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CHEWIE EDITION NUMBER 41
February EDITION 2010
A STORY BY CHENEY BREW
a fantastic and perceptive review of a perceptive and fantastic book,
plus the Bible based wisdom of Mark Twain... read and look on
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Coney Island, Brooklyn.
by CHENEY BREW
The train starts emptying out around Smith St, making a clanking, groaning beeline for Stillwell Avenue. The scenery is looking more unfamiliar by the minute, with none of the brownstones or bistros of the Brooklyn I’d just seen. Pushing my subway map into the recesses of my pocket, I try to look as though I ride the F train this far every day. Nonchalant, self-absorbed.
I’d been told there was nothing to see at Coney Island during winter, but that was only true if you wanted to watch cheerful sunburned teenagers ride the Parachute Jump. I’m determined to explore all of Brooklyn’s renegade provinces while I’m here in New York, regardless of season.
Disembarking, I’m struck by merciless cold. The wind off the Atlantic takes no prisoners, despite my many layers of woolly defence against early December chill. The seagulls don’t even flap their wings - they bob as though suspended by invisible wire, supported against the current. The sky is a brilliant blue against the flat, steely expanse of the ocean. Everything is in place and stubbornly, beautifully quiet.
I walk along the pale, sand-swept boardwalk, a happy patron of the deserted carnival lining the beach. The pudgy mascot of Astroland Amusements proffers his giant hamburger to the sky. The Wonder Wheel casts multi-coloured spokes against a backdrop of monolithic apartment blocks. I pretend I’m in a Chekov play as I approach the pier, no one to break my charade except two old men in enormous quilted parkas, fishing lines cast over the railings. Neither notices me and as I pass, I can see why.
A small tent sits on the other side of the pier, flanked by camera equipment and bored-looking assistants. Walking a little further I see, on this motherless harpy of a day, an oiled-up lingerie model cavorting awkwardly in the shallows. I watch as a photographer in a fur-hooded jacket shouts instructions over the wind. The model is given a large fishing net to work with, which seems to complicate things.
It strikes that me this would be completely absurd if we weren’t in New York.
I walk to the boardwalk’s end and down towards Brighton Beach Avenue. Soon enveloped by the chaotic markets and theatres of Little Odessa, I seek out a hot meal. A friendly woman behind the counter at a bustling delicatessen takes pity on my confused peering at the Cyrillic menu and takes it upon herself to educate me. She heaps my plate high with cabbage rolls, pelmeni and shashlyk, explaining each as she goes. Everything is warming, delicious and exactly what I wanted.
Eventually I head towards the subway, satisfied and laden with little bags of delicious coffee candy, the bounty from my expedition. It occurs to me the fashion model could probably use a handful of candy and I think briefly of looping back to the boardwalk and offering her some. Maybe not though - she’d probably think I was weird.
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Smile or Die: How Positive Thinking Fooled America and the World
by Barbara Ehrenreich; 240pp, Granta.
Lucy Ellmann suggests that positive types aren't just misled rather they're intentionally mean. So all you deep thinking misery guts types, you whingers and whiners, refuseniks and so on, you may be looking at life the right way after all. Tell that to your counsellor, your priest, your couch mad psychiatrist. When she penned Nickel and Dimed, about America's working poor, Barbara Ehrenreich took low-paid work herself. For Smile or Die, having cancer was the start of an investigation into the ubiquitous notion that positive thinking is essential to health, wealth and wellbeing. In reality being positive may make illnesses worse, cause nations to seek wars they can't win, waste time and money "improving" lifestyle when the actual impediments to happiness lie far beyond our control.
Americans "distributed motivational books and came to believe it themselves," writes Ehrenreich of a financial worl d where$3 trillion worth of pension funds, retirement accounts, and life savings evaporated into the same ether that had absorbed all our positive thoughts." Optimism convinces you that cancer results from a deficient immune system and can be healed through meditation, or that Lehman Brothers would survive because somebody wanted it to. According to motivator Zig Ziglar, who helps companies such as AT&T bounce all the blame back on to workers, if something goes wrong, it's because you didn't work hard enough or pray effectively.
Positive types aren't just misled, they're mean. "Negative people suck!" claims one American motivational coach, an exemplar of the "empathy deficit" in positive thinking. The pitiless message to the powerless from all these motivational speakers, megachurch preachers, self-help gurus and other assorted selfishness-sellers is that sad sacks get what they deserve.
Promoting the idea that happiness is within your grasp is in the interests of corporations trying to bamboozle an overworked and underpaid workforce. It's also favoured by churches trying to get rich quick off the American dream. Ehrenreich traces the fad from Calvinist self-control through Christian Science to blatant assumptions of the holiness of cash. Informing the uneducated and unmedicated that their plight is all their own fault is followed up by instructions for making anything you desire – from a new TV screen to a trip to Mexico – "materialise" through mind control. The censorship of negative opinion combines perfectly with the American policy of each man for himself in the best of all possible worlds.
This is the philosophy that gave us the smart bomb, the space programme, sub-prime mortgages, plenty of psychopaths and Sarah Palin. Every dumb American idea we've all had to stomach and die for can be attributed to this devotion to fantasy and self-satisfaction. Ehrenreich writes that America is unsurpassed in one area: "the reflexive capacity for dismissing disturbing news". Current American euphemisms for getting fired include "releases of resources", "career-change opportunities" and "growth experience".
Of course the reality is that Americans aren't really happy, they're just trained to look as if they are. It's fake orgasm on a grand scale, and we're almost deafened by the din. Ehrenreich dares to mention the value of "defensive pessimism", that handy trait that suggests you keep your foot near the brake pedal just in case there's a three-year-old round the next corner. We want chefs who worry about the soufflé falling, we want energy planners who consider the worst outcomes of radiation poisoning and plutonium thefts, we want pushchair manufacturers to be wary of crushing babies' fingers. We need a grown-up disdain for complacency, compliance and conformity, and a critical forum in which you are not reviled for having nothing to advertise but your discontent.
Think about all the people over the years who've told you to embrace change, or think positive, or smile-love-it-may-never-happen. Were they right? I doubt it. I bet "it" did happen, and I bet you didn't like it.
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Mark Twain, describing the Christian Bible in Letters from the Earth, 1909:
“Also it has another name – The Word of God. For the Christian thinks every word of it was dictated by God. It is full of interest. It has noble poetry in it; and some clever fables; and some blood-drenched history; and some good morals; and a wealth of obscenity; and upwards of a thousand lies… But you notice that when the Lord God of Heaven and Earth, adored Father of Man, goes to war, there is no limit. He is totally without mercy — he, who is called the Fountain of Mercy. He slays, slays, slays! All the men, all the beasts, all the boys, all the babies; also all the women and all the girls, except those that have not been deflowered. He makes no distinction between innocent and guilty… What the insane Father required was blood and misery; he was indifferent as to who furnished it.” |
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YES, HE'S STILL WITH US SO...
MEET MAX. MAX IS JUST A GREAT LITTLE
DOG YOU MEET AT WENDY'S PLACE.
WOT'S WENDY'S PLACE? CHECK IT OUT ON
CHEWIE 9 (that's the 9th page, okay?) |
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