stressful or whatever – they have a drink. In the support of the movement they’ve accepted the all-or-nothing notion that you’re either saved or you’re lost, and so they say, ‘Oh, hell, I’ve relapsed, I’m on the outer again.’ In that situation the acceptance of AA and all of its slogans can make the catastrophe of the relapse greater for the individual.”

In their 1990 study, The Quantification of Drug Caused Morbidity and Mortality in Australia, Holman and Armstrong found that 21 per cent of all alcohol-related deaths were the result of suicide. While we can only speculate on how many of those lives ended themselves because of alcohol, Stephen Jurd, director of the Herbert Street Clinic in North Sydney for Alcohol and Drug Abuse and a staunch supporter of AA, hints at an area where the answer may be found:
“The one thing that’s actually wrong with AA, particularly in Australia, is that you can go to meetings every day for six months, be a hard worker, get to know everybody, stack the chairs up at the end of the meetings, stop going and nobody calls you. The follow-up is inadequate.”

Which is not to say that AA should be hauled in for questioning; simply that it has a responsibility that extends beyond the warmth of the Fellowship. Having successfully sold itself to the world, it should now be willing to participate in, rather than blithely dismiss, any investigation into the impact it has on the community. Testimonials from satisfied customers tell us – according to AAs own figures – only five per cent of the story.

“There is a tremendous cost from the many downsides of 12-step groups,” says Stanton Peele. “And if a treatment not only doesn’t treat the problem but gives you a whole new set of problems again, then hey, buddy, it’s a bad treatment.”

Jack Trimpey, in his own way, concurs.

“You put thirty people in a room called Sex Addicts Anonymous, thirty people, men and women, standing up one by one and saying, ‘You know what? I just can’t say no!’ then I’ll tell you what; somebody’s going to leave with an erection.”

~

Australia was quick to jump on the AA wagon (the first AA meeting in Australia was held in Rydalmere in 1945) and while the movement here is strong, it is only a shadow of the institution it remains in the US. Australia does not have the same evangelical tradition as America, a legacy, perhaps, of being founded by convicts rather than by pilgrim fathers.

However, Australia’s resistance to evangelical fundamentalism is likely to change.

In 1998, John Howard responded to community anxiety over the rise of heroin addiction by launching the Australian National Council on Drugs, installing as Chairman Major Brian Watters of the Salvation Army. His second in charge was a policeman.

When in July 2000, Howard announced the establishment of the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation foundation, $115 million over 4 years was directed towards “community-based education and rehabilitation projects”, on “advice from the Australian National Council on Drugs”. Much of this funding has gone towards faith-based treatment approaches, almost all incorporating a 12-step approach. With the rise of Drug Courts, young people on drug charges are regularly sentenced to rehabilitation in faith-based treatment programs.

Unlike the situation in America, where there are constitutional restraints on public funding for evangelical groups, Australians are unlikely to win the support of the High Court if they object to being forced to engage in evangelical treatment.

Our hunger for conspicuous heroes, combined with a growing frontline of “fundamentalist zeal”, is bound to provide more ‘solutions’ to ‘problems’ than much-needed answers to questions.

And there’s no point in waiting for answers to come from America.

Languishing in her prison cell in the United States, Audrey Kishline released a contrite statement that ended with a startling admission:

“When I failed at moderation, and then failed at abstinence, I was too full of embarrassment and shame to seek help.”

Stacia Murphy, president of the NCADD, responded:

“It’s a pity this terrible tragedy could not have been avoided by Audrey realising this much sooner.

“Unfortunately, the disease of alcoholism, which is characterised by denial, prevented this from occurring.”

Jack Marx

* First published in Australian Doctor, July, 2004

Thursday, August 12, 2010

Doing the business

BeingThere1.jpg Norman Schwarzkopf led 800,000 troops on a 100-hour turkey shoot in Iraq in 1991. Fourteen months earlier, Mikhail Gorbachev kicked a hole in the world's most famous wall. What these two events had in common, apparently, was that they were excellent moments of “business”.

In his autobiography, How To Talk Dirty and Influence People, Lenny Bruce described business as "talking about nothing". By the end of the 20th century, it seemed business meant talking about everything; leadership, democracy, war, peace. These were some of the topics up for discussion at World Masters of Business, a heaveyweight seminar broadcast to a packed house at the Sydney Entertainment Centre.

