Firewalkers

I received an odd letter in the mail today. Actually, a solicitation. It promised UNLIMITED POWER, in huge red letters and certified this claim my proclaiming As Seen On TV. It was from a guy named Anthony Robbins. I knew Robbins, not personally you understand, but I had seen him many times late at night on those peculiar program-length advertisements which masquerade as regular TV programs (a disclaimer is usually run by the station at the start of the commercial).

For those of you who are not afflicted by a fondness for the wee small hours, or who are but are not doubly impaired by an addiction to television, I will just tell you that there is a whole world out there of late-night hucksters and TV pitch men who sell every conceivable kind of miracle (miracle gadgets, miraculous self-improvement programs, even downright miracles from some of the religious hucksters). I watch lots of these programs for their entertainment value. And now, one of them has found me, proof of every paranoids most cherished delusion, that the television is somehow watching back.

Robbins sells self-improvement. According to the prospectus, Some of Tony's students triple their income in just a few months, others wipe out destructive patterns of a lifetime, others break habits that they've tried to wipe out with years of therapy, others attain peak performance. (That's how these guys all write, with lots of underlines.)

Robbins is rather fun though because as a kind of graduation ceremony he has his students take off their shoes and socks and walk barefoot over a bed of hot coals glowing at about 1,500⁰ F. Now don't misunderstand, Robbins is a straight-arrow kinda guy, with a regular suit and tie. Former football quarterback Fran Tarkenton is one of his main late night shills. Football for christsake. What could be more regular than that. Robbins is not some kind of New Age mystic. These are good God-fearing capitalists, demonstrating the hot-damn POWER of the capitalist faith.

Once Tony Robbins got wind of where I was I started getting solicitations from all sorts of kindred hucksters. Zig Ziglar wants to see me at the top, and promises to teach me the seven steps to success used by the top 3% of all achievers. Brian Tracy assures me I can become rich beyond my dreams, but first I must know how and so I should order his $60 set of audio cassettes on Getting Rich In America. Tom Hopkins will show me how to sell anything. Roger Dawson will teach me the secrets of power persuasion, if only I will let him; and he reminds me that When you destroy the guy across the table, that's negotiating. When you make him thank you for it, that's POWER!. And in case I run across a Dawsonite, Suzette Haden Elgin, Ph.D. will instruct me in mastering the gentle art of verbal self-defense. A whole bunch of people want to teach me how to communicate and WIN WIN WIN. And nearly everybody wants to make sure I am the optimal you, a no-limit person, a peak performance man and a subliminal winner.

America, you should know, there's a whole huge cult of fire walkers out there.

In the decade of the 80s we came to admire such people, these hyped-up achievers. We called them entrepreneurs. They had their own magazines. Ronald Reagan loved them. When asked once to sum up his vision of America Reagan reflected for a moment (a moment of reflection was all he could tolerate) and told the story of a guy who invented a little tin handle to latch onto the side of a beer car to make it into a temporary stein. The guy became a millionaire overnight, Reagan reported with admiration. Years later, Dick Cavette would ask Bill Moyers what one message he would convey to Reagan if given the chance. Moyers replied he would say to the President, Mr. President, not everyone can invent a beer can handle, and it is the job of government to look after those who can,t. No doubt Reagan would not have agreed. He loved those fire walkers.

My one feeble attempt at the fast-lane life of the entrepreneur came one dismal summer during the collapse of my graduate school career. Desperate for a job, any job, I signed up with the local Budget Rent-A-Car agency. My job, I was told, was to go to the train station and hold up a placard reading Mr. Wilson. I was then to go up to people at random and say, Mr. Wilson? When they said no I would then say, Oh, well I guess Mr. Wilson missed his train. Would you like to rent his car, I can give it to you at a discount because it has already been reserved and so I have to rent it out or we lose money. I was to continue doing this to everyone in the train station until someone bit. After receiving this training in the fine art of entrepreneurship, I went home with instructions to return bright and early the next morning to start my adventure in the world of free enterprise. I couldn't do it. I never reported for work.

And yet here I am, getting mail from Tony Robbins. Where did I go wrong? Don't these people know I am a child of the sixties. Don't they realize my entire generation was brought up to have contempt for all this rat racing and all this tacky materialism. Don't they know that even now, edging into middle age, I am still uncomfortable with the idea of too much material prosperity. I like money just fine, and I like more money better than less money, for sure. But its tacky, de classe to want money too much, to strive too hard for material success. That's what my generation told ourselves and what, in some fundamental way, I am destined always to believe.

