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  For all his preachments about possibility, Jennings’s track record with his own children—there are more of them than gunshot wounds, fourteen in all—has, he admits, been spotty. One son is now in jail for murder. “He was out in Napa, and this guy, a priest, picked him up and tried to molest him. And my son killed him,” Jennings says simply and without much evident emotion. But that sad experience has only sweetened his feelings about the success enjoyed by his other kids. “The most awesome thing was taking another son to college,” he says, describing it as the most rewarding moment in his life to date. “Because on one hand I raised a child and taught him everything I’d learned, and it wasn’t enough. But when we drove up and got my other son enrolled and went to his dorm room . . . I mean, he’s eighteen, he’s captain of the rugby team. He’s doing great for himself. See, he broke the cycle. The kids who come out of hell, they have to break the cycle. They have to break the curse.”

  JUST ANOTHER CON?

  It’s not easy to know how to think about a Joseph Jennings. He raises interesting, provocative questions. But such questions are seldom addressed with intellectual rigor, because—as is so often true of “inspirational” messages—no attempt is made to gauge the long-term effects of his programs. People unthinkingly endorse Jennings and his stated agenda without examining in any meaningful, empirical sense whether he stands to do any good—or harm. It’s just assumed that because Jennings seems like a good guy and is striving to do good, good is what will come of it.

  But as with Sportsthink, it’s worthwhile to ask about the takeaway. What’s the message that sticks here? Is it really about redemption and honor at long last? Or, from the kids’ perspective, is it more along the lines of how fucking cool it must have been to live the underground lifestyle Jennings describes? For every football player who backs away from suicide, how many other kids get off on the idea of the pricey cars and prominent scars and just the sheer machismo of it all?

  Which is why parents might have some questions about a school’s choice of motivators. School districts often plan these events without specifically informing parents of the nature of the presentation; they simply send home a note stating that they’re having a guest motivational speaker, and they may or may not ask parents to sign off on the child’s attendance. Would parents really choose a guy like Jennings to deliver inspiration to their kids? If a school can afford just one or two speakers a year, why pick Jennings? Why not opt instead for an unblemished role model who can offer the life lessons and the positive message without the dope and the body count? Even someone like Tommy Lasorda (or perhaps someone younger whom kids wouldn’t instantly dismiss as a fossil) might be more to a parent’s liking.

  And what of the speakers themselves—are they really sincere? A few years ago, Terry Lanni, the MGM Grand chairman and then–Nevada gaming commissioner, was asked for his take on felon-turned-seminar-speaker Bill Jahoda. Like Michael Franzese, Jahoda had run a large mob gambling operation, but now he was crisscrossing the nation preaching the evils of gambling. Lanni didn’t mince words. “I don’t find much credibility in a person who operated as he has indicated he operated in an illegal fashion preying on people,” he told the Las Vegas Sun. “Now he’s suddenly determined that he’s found religion, and as a result of that, he’s a more accepted human being. I find that to be reasonably despicable.”

  I’ve interviewed a number of the key players in the contrepreneur movement, and it’s true that in unguarded moments they’ll say things that hint at the very inner stirrings they take such pains to deny when onstage. Listen closely and you might hear a wistful longing for the bad old days—maybe in a felicitously timed sigh, or the quick note of unalloyed glee that creeps into an account of some memorable caper. They may ride with the hounds now, but you wonder if their hearts are with the foxes after all.

  When I asked Jennings if he ever daydreams about his long-ago rogue lifestyle, he was forthright. “Well sure, brother!” he said, laughing in such a boisterous way that even over the phone, I could almost see his eyes flash. “I ain’t smoked weed in eighteen years, but you can’t tell me I didn’t have fun doin’ it!”