Surely, though, the most fundamental law of safe business, be it the business of defense or politics or commerce, is to prevent anyone from sneaking advantage through a leak in your scheme. Well, I scammed a free ticket from the front desk by doing little more than being polite and looking as if I knew what was going on. I have roamed the Earth ever since snug in the knowledge that I defrauded the World Masters of Business.

Once inside, however, this victory turned somewhat dark. The morning opened to a live rendition, delivered from a stage draped in American, Australian and Russian flags, of that ghastly tune The Wind Beneath My Wings - a cynical bit of lyrical work in which an up-herself-backwards narrator manipulates the ongoing slavery of her subject through a condescending glorification of his subservient role. The Mechanic Beneath My BMW. The Desk Beneath My Portrait. The Arse Beneath My Face.

Though hideous, this was probably an appropriate theme for a seminar aimed at those who wished to learn how to effectively negotiate their way through other people.

What was surprising was the act that followed - a stand-up comedian. The audience howled with laughter as Peter Kay wheeled out a litany of Monica Lewinsky jokes, for heaven's sake. One would've thought that with all the methods of communication at its disposal - email, mobile phones, long lunches, etc – that the Hugo Boss crowd seated in the Sydney Entertainment Center would've heard such historical gags already.

At last, Norman appeared (we'll ignore the fact that he entered to John Farnham's You're the Voice - it's just too baffling to be bothered with). Norman was basically likeable, but difficult to trust, as most Westpoint “men-of-honour” are (it was on a point of honour that Norman's father, Norman senior, allegedly suppressed evidence that could have overturned the death sentence for the arguably innocent Richard Hauptmann in 1936).

His first-hand yarns reeked of apocrypha and he was clearly a master of the American triptych - that standard Hollywood vocal tool in which one must declare everything thrice, changing only one word each repeat, with emphasis on the changed word. Listen to it:

“So every year we would go back and we would allocate everything just as we had the year before. We allocated our food just as we had allocated it the year before, we allocated our ammunition just as we had allocated it the year before, we allocated our cash just as we had allocated it the year before...”

American's love doing this. All for the benefit, I suspect, of the greatest accent on Earth. And it does triple your screen time.

But he had a bit of the old Patton in him, Norman did.

"I like being first,” he said, as he stepped up to the podium. Later, he equivocated: “Show me a good loser and I'll show you a loser!"

He obviously hated the boss, “what's-his-name, Bill something-or-other" and referred to Washington DC as “the only place in the world where you can run ten miles in a straight line and still be at the scene of the crime”.

Norman believed the challenge of leadership was “to get people to willingly do that which they ordinarily would not do". He spoke highly of "character”, both moral and ethical.

“Ninety nine per cent of the leadership failures over the last I 00 years were not failures due to incompetence,” he said. “They were due to failures in character.”

Yet he also believed in failure as the destiny of all leaders.

“We all come into the pyramidal society and when we enter the workforce at the bottom there's lots of room. But as we move along in life, that pyramid gets narrower and narrower and every single one of us eventually gets knocked off that pyramid.”

How this news might have helped the fiscal community was unclear. But he did distil his experience into two pieces of advice which he could "guarantee” would make us all “successful leaders of the 21st century": “When placed in command, take charge"; and "Do what's right".

No doubt these words have caused all sorts of confusion throughout the Sydney business community ever since.

Gorbachev, by contrast, was an idealist, his socialist roots embedded in his DNA. Through an interpreter with the vocal timbre of Stephen Hawking, he told us that: “The foundation of success is not only the natural ability of the individual, or the leadership ability of the individual, but knowledge. Knowledge is essential. The most important thing for all is self-education.”

At times, his unsophisticated logic seemed borrowed from Chancy Gardener, the exalted simpleton from Jerzy Kosinki's Being There.

"Politics and business are like the sea," he said. "If you wait for fair weather before starting on your way you may wait always. So you should set sail. And you should know that sometimes the weather will be fair and sometimes the weather will be stormy, but it is only those who are prepared to go forward in fair weather and in storm, only people who are prepared to take the risk, who can hope to succeed. The important thing is to prepare for the trip.

"Don't panic when things go wrong,” he said. “Try again. I'm sure it will work.”