Now it is true that I am not a total slug (my wife's frequent assertions to the contrary notwithstanding). I do have my share of residual ambition. Despite my best efforts through much of the sixties and most of the seventies, I must recognize that I am still infected with the curse of striving--not too successfully or energetically or steadily, to be sure, but infected nonetheless. Like so many other things in our adult character, I trace it to early childhood warp and woof. I cant help myself. Like those little goslings following Conrad Lorenz around the Swiss countryside, imprinted at just the ripe moment, and no matter how sophisticated they become in later life, they will forever be unable to see that pudgy, aging Swiss scientist as anything other than Mama Goose. And so it is with all Gods creatures.

I trace my particular imprinting, once again, to early religious instruction. To the rough ambitions and cleansing guilts of Mormonism. To its missionary zeal and certain conviction that it was each Mormons sacred duty to claim every piece of human real estate for God The Father. A job that big is destined to keep one perpetually busy and unsatisfied. Striving, always.

And the rest of the imprinting job fell to my parents I'm sure, who never seem to stop working hard their whole lives. They just assume hard work. My mother worked outside the home (and inside the home) from my earliest memories--decades before such things were acceptable much less fashionable and then, later, obligatory. In large measure because of economic necessity, but also, I have always felt, because that's what one did in life--worked, hard. My mother, in particular, cant stand idleness. She despises laziness in her children and shakes a disapproving head at any signs of its appearance. My father just always worked, on and on, spending less of his time on disapproving head shakes.

As I get older I understand more about my parents all the time (a commonplace, I know, but an important one). I got a big boost yesterday from Russell Baker. Just finished a marathon Sunday-read. Started with the Sunday Baltimore Sun, followed by the Sunday Washington Post, followed by the second volume of Russell Bakers memoirs, The Good Times.

I read Baker's story straight through, till one in the morning. The story of Russell Baker's life is one of incessant, insecure striving. Raised in the Depression under desperate circumstances, his mother drilled into him the insistent demand that he work hard, hard, harder, without surcease, in order to make something of himself. No matter how much he achieved, it was never enough. That's nice, Buddy, she would said, And if you will work at it, you may make something of yourself. The job on the Baltimore Sun wasn't enough; foreign correspondent to London, not enough; the New York Times man at the White House wasn't enough; even his own column in the Times (the mythical Times) couldn't do it. That's nice, Buddy. Now if you work at this new job, you might make something of yourself. Baker was nearly 60 when his mother died at age 87. Yet he was never able to shake the refrain of her ambition for him. As he is laying his mother to rest on a Virginia hillside, Baker ends his book with these words: If there's one thing I cant stand, Russell, its a quitter. Lord, I can hear her still.

Russell Bakers memoirs are, among many other warm and wonderful things, a story of a generation, my parents generation. Although Russell Baker had no such intention, it is also the story of my father especially. I recognized in Baker traits I have so long seen but so little understood in my father. The driven quality by which hard work is simply assumed, like the color of the sky or the need to keep breathing. The hardscrabble scratching to survive as a child during the Depression, and the mark this left on their character, how it makes them at once self-reliant and appreciative of the value of things my generation takes so for granted, but at the same time always afraid to stop moving to stop struggling to stop working at life so damn hard.

My father was also a Depression era kid. My grandparents were country folks during those days, and country folks had it better in one way in that they raised much of their own food, so money to eat was less of an issue. Money for anything else was nearly non-existent, but food could be had. Many of my fathers stories from that time concern how they worked at raising and preparing food. Milking the cow, skimming off the cream, making butter through a slow methodical process. Drying meat and burying it to preserve it in those days before they had a refrigerator. Raising bees to harvest their honey, and the joys of chewing raw bees wax combs. Coaxing a garden up out of the Arizona sand.

My father worked at his last job, a Greenskeeper and then Manager of a local nine-hole municipal golf course, from before sun-up to after sun-down. In the summer that's 14-hour days. In the winter he just moved the act indoors, the labor stayed the same. For the last few years he raised a magnificent garden out at the golf course--a garden on a golf-course scale. Pickup loads of red, ripe tomatoes came out of that dry Arizona dirt. Wonderfully hot green chilies which turn red when left to hang in the hot sun to dry. Bales of light green leafy lettuce and swiss chard. Watermelons of all odd sizes and shapes, from softball-sized to, well, to watermelon-sized. Cantaloupes and honeydews. Carrots and radishes. Cucumbers and squashes, squashes of all varieties, yellow squash and butternut squash and spaghetti squash and zucchini squash. He raised so much he gave it away in the Pro Shop and trucked weekly loads to the Senior Citizens Center. My father had a gift for this kind of gardening. Not a green thumb. In dirt-dry Arizona, nothing, including thumbs, are green. No, he scratched these crops from the dry ground and made them bloom by sheer effort of will. Working even at this. Working at it as only a Depression era kid could.

