In the 20 years I’ve been in LA, there have been about 20 self-help fads. To my knowledge, not one yet has embraced the handbook of the stoics, which involves actual self-discipline, which is hard. Rather, they are based upon fuzzy feel-good philosophy ungrounded in logic, science, or rigorous thinking. (Which always brings to mind Mr. David Bowie’s retort, from “Fashion”: “I’m okay, you’re so-so.”)

The most recent of these fads is The Secret. This book, with accompanying cult, purports that all human success is linked by one phenomenon — which turns out to be the Power of Positive Thinking. Why anyone would think this “secret” eludes me; hasn’t this been practically canonical for 75 years?

I could go on about the cult of The Secret, which is claiming friends and colleagues left and right, but I think media theorist Douglas Rushkoff has already done an excellent job. Below is a posting he sent via his newsgroup. (And thank you, Doug, for saving me the time in writing something similar.)

Before I get to that, let me float one more idea: That we should never discount the Power of Negative Thinking. By that I mean good old skepticism, the sort that keeps most of us from buying swampland in Florida or bridges owned by the government. Positive Thinking has its obvious benefits, but it’s skepticism that keeps us alive and well and not falling for the lure of snake charmers.

New Pseudoscience Patina, Same Snake Oil
The Secret’s self-help message is just common knowledge.
by Douglas Rushkoff

As the saying goes, opposites attract, as when an electron races to a positively charged ion, or the north pole of a magnet pulls the south pole of another. But try telling that to proponents of The Secret, the latest in a long line of spiritual systems aimed at selling
personal prosperity through faulty scientific reasoning.

In case you’ve missed it on Oprah or Larry King Live, The Secret is a self-help DVD and companion book synthesizing the pitches of a few dozen of today’s most prominent self-help gurus. Its creator, an Australian named Rhonda Byrne, claims there’s a single truth
underlying all these systems. It’s more ancient than the Bible and has been intentionally hidden from human beings for just as long. The great secret? Positive thinking. Abundance is a state of mind: Think healthy, and you’ll be healthy. Or more to the point, think rich, and you’ll get rich. Most of the spiritual teachers in The Secret are wealth-seminar leaders who display the book’s logo on their Web sites. The Secret has certainly worked wonders for its marketers: More than 1.5 million DVDs have been sold, and the book hit number one on The New York Times best-seller list of hardcover advice books.

While positive thinking no doubt has its benefits—from the placebo effect to good old self-confidence—The Secret tries to justify itself
not only in the language of pop psychology but in that of modern physics. According to the book, happy thoughts will do more than
affect behavior. It claims the interrelatedness of matter and energy (a principle proven by Einstein) allows people to change reality to
their liking by changing the way they think about it. (Thought is presumably energy in this schema, and reality is matter.) For most,
however, this potential for cosmic transmutation is limited to attracting more money into their personal bank accounts.

To be sure, it’s entertaining to marvel at Masaru Emoto, a Japanese alternative healer who claims that crystals grow more symmetrically inside bottles labeled with positive messages than in those with negative messages attached. But such “results” can be explained by the observer’s tendency to notice the crystals he is looking for rather than the ones that don’t fit his expectations. That’s why people basing psychiatric therapies on pseudoscientific research will get mixed results at best. Stick a Post-it note with a positive
message on a schizophrenic’s forehead and see how far you get changing the water molecules in his brain into happy ones.

Meanwhile, a growing arsenal of healing machines based loosely on tenuous nonlocality theories from the fringes of quantum physics have become an increasingly popular alternative to the discomfort of scientifically verifiable chemotherapy. With names like SCIO and
Rife, these machines don’t even need to be in the same room or city as the patient they’re treating—since, as their proponents reason, quantum mechanics doesn’t recognize physical distance. Sure, if this “energetic medicine” makes a person feel better or more optimistic— and doesn’t delay or replace therapies that might actually work— there’s no harm except to the wallet.

So why bother condemning all this wishful thinking? After all, who of us hasn’t ever experienced a bit of The Secret’s real power? Wearing an expensive suit to an interview or flying first class, as one of The Secret’s featured instructors suggests on his Web site, can make you feel and act differently. Sometimes spending more money does seem to bring more money in, and speaking positively often leads to better results than whining about how tough life is.

But such techniques are hardly new, let alone secret. Like mastering the will through self-hypnosis or better negotiating through body
language, the “power of positive thinking” has nearly a century-old track record among car dealers, admen, and others for whom attitude means as much as, if not more than, attributes. It’s from this universe of phantom values and socially constructed truths that The Secret derives its ultimate power. Try sharing The Secret with some refugees from Darfur; you’ll probably find the results are not
terribly impressive.

No, The Secret is best applied in the same foggy arenas from which it emerged. It’s great for self-help gurus, spiritual evangelists,
salespeople, and multilevel marketers because it’s based in the same kinds of mythology on which they’ve always relied: There’s a timeless principle, a preexisting law of nature only now becoming understood by science but completely easy for you to use to make your life better.

Just pay me, and I’ll share it with you.

On October 13th, I’m emceeing the BLLOTY Awards, which honors syndicated radio host Stephanie Miller and her team. BLOTTY stands for Best Liberal Laugh of The Year award.

Details are here.

You’ll note that also speaking is Democratic candidate for Congress Elliot S! Maggin — the former writer of Superman comics. He’s eager to explain how Republicans — and his district’s congressman in particular — are subverting Truth, Justice, and the American Way.

Please join us. We need more comic-book people in Congress.