I noticed few punters wrote this particular gem down.

In reality, Gorbachev's appearance served as little but a big name to the local businessmen. He spoke mostly of globalization and foreign investment, eventually drifting into a broadside at the USA, whose flag dangled helplessly behind him.

"We used to speak of the need for a new world order,” he said. "Today we realise that new order is not really there. A very different strategy is being proposed by the United States. They are critical of the United Nations administrative council. They are critical of the role those organisations should play. And they go as far as to totally reject the roles of those institutions in world politics. We have seen that in the current crisis over Yugoslavia, where NATO has acted without the mandate of the United Nations."

But getting back to business, what nobody mentioned here, amid all the talk of character, quest for knowledge and sailing, is that to be a successful businessman today you must first be a liar and, hopefully, a thief. You must exchange for money something which is not worth as much. You must charge people for the use of lightning. You must extract dollars from them each time they want to speak to their mothers. You must sell credit cards to children - at their schools, no less - by convincing them of how easily affordable they are, only to prosecute them with the full weight of the law when they naturally, humanly default. You must do this quietly and in a dignified manner, so as not to arouse the suspicion of idealists, lest the laws get changed and you wind up in jail next to people who sell drugs to addicts who need them or men who defraud banks so that they can feed their families. None of this was mentioned because the audience was built of such fiscal hoodlums and it's dumb to say “nigger" at a Black Panther's convention.

Perhaps I'm being a little politically undergraduate here, but it's hard not to feel your insides tilting to the left in a barn full of power-profit enthusiasts, some of whom had paid a square grand for a seat.

But the messages were there, for those who wished to hear them. Schwarzkopf himself (who, I might add, applauded The Wind Beneath My Wings as "one of my favourite songs"), while pontificating about leadership, made three apparently contradictory statements.

“Whenever there are three or more people together there is always a leader.”

“Every one of you is a leader ... and if you think you are a leader, then, by golly, you are a leader."

And…

“The leader is often not the person who thinks he is the leader."

If all were true, leaders would exist, not exist and both wrongly and rightly think they exist, all at the same time.

I don't believe Schwarzkopf, a careful man at least, made a mistake in this pre-planned 40-minute speech. I think what Norman was telling us is that to be a leader in the 20th century, you've got to be full of shit.

A fine example of his ability in this department came through in his somewhat unnecessary defense of Operation Desert Storm, where he claimed he knew what they were doing was "just" because of the mail he received while in Saudi Arabia, “the equivalent of 28 football fields piled six feet high with mail, 99.9 per cent of which was behind us”.

One can only assume that the disgruntled 0.1 per cent was written in Arabic and sent by Iraqis who, through some major security blunder, had been handed the address of the Commander-in-Chief of the Allied Forces.

But all of this is bosh. Leadership plays only one part in the business world, and democracy plays practically none, so one has to ask what Schwarzkopf and Gorbachev were doing at the World Masters Of Business. The answer, I think, is that WMOB was simply a rock concert for accountants. I doubt anyone was seriously here to pick up some top-drawer business tips, although many were scribbling down in notepads (the Lewinsky jokes, probably). Essentially, the World Masters of Business was a motivational excursion - the chance to get turned on by the sight and sound of some true white-collar heavyweights. And in that arena, it was indeed inspirational. I marched back to Deli-France and demanded a tuna roll with no butter.

For me, however, the most educational scene of the day played out by the side of the stage, as Gorbachev exited after ending his speech. As several collars milled about, trying to get a glimpse of the man, a young executive type began to argue with security, demanding to be allowed backstage for an audience with Gorby that he clearly had no official right to conduct.

Security refused and the moron began using everything he'd learned on the day, replying to a security staffers assertion of “l can't help you” with a well-rehearsed: "I know you can't help me, that's why I'd like to speak with someone else who can!”

He was basically told to get stuffed.

FOOTNOTE: There were, in fact, other speakers on the day besides Schwarzkopf and Gorbachev - notably, that memory bloke from the late night infomercials, but I honestly cannot recall his name or a single thing he said.