Even things about my fathers generation which seem brutish and unhealthy, like excessive drinking, now seem to have a kind of logic to them. It is part of their way of grappling with the world, of expressing a comrades sense of the risks of life and of a stout-hearted response. Never mind that its mostly romance and false heroics and that the reality is palsied and slurred and liver-rotting and brain-dulling. Those are just a clinicians complaints and what are such things over against romance.

My father and Russell Baker both burn with a kind of hard work which looks like ambition but really isn't. It's more a recognition that life if hard and hard work is the only way to meet it. So I don't think either father or Russell Baker are prime candidates for the firewalkers. Getting rich quick, without a lot of hard work, and even getting too rich, are probably alien intuitions for Depression era kids. Life isn't like that. If you work hard for a very long time, then, and maybe not even then, you can make something of yourself. None of this optimal, as rich as your dreams, WIN WIN WIN crap for them. Life is not like that, and they know it. No, I'm afraid its my generation and the ones following who have been conditioned to think everything in life comes instantly just for the desiring. Were the suckers for the late-night shucksters. I guess they didn't get my address by mistake after all.

But that can't be the only alternatives. Surely, the gods do not decree that dirt-scratching perpetual insecurity or the cloying omnigreed of the fire walkers are the only alternatives. Surely, there must be a middle way.

As I freely confess, I am stuck in the sixties; although I have long since made my peace with capitalism. Capitalism has indeed proven to be an engine of great power in the business of generating material prosperity. It works so well, and most planned economies fail so miserably, because capitalism is founded on the insight that most people most of the time are more inclined to work for their self-interest than for the interest of the collective. This is generally a highly reliable principle of human nature. But capitalism has shortcomings and many excesses. In most modern capitalist societies this is recognized and regulation of various sorts is applied to make our free markets free only in a broad-brush sense. This is done in sage recognition of another fundamental principle of life: that ideologies map imperfectly to the terrain of human affairs.

The question really is one of balance, rather than ideological purity. The Soviet Union and most of Eastern Europe are rapidly moving toward capitalism not because capitalism is Gods own rest-state, to which all things economic must repose. It is just that these nations need to move toward capitalism in order to get closer to balance. The incredible pell mell rush of the Eastern Bloc towards capitalism is not an expression of capitalism's huge gravitational attraction so much as an expression of how extremely out of balance these nations have been. For America, the direction of greater balance may well be away from the hyperstriving of the entrepreneurs, toward a greater sense of our collective responsibilities to each other. It sure looks to me like there are more than enough fire walkers in America.

Perhaps a couple of slight nudges in a direction away from the firepit are in order. I don't know about you, but Zig Zigler is not exactly the guy I like to look to for guidance in life. I think Ill try Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha, instead.

The Buddha spent some considerable time under the Bodhi Tree contemplating the question of what he called right livelihood; indeed, it was number five with a bullet on the list of undertakings along the Eightfold Path to enlightenment. How does the enlightened person approach these matters of work and money and the striving for worldly success, according to Buddha? (It is not necessary to send $60 for the audio cassettes.) Basically, Buddha thought that no one should engage in unwholesome work, for any reason. His list was contemporary for his times and included such professions as: butcher; the manufacture and sale of weapons; and the production and sale of intoxicating drink. Not a bad list even still, although I am sure in his far-seeing wisdom he never imagined the frenzied hordes with their great greedy chant of WIN WIN WIN. No, Buddha admonished the Middle Way as the path to wisdom, by which he meant moderation above all; and a healthy dose of service to others thrown in for good measure. Earning While Serving Modestly might be a good summary of his credo.

I don't know about you, but for me, this has a warmer feel, a better ring and shine, than destroying the guy across the table and making him thank me for it.

And finally, there is one other thing which must be said about all this striving for perfection, about becoming the optimal you, that no limit person who is a peak performer and a subliminal winner. A key puffery of all these fire walkers is that they seriously misrepresent the perfectibility of things--especially of people. Humans are almost infinitely malleable, to be sure, but that is not the same thing as infinitely correctable. Most of us most of the time are just bumbling our way through life. No matter how sophisticated and smooth and successful we become, life is messy and approximate and filled with folly. And everyone is in the same boat. Even the smoothest, most successful, most together winners around, are all just bumblers with good PR. In truth, we are all like a bunch of fakirs, doing the Indian Rope Trick for the wide-eyed yokels, only to discover that our entire audience is composed of other fakirs who are tirelessly doing their own version of the rope trick just around the corner.

No doubt Tony Robbins can teach us to walk on fire. And no doubt this will fill us with a sense of POWER. No doubt we might become rich and successful, if we try hard enough and are willing to do what it takes. And no doubt this will fill our bank accounts with money and our egos with pride. And as good Americans, we should believe all this will fill us with happiness and satisfaction. Heat up those hot coals Tony, here I come.