  It’s there, too, in Kevin Mitnick, a former hacker who has gone from being the world’s most infamous computer criminal to a high-paid corporate consultant; he calls his venture Defensive Thinking (and he suffered the ignominy of being hacked several times in his first few months of operation). When I interviewed Mitnick, he offered preening remarks about the advantages he offers corporate America over “the people who came up through the system and studied [computer] penetration through labs and textbooks, instead of out in the real world.” That one swipe left no doubt that Mitnick still prides himself on what he was able to accomplish before he traded his black hat for a white one. This same sentiment was on display at a recent Def Con, the hacker convention that is held each year in Las Vegas. The whole tenor of the event has changed through the years. Once an underworld-chic gathering whose highly caffeinated attendees met in smallish groups to share their latest antiestablishment exploits, Def Con has evolved substantially into a mainstream forum on network security—if not an actual job fair for Fortune 500 companies. In one recent year, some members of the community showed up wearing T-shirts that bore the simple, heartfelt lament “I miss crime.”

  In fairness to the felons, most do accept responsibility for their former lives. Ron Cohen told me, “I’ve never shirked the fact that I’ve made some very, very bad mistakes, and that yes, I’m guilty. But what do they want me to do about it now?” Joseph Jennings points out that he’s a living, breathing example of the fact that healing is possible. “When the lecture comes from somebody who’s always been in a position of authority, often it falls on deaf ears,” he says. “I’m not proud of what I did, but it gives me a credibility with the kids who most need to hear my message. I was where they are now.”

  Fairness also compels us to mention the one very specialized market segment whose need for help is most acute and whom ex-cons may be uniquely qualified to serve: America’s sizable population of other ex-cons, now estimated at thirty million and growing by six hundred thousand each year.2 This is where Ned Rollo comes in. Rollo, now in his early sixties, pleaded guilty at age twenty-three to manslaughter and was sentenced to seven years’ hard labor at Louisiana’s infamous Angola State Prison. Upon his release he was shocked at the degree to which society shunned him and appalled at the paucity of options available to people who had done time. He began working as an advocate for ex-cons, at first slowly and locally, on a shoestring. There were setbacks: People and institutions fought him, and he struggled with his own demons. Eventually, however, he founded OPEN (Offender Preparation and Employment Network). Through OPEN, Rollo seeks to show other former felons that the glass really is half full; he is, as the Dallas Observer put it, “a kind of Tony Robbins for the penitentiary set.” Toward that end, he wrote 99 Days and a Get Up: A Pre- and Post-Release Survival Manual for Inmates and Their Loved Ones (rereleased in 2002 with an amended subtitle: A Guide to Success Following Release for Inmates and Their Loved Ones), which is fast becoming required reading at federal lockups across America. The Texas prison system alone ordered forty thousand copies. He has also appeared on Good Morning America, Donahue, and—need I say it?—The Oprah Winfrey Show. Today, Ned Rollo is recognized as one of the nation’s top authorities on reintegrating convicts into society, even by those with formal credentials in penology.

  So take heart, Martha Stewart. There is life after house arrest.

  PART TWO

  THE CONSEQUENCES

  8

  YOU ARE ALL DISEASED

  Sometimes we feel guilty because we are guilty.

  —Promotional line for Late-Night Catechism, the “one-nun” comedy show

  To many people, SHAM gurus like Phil McGraw, Tony Robbins, and John Gray have become the face of the self-help movement (in part because they like to plaster their faces on books, videos, and in some cases coffee mugs and nutri
tion bars). But another segment of the movement has earned many millions of loyal followers even though it lacks celebrity leaders and endorsers. It, too, has a face: the face of anguish, ineptitude, and self-pity.

  As we have seen, the Recovery movement experienced its own boom along with the SHAM explosion of the late 1960s. It was a period during which the so-called disease model took hold and reigned supreme. The 1935 debut and subsequent success (at least in its membership rolls) of Alcoholics Anonymous led in 1953 to Narcotics Anonymous, in 1965 to Overeaters Anonymous, in 1970 to Gamblers Anonymous, and in 1979 to Cocaine Anonymous. (Some say the last group was spun off from Narcotics Anonymous so that chic Hollywood types wouldn’t have to rub elbows with gritty mainliners in the Nelson Algren tradition.) Today the menu includes Adult Children of Alcoholics, Artists Recovering Through the Twelve Steps Anonymous, Codependents of Sex Addicts Anonymous, Debtors Anonymous, Emotional Health Anonymous, Nicotine Anonymous, Pills Anonymous, Prostitutes Anonymous, Sexaholics Anonymous, Survivors of Incest Anonymous, and Workaholics Anonymous. By no means is that a comprehensive listing. There are even programs for “cleanaholics,” who are too often lumped with genuine sufferers of obsessive-compulsive disorder, a very real and troubling psychiatric disorder that afflicts an estimated four to six million people.