Wednesday, March 10, 2010

Hubbard

DTron2.jpg All over the Internet today you'll find the video of a BBC reporter John Sweeney going quite berserk at a member of the Church of Scientology. He looks a complete berk and is rightly embarrassed by it all, but one shouldn't forget about the nature of the beast he's wrestling with. How the Church of Scientology deals with critics - known in the Church as "suppressive persons" - is well documented, and it's not impossible that Sweeney is the victim of a successful "attack the attacker" campaign, a plan of action originally mobilised by the Church of Scientology's founder, L. Ron Hubbard. In the shady corners of the 20th century, they don't come much more interesting than Ron, and millions of words have been written declaring Hubbard a fraud, most notably three books, all available for free on the Internet: A Piece of Blue Sky by Jon Atack, a former member of the Church; L. Ron Hubbard: Messiah or Madman by Bent Corydon, a former member of the Church, and L. Ron Hubbard, Jr., a.k.a. Ronald DeWolf (Hubbard's son); and The Bare Faced Messiah by Russell Miller, whose work was based in part on the admissions of former Scientologist, Gerald Armstrong, whose chance discoveries about the man he had once believed to be "the greatest man who ever lived" saw him declared a "suppressive person" by the Church of which he had been a loyal member for more than a decade. It's no wonder the Church of Scientology is touchy about investigation, for the life of its founder certainly warrants a close look.

L. Ron Hubbard was born in Tilden, Nebraska, in 1911, his family moving shortly thereafter to the state of Montana. It was here, according to Hubbard himself and the official Church biography, that the four-year-old boy struck up a "unique and rare relationship" with a local Blackfoot Indian medicine man known as "Old Tom", Ron's inquisitive nature so impressing the whole tribe that, at the age of six, he was "honored with the status of blood brother of the Blackfeet in a ceremony that is still recalled by tribal elders."

Curiously, officials of the Blackfoot Nation, who never practiced the act of blood brotherhood, do not recall anyone called "Old Tom", the name appearing nowhere in the tribal scriptures.

By his own account, Ron was a tough kid, breaking in broncos at the age of three and dominating the streets of his town until the "neighborhood was safe for every kid in it." As he recalled in his autobiographical transcript:

"My grandfather taught me lumberjack fighting and I went out on the prowl to find the youngest and smallest O'Connell kid alone. I licked him, then took on the next one and the next one and the next one, and by the time I had worked up four sizes, the rest of them decided that I was an inevitable part of the scenery and left me alone."

Subsequent research of the Helena school records has shown that the five O'Connell kids did indeed exist, the eldest being 16 years old when his nemesis was the tender age of six. In 1986, Russell Miller interviewed Andrew Richardson, a childhood friend of Hubbard's from Helena, whose recollections tend to cast some doubt on Ron's version of events.

"He never protected nobody," Richardson said. "It was all bullshit."

As a young man, Hubbard allegedly developed an early curiosity for life's great mysteries, an inquisitiveness instilled in him during his "extensive" travels throughout the inscrutable orient, his wanderings to the age of 19 meaning he had "travelled over a quarter of a million miles on the surface of Earth". As the 1978 edition of What is Scientology? recalled:

"Deep in the hills of Western China, Ron visited the lamaseries. There he conversed with monks and made friends with them and the people. In the isolation of the high hills of Tibet, even native bandits responded to Ron's honest interest in them and were willing to share with him what understanding of life they had."

In fact, Hubbard never went to Tibet and journeyed the orient on YMCA trips with his parents, the entries in his tourist diaries probably more reliable testaments to the Eastern impact on the young boy's psyche, the Great Wall eliciting a comment about its possible use as a rollercoaster, while China's "problem", according to Ron, was that there were "too many chinks".

Back in the USA, after graduating from High School, Hubbard attended George Washington University, where, according to the Church, he studied "engineering and atomic and molecular physics" in the name of "a personal search for answers to the human dilemma". The Church does not record that Ron was a terrible student (he scored an "F" for "molecular and atomic physics"), placed on probation for "deficiency in scholarship" in his second year, at the end of which he was chucked out with no degree. Nevertheless, Hubbard continued throughout his life to refer to himself as a "nuclear physicist", citing his education at George Washington University and "Princeton", where he was never a student.

