Portrait of a Winner: or, I escape from the Dark Side


 


I've once gain been drawn into that weird demimonde of the motivational tape. Say what you will (and my friends are beginning to), but I have come away with some fascinating stuff. And this time it's particularly fragrant.
Presented for your consideration is Denis Wately, motivational counselor to Super Bowl players, Olympic athletes, Apollo astronauts, POWs and hostages. (No, these are not new tapes.)
His New Psychology of Winning is by and large the usual crap, more bombastic than usal. But in the midst of it, he tells a story about himself.
Now, if he had told this story from a "Dang, but I used to be fucked up!" standpoint, it would have been effective. But there was nothing of that in the presentation.
It seems Denis was a naval aviator. After he left the service he says that there was a time that he used to love driving his fire-engine red Porsche, getting on the freeways in search of Honda Civics to tailgate.
Wait, it gets better.
He would drive around in his red Porsche in his flightsuit.

Wearing his flight helmet.

and with a live firearm in his holster.

He then goes on to tell a story of returning from a foray thus accoutered and seeing his wife trying unsuccessfully to feed their ten-month-old daughter strained squash. He chases wifey out, grabs kiddo, shovels strained squash thereinto, and clamps the baby's lips shut. The child, unwilling to succumb, purses its lips and projectile spews strained squash at small aperture and great concentration of force into Dad's face and up his nasal cavities, rendering him incapable of breathing.

Which says something about the indomitableness of the human spirit.

Or something.

And I'm listening to a motivational tape written by this guy.

And the thing I couldn't help thinking about was that the lack of bemusement on his part, thinking that this story from his past is just a charming anecdote is that he's still that way.

But after that, I think some angelic power took pity upon me and guided me to the perfect book to listen to after this descent into the maelstrom: Babbitt, by Sinclair Lewis.

If I have one big gap in my reading, it's the books on the Approved List of Good Literature, especially the stuff that gets assigned in English classes. And Babbitt is one of those book-review books that I would have died rather than read.

But so much the better, because the book, written eighty years ago, shines a brilliant light on the foofaraw that is still being foofarawed today.

The standard survey-course hook on Babbitt is that it portrayed a quintessential American hypocritical type and the society in which he, after a fashion, flourished.

That's not really it: Babbitt is a very likeable guy, tremendously sympathetic, and an easy person to wish well. What Lewis aims at is the matrix that entraps him into stupidity, banality, and evil.

A large portion of this is the language. Eighty years makes the patterns exotic: it feels a lot like a Coen Brothers movie. But that also allows the blazing banners of bullshit to be all the more brightly colored. Lewis not only does dead-on assaults on correspondence school advertisements, tough and streetwise evagelical preachers, and (something we've thankfully purged from our system) newspaper verse. They're screamingly funny.

But it's the snares of language that really entrap George Babbitt--much more than greed, sanctimony, class jealousy and xenophobia. Lewis points out that B. is just as susceptible to good influence as bad--and that, in fact, is the organizing principle of the novel. Lewis's weapon is closer to the steak knife than the scalpel: never what you'd call subtle, he's still always in control, and the book is thoughtful rather than savage--and more effective than anything burning with anger.

Babbitt really is about guys running around in flightsuits talking about vision and winning (and "mission accomplished"), and the web of words that keep them where they are and who they are not.

Because all those rattraps are still there ands still set, and people are just as trapped as George ever was.


Posted: Wednesday - July 27, 2005 at 10:52 PM        

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