the
CRIMES AND
PUNISHMENTS
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THE RELATIONSHIPS CONUNDRUM
by
DONALD DEWEY
_________________________
Donald
Dewey has written some 40 books of fiction and nonfiction, as
well as contributed scores of stories to magazines and other periodicals.
He has also had some 30 plays staged in Europe and the United
States. Dewey was editor of the ASME-award winning magazine Attenzione
and was editorial director of the East-West Network, overseeing
a dozen in-flight magazines and the PBS organ Dial. Don's
latest book, Franchisement:
The Alan Gibb Story, is now available.
In the evolution
of the human species personal relationships have never been so
mottled with insecurity and fraught with peril as they have been
at the dawning of the millennium. Rare is the day the average
gendered individual does not feel his self lapsing into angst
or her spirit being enveloped by ennui upon exposure to somebody
else. Miscommunication, inadequacy, conflicting tastes in cereals,
and entirely different thoughts on the part of two or more people
thrown together -- all these phenomena identify social chasms
hourly. Other people remain other people; they are not Us.
At the
same time, the Us remains invisible in our mirrors. What we see,
at best, is a single form requiring technical assistance in more
areas than we care to count. And though we might resist being
defined by what we see, we see nothing else. Yearning for a higher
purpose in our lives founders on everything from the squatting
of negative cynicism to the eviction of positive imagination.
When we tell ourselves to forget about a higher purpose, to be
satisfied with the self-fulfillment due solely to Numero Uno,
we worry we won’t be able to count that high. Our 12-step
programs to physical and moral recovery have shaky banisters,
our 10 commandments seem like any other Top Ten list, and we keep
forgetting what the score is. Together with the problem that other
people remain other people, we suffer from the doubt that we may
or may not even remain us.
What
has lent special drama to our plight, of course, is the backdrop
of the new millennium. To find a comparably arduous testing of
personal relationships we would have to invoke the previous millennial
dew, at the beginning of the 11th century, in the bowels of what
we smugly refer to as the Dark Ages. In that period the quest
for emotional commitment (as well as for bread) was constantly
undermined by non-supportive world events; e.g., the assassination
of Kenneth III in Scotland, the poisoning of Bloody Otto of the
Holy Roman Empire, the ascent of the Seljukian Turks in Asia Minor
and of the Fatamite caliphs in Egypt. It does not require a schematic
mind to recognize similar pressures on embryonic 21st-century
sensibilities from the fatal drug overdoses of popular music stars,
the unhampered global expansion of fast food franchises and the
rise of religious fundamentalism from the caves of Afghanistan
to the studios of the Christian Network.
But
as tempting as it might be to suggest that the present crisis
in human relations is merely the latest lava from an inevitable
millennial eruption, such a conclusion would be more consoling
than accurate. One elementary fact alone precludes all the analogies
that might be drawn between the two epochs: PEOPLE OF ALL GENDERS
HAVE LIVED ONE THOUSAND YEARS SINCE THE ELEVENTH CENTURY! Put
another way, we are one thousand years older since Bloody Otto
sampled the wrong dish, we have had a thousand more years of experiencing
the traps of non-nurturing relationships, and we have spent 10
centuries more of potential solutions for maximizing the profitability
of human interconnection and minimizing losses from failed investments.
And with what result? Existential malaise. A sense of futility
that we have tried everything and nothing works. Increasing gratuitousness
as a response to the feeling of futility. Relentless violence
as a companion to the gratuitousness. House and Senate committees
investigating all the violence and endorsing the use of V-chips
on television monitors. The physical -- not to mention mental
and moral -- repulsiveness of presidential aspirants and their
stooges. We aren’t in a situation analogous to that of the
11th-century peasantry for the simple reason that, unlike us,
it didn’t squander 1,000 more years of opportunity for grasping
our terrestrial misery. We are WORSE OFF.
If the
growth of our corporeal and incorporeal needs has taught us anything
by now, it is that misery not only loves company, it positively
adores SYSTEMS. Across the centuries we have rushed to one deceptively
organized corpus of thought after another in the vain search for
clues to the dynamics of human behaviour and to the appropriate
governors for supplying the right mixture of JOY, HAPPINESS, and
PROFIT. The two most venerable systems we have resorted to have
been religious and philosophical. On a religious plane generations
of forebears have been attracted to the theology, morality and
ritual stipulated by spiritual belief, trusting it would deliver
workable relationships in an afterworld as much as on this planet.