Not surprisingly, Hubbard eventually turned his hand to fiction, writing for periodicals like Astounding Science Fiction magazine, gaining a pretty good reputation among fans of sci-fi and pulp. He was a good storyteller. In his book, The Pulp Jungle, fellow writer Frank Gruber recalled an evening with the 23-year-old Hubbard in New York in 1934, when several hours of listening to Ron's tales prompted Gruber to respond:

"'Well, you were in the Marines seven years, you were a civil engineer for six years, you spent four years in Brazil, three in Africa, you barn-stormed with your own flying circus for six years... I've just added up all the years you did this and that and it comes to eighty-four years...' He blew his stack...Most of the other members expected their yarns to be taken with a pinch of salt, but not Ron. It was almost as if he believed his own stories."

With the outbreak of World War II, Ron served in the US navy, emerging, by his own account, as a battle-hardened and highly decorated serviceman, awarded numerous medals for valor and bravery, including the Purple Heart. Unhappily, official naval records tell a significantly different story.

The first signs of the character traits that would dominate Hubbard's later career were identified in 1942 by the Naval Attache in Brisbane, Australia, where Ron, on leave from the SS President Polk, had become "the source of much trouble" for the navy. Explaining why Hubbard was being sent back to the United States, the memo noted:

"This officer is not satisfactory for independent duty assignment. He is garrulous and tries to give impressions of his importance. He also seems to think he has unusual ability in most lines."

Hubbard was no more impressive to superiors at home, his Commandant at the Boston Naval Shipyards requesting he "urgently" be reassigned to a more junior position. But Ron was at least determined, and before war's end he found himself given one more chance at command, this time of a small PC-class submarine destroyer deployed in San Diego, California, presumably far from harm's way. Nevertheless, the most notable moments of Hubbard's command are the two whole days during which he ordered the depth-charging of a Japanese submarine that was never there and his decision to conduct unauthorised gunnery practice while illegally anchored in Mexican waters, the latter finally scoring him relief of his command with an official letter of admonition.

Interestingly, the Scientology version of Hubbard's wartime achievements makes much of the "action" he saw "in both the Atlantic and Pacific", during which he "thoroughly distinguished himself in the eyes of those who served beneath him." How Ron appeared in the eyes of those who served above him is not recorded by the Church.

In later years, Ron would ponder the "2,000 ton Japanese submarines, worth perchance a score of million dollars to the enemy before my depth charges sunk them" and lament his actions that assured "not less than three hundred enemy lives struggled wetly out to Soldier Heaven". However, there is no evidence that L. Ron Hubbard contributed a single moment of distress to any defence force besides the US Navy, and Hubbard's claim to medals and citations appear, for the most part, to be complete fabrications.

In the post-war years, Hubbard turned back to writing, his preferred theme still futuristic invention, though his outlook was now considerably different. "Y'know, we're all wasting our time writing this hack science fiction," he allegedly told SciFi author Theodore Sturgeon. "You wanta make real money, you gotta start a religion!"

The first article on Dianetics appeared, appropriately enough, in a 1950 edition of Astounding Science Fiction. Within a year, Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health, was on the bookshelves. An unusual collision of Freudian psychology, Asimovian science fiction and P.T. Barnham chutzpah, Dianetics was instantly canned by the American Psychological Association as "a hodge-podge of accepted therapeutic techniques with new names" (the beginning, it seems, of Ron's life-long hatred of the psychiatric sector). Nevertheless, Dianetics was an instant bestseller and the first Dianetic Research Foundation was opened in Elizabeth, New Jersey, with branches opening in five other US cities before the end of 1950.

The cash was rolling in, but, strangely, the Foundation was not benefiting. In her book Dianetics in Limbo, one-time DRF manager, Helen O'Brian, recalled:

"I was an awed outsider with an associate membership during the boom to bust cycle of the first Dianetic Foundation....One man who was an important member of the organizing group told me a few years ago that he still retained copies of the bookkeeping records that made him decide to disassociate himself from the Elizabeth Foundation fast. A month's income of $90,000 is listed, with only $20,000 accounted for. He was one of the first to resign."

Within a year Dianetics was bust, with everyone from creditors to US Marshals hammering on Hubbard's door. Ron's response was quite brilliant: the Hubbard Association of Scientologists became The Church of Scientology, a letter from Hubbard to Helen O'Brian in 1953 stating his reasons quite candidly:

"I am not quite sure what we would call the place - probably not a clinic - but I am sure that it ought to be a company, independent of the HAS but fed by the HAS. We don't want a clinic. We want one in operation but not in name. Perhaps we could call it a Spiritual Guidance Center. Think up its name, will you. And we could put in nice desks and our boys in neat blue with diplomas on the walls and 1. knock psychotherapy into history and 2. make enough money to shine up my operating scope and 3. keep the HAS solvent. It is a problem of practical business."

