How to win friends and influence people

I remember Thanksgiving with my wonderfully generous hosts in Boston, a Jewish family with two really smart kids. During the meal the eldest (eight years old) was quizzed :

"And what's the capital of K's country, India(no matter that we were from Pakistan) ? One out of one. Good.

"And who was the first Sultan of Delhi?"

Don't look at me kid. But he did, from the corner of his eyes. No answer. He shrugged his shoulders, deflated. But now they were looking at me. I'm buggered.

And so the whole meal passed in this pathetic game of approval and rejection. I felt myself gradually slouching into my chair. I was going to ask the kid to pass the oranges but thought better not, they might ask him when oranges were first introduced into Europe!

I came across these lines from Gaddis:

On the one hand the parent looks for signs of potential failure-this search arises in part from guilt and anxious preoccupation about himself. On the other hand he looks for signs of talent-this must not be wasted.

I couldn't but help think of all those false smiles, the picket-fence perfect lives, the beauty pageants and the strong desire to be a celebrity, to be someone , to be liked. (Roth's portrayal of 'the Swede' is brilliant on this).

The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want.
---Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman.

First best. Kick ass. We gonna show those towel-heads in I-raq..

And there were other factors for using our military skills, minor but significant: these reasons return us to the ongoing malaise of the white American male. He had been taking a daily drubbing over the last thirty years. For better or worse, the women's movement has had its breakthrough successes and the old, easy white male ego has withered in the glare.

Even the consolation of rooting for his team on TV had been skewed. For many, there was now measurably less reward in watching sports than there used to be, a clear and declarable loss. The great white stars of yesteryear were for the most part gone, gone in football, in basketball, in boxing, and half gone in baseball. Black genius now prevailed in all these sports...
---Norman Mailer , New York Review of Books

But what of those who don't make it to first place, all those scroungers on welfare? What of those who do not answer to the 'calling'?

Listen you son of a bitch, life isn't always a goddam football game! You won't always get the girl. Life is rejection and pain and loss.

Step up to the rush for second place. One has to wonder if what Solzhenitsyn saw as the constant desire to have still more things, and a still better life (the American Dream) ..imprints many western faces with worry and even depression doesn't go to the heart of the matter. With so much pressure to be the best, to always have the perfect life, have all the answers to the questions, is it any wonder that in order to keep the quiet desperation at bay life should be lived on the surface only? (Roth, again)....

and the day's mail brings flyers offering courses in Mid-life Crisis, Stress Management, Success Through Assertiveness, Reflexology, Shiatsu, Hypnocybernetics, and The Creative You....mortifying confessions, group therapy, primal screams and "making it"..Maharishi Mahesh Yogi's TM technique for reducing blood pressure and increasing self esteem....books on how to be happy, how to obtain peace of mind, how to win friends and influence people (sold 15 million copies), how to breathe, how to achieve a cheap sentimental humanism at other people's expense, how to become a Chinaman like Lin Yutang and make a lot of money, how to be a Baha'i or breed chickens all sell in the millions.
--Gaddis.

I don't know. Perhaps some think this war on Iraq is another game (play station for the troops, something else for the politicians). The death of other people's children is insignificant: no mournful flutes for them, no playing of Barber's Adagio, just the grim reality of dust returning to dust. There is some talk now of "lowering of expectations", of hoping for the second best. Maybe one day people will start to ask, as in Lord of the Flies, if the beast wasn't within, if there wasn't something terribly flawed, right from the beginning , with the first best.

Somehow I doubt it. Talking of Vietnam, Gerald Ford would say:

It seems a shame that at the last minute of the last quarter we don't make that special effort,..It just makes me sick.

More troops to Iraq anyone?I can see next year's bestseller, having won Muslim hearts and minds : How to Win Friends and Influence People.

~~~~~

Wrote that just before the 'surge'. But the same thing applies to Afghanistan: 'We' cannot, simply cannot, fail or be seen to fail.

At the level of the individual, is this frenzy to 'succeed' leading to fatigue, exhaustion, nervous disorders? As the pointy heads keep on telling us, happiness depends on comparisons (with other people and other times in one's life). Not only does the pursuit, then, warp our sense of our self, but it could ultimately be futile-even according to its own narrow standards.

Look back on your life. What have you achieved? Look at the people around you, the high-flyers (who are easy, too easy, to mock) and those who have settled in to stable patterns of bourgeois mediocrity and quiet plodding success. They've done it, managed to grow up, make their peace with the world, religion, God. No-one your age is still a liberal. Conserve. Build. Forget. Learn to count: 1st best, 2nd best...