Today I hiked a large section of Griffith Park behind the observatory with my kids, aged 16, 9, and 5, and the family dog. It’s about a 3-hour hike and, at times, pretty steep. Lex, the 16-year-old, insisted on wearing his new weight vest, which adds 45 lbs to your torso. (Something that Newcastle beer and Slim Jims would also do, but more enjoyably.) He is seriously into weight lifting and said his new fitness goal was to run the seven-minute mile.

“That’s nothing,” I said. “Batman ran the mile in two minutes. So did Robin.”

“He’s fictional!” Lex said, his face running with sweat. We were now over two hours into the hike.

Although I couldn’t remember the precise episode, I remember Batman turning to Robin and telling him they’d have to do that mile in two minutes or some bomb would go off. Commissioner Gordon looked concerned and Chief O’Hara was plainly aghast because Batman and Robin had just come back from running a three-minute mile in the same episode.

“Don’t tell me,” I told Lex. “I saw it. And he was about 40 years old with a paunch. And he had that heavy cape and cowl.”

These kids just don’t believe how much tougher the previous generations were. It’s up to us to keep reminding them.

After the hike, on which I also wore the vest for half an hour just to give the kid a break, I came home and bathed the dog. Then I fell asleep for an hour on the couch.

Two years in a row now I’ve attended the Western Food Expo for business reasons.

Now, as a father of three sometimes called upon to break up warring factions at the dinner table, I think I might be better served by attending this food conference — where vendors pitch their food products to prisons. (And where it’s important to keep the stick out of the corn dog.)

At some point, every endeavor done to its utmost becomes elevated to the level of an art. I will never forget when my father came to visit almost 20 years ago and led me on a walk around my own neighborhood, pointing out craftsmanship and achievement I had never noticed, especially, most mundanely but most powerfully, the cement pourings that made up the sidewalk. Every corner was stamped with the name of the firm, “J. W. Mougham.” As a general contractor and builder for many years, my father was able to note how straight and true the stress lines were, which would allow the cement, under stress from roots and shifting soil underneath, to fracture along those lines rather than breaking elsewhere. “This man knew what he was doing,” Dad said. I have never looked at sidewalks the same way since.

Which brings me to the subject of this video, which will leave me thinking somewhat differently about one of the games we used to play around the campfire. Clearly, there’s an art to this as well. To me, this display of shadow hand puppetry is astonishing.

Because according to a new book, it is an evolutionary warning that you are about to get eaten alive.

My new one-act play, “Next Time,” opened Saturday night at Hunger Artists Theatre in Fullerton. Here’s a trailer for the “Beyond Convention” festival it’s part of. (And no, my particular play is not one that involves making a sandwich, or digging a grave, or leaping through the air with sheets.)

Always choose your URL wisely.

(Thanks to Kimberly Glann for sending this in.)

All of these are legitimate companies that didn’t spend quite enough time considering how their online names might appear … and be misread. These are not made up. Check them out yourself!

1. “Who Represents” is where you can find the name of the agent that represents any celebrity. Their Web site is www.whorepresents.com

2 . Experts Exchange is a knowledge base where programmers can exchange advice and views at www.expertsexchange.com

3. Looking for a pen? Look no further than Pen Island at www.penisland.net

4. Need a therapist? Try Therapist Finder at www.therapistfinder.com

5. There’s the Italian Power Generator company, www.powergenitalia.com

6. And don’t forget the Mole Station Native Nursery in New South Wales , http://www.molestationnursery.com/

7. If you’re looking for IP computer software, there’s always http://www.ipanywhere.com/

8. The First Cumming Methodist Church Web site is www.cummingfirst.com

9. And the designers at Speed of Art await you at their wacky Web site, http://www.speedofart.com

That’s right, the Bush administration is onto the threat from zombies.

(Thanks to newsfromme.com, where I first saw this.)

For a truly terrifying indicator of the threat we’re facing, make sure you watch to the end.

Over on Slate, they’re serializing the new graphic novel about Ronald Reagan’s life. I don’t know whether or not the printed version is in color, but the online edition is black and white — which seems perfect, because the entire enterprise seems close to a whitewash. Not since George Washington and the cherry tree have we seen such hagiography in service to a dead president. Not only that, the caricatures are bad.

Want to judge for yourself? Click here.

For me the identify of the writer is perhaps the most distressing aspect of this. I expect to disagree with some people about Ronald Reagan and his legacy (which I sum up as turning a blind eye to AIDS, plunging us into debt, manipulating the (non)release of hostages to help secure his election, starting an illegal and undeclared war south of our border, dealing arms to Iran, and launching the government investigation into our bedrooms and bookshelves). But I didn’t expect it to be Andy Helfer. In the late 1980’s, Helfer was the writer of a relaunched comic about the Shadow that brilliantly brought an absurdist filter to the subject. From wikipedia:

In the late 1980s, another DC reincarnation was created by Howard Chaykin, Andy Helfer, Bill Sienkiewicz, and Kyle Baker, in a miniseries and sequel ongoing series. This version brought The Shadow to modern day New York. While initially successful, this version was not popular with “Shadow” traditionalists, because it depicted The Shadow using Uzi submachineguns and rocket launchers, as well as featuring a strong strain of black comedy throughout. It was canceled after an issue in which the Shadow’s head was transplanted onto a robot body.

While I have endlessly recycled thousands of comics over the years (thank you, eBay), I have held onto those. They are wonderful reading. Now it’ll be harder to enjoy them, knowing that 20 years later the writer is plumping for the guy who put all the mental patients out on the street while enriching his friends through an illegal war.