Thus Scientology became a religion, protected by the United States Constitution, assaults upon it by the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association and the Government itself seriously handicapped, its critics branded religious "bigots". In the words of Jon Atack:

"To the general public, Scientology was represented as a humanitarian, religious movement, intent upon benefiting all mankind. Its opponents were dangerous enemies of freedom, and were tarred with unfashionable epithets such as communist, homosexual, or drug addict. Opponents were portrayed as members of a deliberate conspiracy to silence Hubbard, and bring down the 'shades of night' over the Earth."

Hubbard was able to do this thanks to a notable shift in doctrine, a historical addendum to the Dianetics story that elevated mere "science" into the untouchable realm of the supernatural.

In a discovery that seemed to owe more to Hubbard's science fiction career than any knowable reality, Ron identified the "thetan", an entity similar to a soul or spirit, whose meddlings inside the human body gave rise to near every ailment or mental condition. Hubbard first spoke of thetans in 1952, but his explanation of where they came from emerged later, during a lecture series about "Advanced" Scientology in 1968.

Briefly, thetans were the regrettable result of the actions of the evil galactic dictator, Xenu, who, approximately 75 million years ago, tricked billions of aliens into travelling to Earth, then known as "Teegeeack", in modified DC8 aircraft, before blowing them up with hydrogen bombs. The wretched souls of the victims, the "thetans", blown into the air by the explosions, were then captured by Xenu and forced into cinemas (located in either Hawaii or the Canary Islands) where they were made to digest a series of motion pictures that depicted all manner of nonsense, including the basic doctrines of Christianity and psychiatry. The thetans then gathered together in groups and infected the bodies of the few who'd survived the bombing, their indoctrination in the movie cinemas cursing humanity to this very day. The only known way one can become "clear" of thetans is through the Church of Scientology...

L. Ron Hubbard died in 1986, Forbes magazine estimating his fortune at some US $200 million.
Before his death, Hubbard, in a move he was to regret, gave his permission to Church member Gerald Armstrong to search through his massive stockpile of personal documents with a view to writing a biography.

"I was finding contradiction after contradiction," Armstrong told Russell Miller. "I kept trying to justify them, kept thinking that I would find another document that would explain everything. But I didn't. I slowly came to realize that the guy had consistently lied about himself.

"My approach was, 'OK, now we know he's human and tells lies. What we've got to do is clear up the lies so that all the good he has done for the world will be accepted'. I thought the only way we could exist as an organisation was to let the truth stand. After all, the truth was equally as fascinating as the lies.'"

Armstrong shared his views with his friends in Scientology, in an official report that argued the Church best not "present inaccuracies, hyperbole or downright lies as fact or truth...it doesn't matter what slant we give them; if disproved, the man will look, to outsiders at least, like a charlatan." It's a declared opinion for which Armstrong claims to be still paying today.

"The betrayal of trust began with Hubbard's lies about himself," says Armstrong. "His life was a continuing pattern of fraudulent business practices, tax evasion, flight from creditors and hiding from the law. He was a mixture of Adolf Hitler, Charlie Chaplin and Baron Munchausen. In short, he was a con man."

The question that begs asking is how the belief system started by a man so comprehensively revealed as a huckster could possibly still have so many apostles, many of whom are notable, successful human beings with easy access to the known facts. It's true enough that the tenets of Scientology are no more or less ludicrous than those of any other established religion, and if we could access naval memos from Biblical times there'd surely be more than a few discrepancies regarding those who claimed to part certain seas or walk on certain waters.

But what sets Hubbard apart from the others, from Jesus Christ to Joseph Smith, is that Ron did not claim to be the mouthpiece for the Divine, a mere conduit for the Good News. Scientology was a result of Hubbard's own "research", though he steadfastly refused to quantify his own investigative protocols. In short, Scientology begins with Hubbard, and stands or falls on his reliability. That's troublesome news, surely, for Scientologists.

