Gimme Shelter

A quick look at the mail advises me that once again I have been "snail spammed" by my father. As long as I can remember, the man has held an inexplicable attraction to self-help books. You know, those pieces that lean heavily upon sentences in the declarative and imperative forms: "Take care of your headaches!", "Eat your way to immortality...", etc. Offerings such as Durk Pearson and Sandy Shaw's Life Extension, Dr. Kenneth Cooper's Antioxidant Revolution, and Jack Canfield's Chicken Soup for the Woman's Soul have been thrust upon me for years. I had one of the first copies of Steven Covey's The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People and a more recent knock off, The Nine Habits of Highly Effective Proustians. I know, I know, for all the good it did me.

One of the latest in this endless string of insults is Gavin DeBecker's The Gift of Fear. Tackling this treatise by a self-professed sociopath might emerge as a worthy alternative when weighed against an evening of scrubbing cat whiz out of a closet carpet, but short of that... Worse, my Dad seems determined to apply some of the cockamamie ideas that spew out of these tomes. With nary a trace of irony, he suggested only recently that one of my childhood friends, who on her best day is marginally functional when attending (you guessed it) 3 or more self-help meetings a day and eating grams of Haldol sufficient to stun an elephant, might benefit enormously from megadoses of zinc and biotin. Never mind that she comes from a once large family decimated by substance abuse of every description, manic depression, suicide and Lord-knows-what-else. This is a person whose dominant extracellular cation is lithium instead of sodium and who periodically speed dials us at 3:00 a.m. from California to confide that her budgie has "channeled warnings of a major quake" which will be the final solution. Yes, a bit more trace elements in her and she would be junior league material in days.

And it is not as if Dad's propensity to fire off copies of the latest psychobabble can be stopped with simple silence or a more direct, "no thank you." Anything short of these dogs being returned to sender without explanation or "moved and left no forwarding address" is considered a success on his part. I know this because my sister used to employ them as kindling for her politically incorrect fireplace (she hails from Colorado). Then she discovered, to her horror, that she was subjected to quizzes regarding the contained subject matter and was expected to have at least opened the cover of the book. She solved the problem by ripping her mailbox off the house, reducing the postal deliverer to sliding thin letters under the front door. The rest is held in the main office downtown before it is unceremoniously dumped. In Denver, as in Milwaukee, workers "go postal" with some regularity. Come to think of it, maybe the wackos are reading Dad's rejected texts! Undeterred by returns, Dad simply metastasized to new unsuspecting victims: my daughter was hit with Chicken Soup for the Teenage Soul for Christmas. My husband not-so-carefully, yep, even disdainfully, files these offerings on what he calls the "Dad's Drivel" shelf, mostly to minimize the risk that they might contaminate his first edition Raymond Chandlers, Richard Russos, and Loren Estlemans.

I used to think I was subject to this flurry of exhortations to improve myself because my father believed me to be either hopelessly dim-witted or disinterested in "achieving personal excellence." That may well yet be the case. I confess that I assume a slack-jawed look whenever he (or other similar minded sorts) launches into an enthusiastic rendition of the latest ways he is polishing his "living skills." After some consideration, I have concluded that I have trouble with the idea that one has any capacity to significantly better his lot in life. The inescapable premise behind much of the self-help literature (and I use the term "literature" loosely) is that a person can and should indeed "take control" of things such as his physical and mental wellbeing, his status in the world, etc. Where does the notion that one can control anything important come from? I could argue that the sum of the world's literature over the last thousand or so years (not to mention most major religions) suggests otherwise. Taking this thought a bit further, I realized that if one believes the die largely to be cast, so to speak, then it follows that he would value comforting, commiserating, and amusing his fellow man over waling on him to "take charge." Which philosophical bent probably accounts for my choice of reading material.

Certainly a primary function of fiction is to let us peek at the frailties and foibles of others, laughing at their lunacy and sharing frustrations at their impotencies (usually but not always figurative). How could you not appreciate lines like these from John Dufresne's Love Warps The Mind A Little: "Said on his last job he pissed off a dry waller, who then fired a two inch nail into Hervey's head with a nail gun. 'I thought the #$&@! just punched me; I didn't know about the nail till later when I tried to take off my hat. Doctors told me I was lucky to be alive.' I thought, you should have asked for a second opinion, but I didn't say anything..." Now that is worth staying up a little later to read. Dad, I'm in awe of your optimism, but on the whole, I'd rather be amused.

Elizabeth R. Jacobs, MD
Professor and Chief of Medicine (Pulmonary/Critical Care)
Medical College of Wisconsin

"Reflections" is a collection of essays by the health professionals of the Medical College of Wisconsin.