S H A M b l o g

Rhonda Byrne may have been a tad late getting to her own party, but the positive-review-athon for The Pow-errrrr appears finally to have kicked in with a vengeance (no doubt with Amazon looking studiously the other way, if not actively participating in the conspiracy). All three of what we used to call "spotli ght reviews" for the book are now glowing 5-stars, as are all 10 of the most recent reviews featured in the sidebar. My negative review has been kicked down the stairs to the cellar...along with a thoughtful and quite-literary take from Kathryn Price that once held sway among the spotlights with a helpful rating of over 70 pe rcent but can no longer compete with the recent slew of 100-percent-helpful 5-stars. ================================= Speaking of unwarranted hype, last week I finally saw Michael Moore's highly engrossing logical quagmire, Bowling for Columbine . As far as I can tell, here is Moore's thesis: The words racism and violence have almos...

Let's start, boys and girls, with a disclaimer/confession: I have not read Rhonda Byrne 's new book, The Pow-errrrr . (And can't you imagine the phrase being uttered just that way, in breathy tones that drip with a practiced air of mysterioso? The Pow-errrrr ... One almost hears distant nighttime thunder and gusty winds rustling through trees in the background. Whooooossshhhhh ....) That said, I ask you to read her publisher's own product description, as appearing on Amazon, and experience for yourself the utter contempt for the collective intelligence of her target market: The Secret revealed the law of attraction. Now Rhonda Byrne reveals the greatest power in the universe— The Power to have anything you want. In this book you will come to understand that all it takes is just one thing to change your relationships, money, health, happiness, career, and your entire life. Every discovery, invention, and human creation comes from The Power . Perfect health, incredible ...

What a lot of people miss about the New Age is that in philosophy and tone, it is very much aligned with latter-day conservatism and the sorts of things we saw happening, say, at AIG and Goldman-Sachs before the f all. The Secret , after all, is nothing if not wildly, irredeemably, unapologetically aspirational. Along with its philosophical sibling movements in the megachurches — such as that run by our friend Joel ("the gospel according to Vera Wang") Osteen — The Secret legitimizes the idea of endless upward mobility and a reality in which wealth is not zero-sum, but in fac t can be attained by everyone everywhere at the same time if "you just want it enough." Secret alum Lisa Nichols says it flat-out in the very title of her CD: " You Deserve It !" In the world according to Rhonda Byrne and her (pseudo-)philosophical protégés, every man (and woman) is an island, and all of those islands are the Caymans . Both The Secret and cons ervatism encourage a...

Today, boys and girls, we have one of my occasional guest columns, this time by a regular who pops in now and then under the name "Frances." A few prerequisites. First — as is always the case when I present these columns — they are not to be interpreted as anything beyond "one person's opinion." * I am showcasing the following thoughts not under the guise of presenting universal truth (though I do think they cut pretty close to the heart of the mat ter , or perhaps in this case the breast of it); I'm showcasing them because I find them interesting and on-message. Second, by the ir nature, all posts of this type deal in anecdotal evidence. Frances is comparing the plight of one high-profile cancer victim who turned to conventional medicine to the plight of another high-profile cancer victim who turned to The Secret . Bear in mind, however, that in the latter instance, anecdotal evidence of failure carries more weight than in the former instance, because devo...

In our last episode , we met Byron Katie and were introduced to her Four Questions, which supposedly will take you to a new level of peace, happiness and fulfillment. And, in fairness, you'll have no trouble finding legions of online fans. But...you'll also find legions of people who swear by oxycontin , at least in terms of the narcotic's propensity for making life seem rosier and less anxious (till you run out of the drug). Which raises, in my mind, a Fifth Question: Is what Katie espouses really a valid metaphysical system? Or is it just the New Agey equivalent of oxy...a convenient, seductive-sounding way of rationalizing all the bad stuff (and generating enormous revenues for Katie, or so we're led to believe)? Once again, we'll let Katie set the tone in her own words. This is from her site: "The Work of Byron Katie is a way of identifying and questioning the thoughts that cause all the anger, fear, depression, addiction, and violence in the wor...

UPDATE, Tuesday, Aug. 24. Now that my take (scroll down) on Rhonda Byrne's The Pow-errrrr has indeed made it to "spotlight" status, there is apparently a massive counterattack underway from the other side. In just the past few hours, my review has accumulated at least 10 "not helpful" votes. Wonder how long I'll be able to "hang".... And let me add that this isn't some sly effort on my part to "sell a few more copies of SHAM ," as some have alleged. My being dour about The Pow-errrrr , as it were, is not going to sell many (if any) copies of my book...as evidenced by the fact that at this writing, SHAM lolls at No. 529,411, down markedly in the past few days despite my sudden visibility on Rhonda's high-traffic page. I feel safe in proposing that there's virtually zero overlap between her target market and my own. =========================== UPDATE, Monda y, Aug. 23. I've never done this, folks, and I really don't b...

This morning I was emptying the dishwasher, and I started, as I always do, with the dinner plates. That is my ritual: dinner plates, smaller plates, cereal bowls, silverware (I hate that facet of the job for some reason; I'd love to subcontract out the silverware component, certainly the part where you're putting all the like items in their respective places in that plastic tray), miscellaneous geega ws (strainers, salad mixers and such), and then I finish up with glasses. When I reached the glasses today I realized I'd missed a dinner plate. It was standing right there in the front of the bin and I hadn't noticed it. If you'd asked me up to that moment whether there could be a dinner plate left in that dishwasher, I would've sworn that there wasn't; couldn't be. Yet there it was, in all its dinner-platey glory. This is a surprisingly common foible in the close personal relationship between me and my dishwasher: I'll think I've put away one enti...

A regular reader, Case, gently chastises me as follows: "Since The Secret crowd was on Oprah last week, I've been waiting for a SHAM post on the topic." He also observes, "Isn't The Secret the anti-determinism?", and, helpfully, "FYI, the movie is now free on the web at [ this site ] that aggregates YouTube videos." Case...you got me dead to rights. The last few weeks have been crazed, so rather than watch Oprah's Secret -fest live (which I'm not sure I could've stomached anyway; I'd need several stiff drinks, and I can't start that early in the day), I TiVo'd it for later replay. Alas, the gods of technology decided to have a little fun with me: It didn't "take," for whatever reason. Maybe the Secretmeisters, in their state of profound cosmic contempt for me and my ilk, managed to dispatch some sort of curse into the ethers, and it later came to rest in my video equipment. Or maybe it's a "law of ...