One wonders why today's Church, faced with the overwhelming weight of truth about its founder, might not have chosen to distance itself from Hubbard, to declare that, by some fortunate accident, the simple psychological system devised by a man of questionable character and intent seems to work nonetheless, as it obviously does for some. Instead, the Church of Scientology still reveres L. Ron Hubbard as something like a prophet, its robust defense of the apparently indefensible making it appear more of a garrison than a religion, its energy for doing combat with criticism more suited to a militarist cabal than a church.

It is one invention from the mind of its founder that the Church of Scientology could well dispense with.

In New York in 1947, destitute and near suicidal, L. Ron Hubbard scribbled his thoughts into notebooks that would one day be tendered as evidence in the Los Angeles Superior Court. The miracle of Scientology, and the character of its founder, were yet to be known to the world.

"You can be merciless whenever your will is crossed," he wrote, "and you have the right to be merciless.

"All men are your slaves."

(First published in The Sydney Morning Herald, May 16, 2007).

Sunday, March 7, 2010

Why Oscar belongs in the trashcan

To appreciate why the Ocars are rubbish, one first has to understand exactly what the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is. AMPAS is a circle of peers - producers, directors, actors, cinematographers, screenwriters, publicists - all of whom owe the pits and troughs of their careers to the very organizations they are due to vote upon every January. It would be naive to think that each of the 6000 odd members of the Academy does not have a shed full of axes to grind. Could there possibly be a more monstrous collective ego than that of a Hollywood performing arts league, exhibitionists by trade, prima donnas of legend, each one of them driven by unfathomable depths of loyalty, malice and enduring memory? He who was fired by Paramount studios in the 50s is not going to forget the past any quicker than did those who refused to clap for McCarthy-era collaborator Elia Kazan in 1999. "Their dirty little secret is that they take too much into account when filling out ballots," wrote veteran Hollywood business reporter Nikki Finke in Salon.com in February 2002. “The Oscars are their payback time, pure and simple."

One can't simply join this most prestigious party of Hollywood lawgivers - you have to be invited. Invites, according to the Academy's own criteria, are "limited to those who have achieved distinction" in the film industry. In other words, you can't be young and vital - you have to have been around long enough for all to consider your best work behind you. Consequently, when you have a dizzyingly innovative idea such as Pulp Fiction running against a sentimental old boot like Forest Gump, it's a one-horse race - there are no prizes for guessing which film scored the votes of Mickey Rooney, Buddy Hackett, Shirley Temple and the thousands of other Academy members whose hearing aids farted with distortion at the opening bars of Miserilou.

Nikki Finke claims to have spoken to Academy members who admitted to voting in 1998 despite not having seen Saving Private Ryan at all - the poor old buzzards knew they wouldn't hack the violence, so gave the film a wide berth. The same queasy Academy tummies, claims Finke, dashed the chances of Edward Norton despite his perfectly brutal portrayal of a racist skinhead in 1997s American History X. As one screenwriter told The Daily Standard's Jonathon V. Last in 2003, "I liken Academy voters to an audience of grandparents at an elementary school play - they like Oliver and You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown."

Onto this stage of derelict judges, ancient grudges and petty jealousies writ large, the studios present an annual performance so corrupt and fraudulent that it's…well, worthy of an Oscar. Publicity-driven Oscar campaigns are nothing new - the studios schedule their big releases with Oscar time in mind, and every holiday season the Hollywood trade magazines like Variety flutter with "For Your Consideration" ads, designed to 'remind' Academy voters of particular nominees. But a new era in Academy Award skulduggery began, it seems, with the 71st Academy Awards in 1998, the end of an Oscar race that set new standards in sleaze.

From the moment the soldiers hit the beach in Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, it was clear to everyone that the Dreamworks war epic was a "lock" for Best Picture of 1997. Over at rival Miramax, studio boss Harvey Weinstein had other ideas. No sooner had the crowd sobered up from the previous year's awards when Weinstein hired the services of Warren Cowan, Dick Guttman, Gerry Pam and Murray Weissman, four veteran Hollywood publicists who remained on the Miramax payroll for the next 12 months, their job to wine and dine Academy members to the virtues of 1997s two big Miramax contenders, Roberto Benigni's Life is Beautiful and a decidedly underwhelming Elizabethan comedy called Shakespeare In Love. Weinstein defended the appointments by claiming simply that the men were publicists and it was a studio's job to publicise its films. It didn't seem to matter that the publicists in question had been retired for decades and were themselves all members of the Academy.