Those of a more philosophical cast have sought explanations for
their thoughts and feelings in arguments that, at their extreme,
have proposed that there are no such things as thoughts and feelings
in the first place. But while followers of both approaches have
been numerous at every stage in history, triggering wars and disputes
over academic copyrights, neither religion nor philosophy has
ever encompassed the full range of human striving and its practical
implications for emotional sharing, self-esteem and fruitful career
paths. To use their own vernaculars, religion has proved to be
godless, philosophy to be mindless.
Aside
from religion and philosophy, there has been a myriad of other
tantalizing systems drafted for explicating human direction. Our
most distant ancestors, for example, identified their characters
with the animal life of the forest and plains. Although commonly
confused with the earliest forms of religious exercise, this zoographic
vision actually accorded a respect to the material and spiritual
worlds that the average religion paid short shrift to in its overriding
priority of confirming some transcendent entity or biochemical
progression as the only desirable goal; i.e., if I’m 75
and have a brain tumour, I must be ready to meet my Maker. By
contrast, the zoographic vision perceived in the annual behavioural
cycles of the bear, the eagle and the salmon the caprices and
obligations of societal living; it posited mauling, screeching
and spawning as indispensable expressions of sharing. That many
of these animals later underwent ‘conversion,’ becoming
symbols even for chastity and contemplation, reflects the fears
organized religion had regarding their competitive appeal to the
typical woodsman.
But
even before religions had tamed its contents, the zoographic vision
had revealed itself as an insufficient model for human interaction.
Most obviously, there was the fact that animals ‘liked’
being in a rut, and had little incentive for changing their ways.
The ambivalences of cohabitation, the insecurities sparked by
mysterious nightly prowling, the seasonality of sex drives, the
lack of ambition beyond commanding a waterhole -- none of these
qualities promoted long-term human identification. In the end,
our anxiety for a systematic illumination had little to show for
its pangs except meat, bones and fur.
Other
would-be ordinations from the animate world have been even less
compelling. The humours of black bile, yellow bile, blood and
phlegm might have appeared comprehensive to some ancient Greeks,
but not to many of their descendants, who had to wonder why success
had to be synonymous with the viscous or the disgusting. The Bodyists
of 12th-century England had their moment in the outlook that human
beings broke down into Nose, Chest, Elbow, Nate, Knee and Foot
types. While they would be influential again in the 20th century,
the Bodyists failed to inspire for any great span of time the
Yorkshireman who, on a good day, liked to believe he could derive
pleasure and fulfillment from ‘all’ his parts and
who, on a bad day, watched ‘all’ his parts being drawn
and quartered. Equally unsuccessful, after fads of varying duration,
were the 13th-century Barbers of Turkey with their emphasis on
Canine, Molar and Incisor personalities; the 14th-century Retinas
of Samos with their divisions of the Green-Eyed, Blue-Eyed and
Brown-Eyed Trait Bearers; and the 15th-century Dominican Friars
of Inquisition Spain who classified men in honesty and purity
as Ten Fingers, Nine Fingers, Three Fingers and Stumps.
The
inanimate world has been no more forthcoming, even when the physical
sciences have been recruited for the effort. Thus while alchemists
from fifth-century China all the way up to 12th-century Europe
were adept at characterizing metals by their potential for being
transformed into gold or silver, their failure actually to achieve
any such re-composition discouraged disciples who, as willing
as they might have been to accept themselves as Lead or Tin types
as a premise, found themselves having to abandon all real hope
of moving upward to more lustrous self-images. That same kind
of anti-climax has contributed to the more recent aversion to
seizing upon the Atomic Table for emotional guidance; moreover,
there has been an added suspicion since Hiroshima and Nagasaki
that, however suggestively idiosyncratic a specific element might
appear, its true Atomic Table value (and thus of the person identifying
with it) could be measured solely by its capacity for being vital
to a nuclear fallout. In a similar vein, attempts to align the
struggles of human enterprise with the properties of precious
stones have expired before chemical realities; to name merely
one, how the outwardly versatile, affluent, and subtly majestic
Opals Personality is prone to disintegrating and disappearing
without warning.
In our
own time, the social sciences have held out one archetypical system
after another for gauging, comparing and projecting human tendencies.