  In fact, despite the ardent rebuttals from the likes of Dr. Phil and Dr. Laura, Recovery has earned perhaps the most mainstream respect of any segment of SHAM. Judges routinely sentence offenders in a variety of cases to programs inspired by AA’s original twelve steps. People naturally conceive their underperforming relatives, friends, and coworkers as unfortunate slaves to miscellaneous dysfunctions. Moreover, those glum views are codified in many personnel-policy manuals, which put companies in the bizarre position of making special allowances for their least productive workers.

  But for all its acceptance in so many settings, the Recovery movement suffers from the same problems that plague the rest of SHAM: It hasn’t been shown to provide much help to those whose needs it supposedly addresses. And it could actually be doing them—and society as a whole—real harm.

  One of the most damaging aspects of the Recovery movement is its insistence that most if not all of us are “diseased,” which brings us to the title of this chapter. Since Recovery is so much about confessions, I’ll offer one of my own: I stole the title from comedian and social satirist George Carlin, who used it for a scathingly irreverent HBO special. Carlin himself might have stolen it from the lexicon of Victimization, which, if it’s about anything at all, is about being wounded, psychically damaged in such a profound, personality-shaping way that only through years of grueling therapy can you learn to cope (but never overcome, since in the land of Recovery, addictions and dysfunctions, like diamonds, are forever). You’d think a plague so horrid and haunting would befall just a small number of us, but such is not the case, we are told. With so many different programs for so many different dysfunctions, Recovery casts such a wide net that almost no one fails to get caught in it.

  Ergo: You are all diseased.

  But there is a larger point here: If you are all diseased, it really means that we are all diseased—that society itself is diseased. Far from backpedaling in the face of such ludicrous inferences, many gurus have made that very point explicitly. Anne Wilson Schaef put it this way in Co-Dependence: Misunderstood—Mistreated: “When we talk about the addictive process, we are talking about civilization as we know it.” For anyone who still didn’t get it, Schaef later titled a book When Society Becomes an Addict. A key chapter of Robert Burney’s book Codependence: The Dance of Wounded Souls bears the title “Normal Families Are Codependent.” He’s not being ironic. In Recovery: A Guide for Adult Children of Alcoholics, Herbert Gravitz and Julie Bowden described the addiction phenomenon as the “visible tip of a much larger social iceberg” that, the authors speculated, afflicts “as much as 96 percent of the population.”

  If true, this would mean that in a nation of some 295 million people, a mere 11.8 million of us (or roughly the population of Pennsylvania) are emotionally whole.

  Does it sound cynical to note that the more classes of people one can paint as dysfunctional, the broader the market for the antidysfunction product or “belief system” one is selling?

  Schaef, Burney, et al. may be right about our dysfunctional society—but one can plausibly argue that they’ve got the cause and effect backward. Given Recovery’s viselike grip on the self-help community for much of the past forty years, no one should be surprised that we have a society that thinks of itself as diseased, a society that suffers from maladies that did not exist in any measurable sense before SHAM itself got involved.

  RECOVERY’S LONG SHADOW

  Though in recent years the rise of SHAM’s Empowerment wing has dulled some of Recovery’s luster, the movement’s effects continue to be strongly felt. We see its shadow most prominently in the culture of blame that has been sold to an audience eager to excuse its own failings; the legacy of that philosophical bottom-feeding surely will be with us for decades to come. We see it in the justice system, in educational policy, in child-rearing protocols, in marriage counseling—in too many meaningful areas of modern life to cover in just one book. It turns up in the melancholic language of political demagoguery, and even in mainstream campaign rhetoric. The most compelling political slogans of recent vintage—“Are you better off today than you were four years ago?”—would not have flown as well in the 1950s, when Americans had not yet been trained to consider their own plight in terms of federal beneficence. “Once upon a time, if you weren’t ‘better off,’ you wouldn’t have looked to Washington for an answer,” the late historian Stephen Ambrose told me when I was publisher of the American Legion magazine and he was one of our marquee writers. “It wouldn’t have occurred to you to think of your station in life in the context of government policy. For better or worse, it was your life, and you owned it.”