When the British Shakespeare In Love director John Madden arrived in New York just prior to the awards, Miramax hosted a "Welcome to America" party in swanky Manhattan restaurant Elaine's, the guest list flecked with Academy members in clear violation of a standing AMPAS canon that members not be serenaded by nominees. Then rumours began circulating of a smear campaign against Private Ryan, with several top Hollywood reporters complaining that Miramax spin-doctors were trying to influence them into giving Speilberg's film bad press. Tony Angellotti, one of the publicists named in the scandal, seemed to confirm the rumours in his own denial. "My job is to analyse," he told a reporter, "and if I said anything negative about Private Ryan or any other film, it was in the context of what someone else said."

It was an expensive campaign for Miramax (an estimated cost of US$16 million) but if the words "Academy Award-winning" are as valuable on an advertisement or rental box as everyone seems to agree they are, it was indeed an excellent investment - Shakespeare In Love shocked everyone by winning Best Film and being nominated for a record 13 awards. Life Is Beautiful, too, was a surprise success with seven nominations and three wins, and when an Oscar-clutching Benigni announced he felt he should "make love to everyone" in the audience, it may have been less of a joke than an expression of what Roberto thought would be his obligation - the Oscar lead-up had seen him dutifully grinning his way through intimate dinners with the likes of Kirk Douglas, Jack Lemmon and Elizabeth Taylor, all influential Academy members and one-time clients of Miramax 'publicist' Warren Cowan.

The bar had been raised, and today all the big studios hire their own 'Oscar strategists' with multi-million dollar campaign funds to ensure that Academy decisions aren't left to chance or, worse, merit.

"Oscars have always been about more than 'pure' artistic merit,” says Lisa Schwarzbaum, movie critic for Entertainment Weekly. “With thousands of people voting, each with personal agendas and interests, what wins is inevitably a mix of merit, zeitgeist and odds. What's shifted in recent years is the degree to which the campaigning has become visible."

It has now reached the point where the studios don't consider it at all unsavoury to have bullied a nominee over the line - on the contrary, the flaks view it as a point of professional esteem, in much the same way as a legal defence team considers it an accomplishment to release an obvious killer back into the community.

When Tilda Swinton failed to get nominated in 2002 for her outstanding perfromance in The Deep End, Nancy Utley, Fox Searchlight's president of marketing, seemed utterly oblivious to the cynical core of her own agenda when questioned by Amy Wallace of Los Angeles Magazine. "I honestly have a very clear conscience about this," she declared. "We attacked it (the Academy) with incredibly strategic thinking…This was as complete, as expensive, and as aggressive as the campaigns for Quills and Boys Don't Cry, which I personally oversaw."
Swinton herself was philosophical, according to The Deep End co-writer and director David Siegel. "It was much more important to the Fox publicity people than it was to her," he said. "She just didn't want to let them down."

Recently, the Academy has made very public but ultimately feeble attempts to clean up the increasingly dirty image of the Oscar campaign. Those published on the Academy’s website include the banning of nights out “specifically designed to promote a film or achievement for Academy Awards”, limits regarding studio contact with Academy members (“Telephone calls to verify a member’s address are permitted”) and austere restrictions on the weight of card and paper stock used as inserts for ‘screeners’ (DVDs and videos of films sent by studios to Academy members). The studios, naturally, have no trouble making a mockery of the Academy’s efforts. Last January, Michael Goldstein of the New York Daily News reported on the abuse of the right to hold private screenings for Academy members, claiming that the studios “lavish Oscar voters and key taste-makers with free screenings in New York, Los Angeles and even hideaways like Maui, Hawaii.” The studios, he claimed, were picking up the tab “for $5,000 a day hair stylists and $50,000 a day private jets so stars can look their best.”

Meanwhile, the Academy “diligently protects the reputation of the Oscars” in America’s courts. Last year, AMPAS successfully prevented a small-time bookie from registering the website oscarbetexchange.com, Lawyers for AMPAS, oblivious to the irony of their own words, arguing that “the integrity of the Academy Awards would be undermined if the public believed the Academy participated in or sponsored gambling on the results of the Oscars.”