  Times change. Many of us now renounce ownership of our lives. And so if we’ve had trouble getting married or staying married, or getting along with people, or staying employed; if we smoke or drink or shoot up; if we beat our kids or wives or girlfriends, or have both a wife and a girlfriend; if we drive too fast, shop too much, defer too often to those around us; if, despite all that fast driving, we can’t get to work or other appointments on time, then—we’ve been conditioned to think—it’s because we have something inside of us over which we have no control, or because someone else did something to us from which we and our inner children never quite recovered. Our neighbors have been encouraged to accept us in our state of weakness or dissolution, just as we have been encouraged to accept them.

  You say you don’t remember anything terrible being done to you as a child? You’re in denial. You’re repressing, which is framed as a dysfunction in its own right, so you’re damned if you do, damned if you don’t. The late 1980s and 1990s witnessed the astonishing rise of “repressed memory syndrome,” wherein great hordes of reasonably well-functioning adults who had never before recalled a single moment of childhood trauma suddenly began recalling, en masse and in great detail, lengthy patterns of childhood abuse. Dozens of women and some men prosecuted or sued their aging fathers, uncles, brothers, babysitters, teachers, or other authority figures from their pasts. In some cases the targets of this retroactive scrutiny admitted a degree of guilt. In other cases, however, the memory itself proved spurious—either implanted or otherwise induced in the course of therapy, or “autosuggested” by intense media coverage of the trend.1 Even when such allegations prove false, lives can be ruined. For example, in the mid-1980s, shocking accusations of sexual abuse at the McMartin Preschool in Manhattan Beach, California, became front-page news, creating paranoia among parents and spawning other sex-abuse investigations. Four years of investigation, followed by two trials spanning three more years, failed to produce a guilty verdict against a single defendant.

  The McMartin ripple effect was all too real. Americans b
egan seeing the phantoms of child abuse behind every curtain. By the mid-1990s, Boy Scout leaders, youth-sports coaches, and high-school band teachers were being accused in such numbers that in 1997 the prominent Canadian newsweekly MacLean’s ran a cover story with the subhead “Youth leaders warn that an atmosphere of suspicion makes it difficult for them to function.” People were turning in their neighbors. Doctors were turning in their patients. Even film developers were turning in their best customers: In 1989, David Urban snapped candid photos of his wife and fifteen-month-old grandson as she gave him a bath. The photo lab at Kmart reported him, and a Missouri court later convicted him of child pornography, though the case was overturned on appeal. Similar ordeals befell Cynthia Stewart of Ohio, who, like Urban, took bathtime photos of her eight-year-old daughter, and William Kelly of Maryland, who dropped off film including nude photos that his daughter and her playmates took of one another. Elements of several of these stories were weaved into the plot of the 2001 TV movie Snap Decision.

  It’s easy to scream abuse when the term is defined so vaguely and generically as to include just about anything. It’s easier still when the culture tells you that you would have turned out just fine had your parents not destroyed your “essential self” by trying to mold you into a tractable, well-mannered citizen. Here, as in so many areas of SHAM, we encounter a fragile pyramid consisting of a baseless supposition posited as fact, then used as the foundation for further suppositions: the seductive folklore of the “pure-hearted child” that permeates so much of Victimization’s jargon. Judith Martin—best known as “Miss Manners,” but also a former Washington Post correspondent, a novelist, and a social critic—may have put it best in a speech at Harvard University in 1984: “The belief that natural behavior is beautiful and that civilization and its manners spoil the essential goodness inherent in all us noble savages is, of course, the Jean-Jacques Rousseau school of etiquette. . . . [It] survives in the pop-psychology and ‘human potential’ movements of today, and in the child-rearing philosophy that has given us so many little—savages. . . . The idea that people can behave ‘naturally,’ without resorting to an artificial code tacitly agreed upon by their own society, is as silly as the idea that they can communicate by a spoken language without commonly accepted semantic and grammatical principles.”