For psychiatrists (with their obvious borrowings from the 12th-century
Bodyists), we are inclined to be oral, anal or genital in our
affective priorities. For sociologists, we are traceable as white
collar, blue collar or police collar. For economists, we relate
to one another as the employed, the underemployed, the unemployed
or the welfare cheat. Political scientists mark us as Democratic
Republicans, Republican Democrats or Irrelevant. Television ratings
researchers transcribe our tendencies as those of Network, Cable
or Streaming. Opinion poll scholars compartmentalize us as Being
Against Train Collisions, Being For Train Collisions or Not Knowing
What a Train Collision Is, And Wanting to See One Before We Make
Up Our Minds.
The
social sciences systems have been as popular in our age as the
religious and philosophical systems were to eons of incomplete
people now completely dead. But just as with those abandoned forms
of intellection, the social sciences systems have survived on
mere familiarity long beyond their actual grip on the imagination.
Anecdotal evidence alone indicates it has been decades since anyone
outside a singles bar or AA meeting felt truly insightful about
cataloging a date as oral, anal or genital in tendency. To a great
extent, in fact, it has been the very failure of the social sciences
systems that has precipitated a critical phase in our present
difficulties. Unlike the relationship-addicted at the end of the
19th century, say, when even critics of Freud’s Id, Ego
and Superego personalities could still look forward to the demarcations
being brewed by Jung, Adler and Dr. Phil, contemporary anxieties
about our place in another’s life and insurance coverage
have little promise of rescue. We seem to have used up all the
systems we have been capable of devising. We show increasing vulnerability
to hot flashes, shortness of breath and irritating allergies.
We throb, we pant and we scratch as though these physical responses
in themselves will summon forth some new antidote for our ailment.
With what consequence? At most, INFLAMMATION and INFECTION.
If there
is one school of systematic projection that might appear to be
unaffected by the present crisis, it is that postulating the daily
influences of other worlds on our needs; that is to say, believers
in the astrological sciences. Certainly, the zodiacalists have
not been inhibited by the vacuities revealed over time by religion,
philosophy, zoology, bodyism, gemology, psychiatry and sociology.
On the contrary, it has been their assumption from the start that
earth-inspired representations of a particular person’s
possible parameters for positive power provided, at best, a self-fulfilling
prophecy. In their emphasis on emotional objectivity, zodiacalists
have instead always looked skyward -- to the stars, to the other
planets, to the orbs. If they have occasionally given the impression
of accepting some of the oldest premises of religion (for instance,
in their adoption of names tracing directly back to Greek theisms),
and have also sometimes looked captive to the accidental sequences
of calendars, they have equally demonstrated an openness in conceding
the expediency of many of their constructs, acknowledging that
their working hypotheses could be perfected through further knowledge
of the cosmos and its disparate parts. Thus astrological adepts
have eschewed dogmatism, recognizing that Hindus, Hebrews and
Chinese have different healing and bonanza schedules with the
sky than do, say, Bulgarians and Mohawks. They have also rejected
simplistic conclusions that would equate an individual destiny
with birth dates, birth hours or birth minutes. In their elaborately
plotted conjunctions of cosmic phenomena and human self-assertion,
zodiacalists have indeed ultimately argued that anything can happen
to anybody at any time. If that insight has struck critics as
too indiscriminate for personality analysis and tactical application,
it has impressed its own adherents for its open-minded tolerance
of planetary and extra-planetary developments.
But
that said, the zodiacalists have also had problems of their own
of late, making them as vulnerable to the current crisis as any
other group. One problem has stemmed from accelerating immigration
patterns, leading to a growing confusion in our great metropolitan
centers about the most relevant calendars and astral houses. On
top of that, dissidents within the astrological science community
have been stepping up efforts to have some pet sign, celestial
movement, or stellar influence dominate charts, in effect demanding
a total reinterpretation of mankind’s traditional relationship
with the cosmos. And even these rebels have been a minor headache
compared to fragmented but best-selling Yahoo cults that would
dispense with the entire solar system in favour of identifying
the complexities of human need and succour with a salvageable
planet or two (e.g., Mars and Venus). Spurred on by the material
success of the Yahoos, astronomers have begun claiming discoveries
of new orbs and even new non-existent orbs with no fixed place
in established horoscopy. The upshot has been interpretative anarchy,
waning faith in the stability of the heavens, and a suppurating
cynicism among former disciples that has reduced astrology to
just another bankrupt social science.
It has
been against this background of overwhelming negative energies
that Dr. Alan Gibb, most notably but not exclusively in his milestone
work You’re a Peewee, I’m a Bambino, has
stepped forward with a revolutionary proposal for seizing, directing,
and profiting from the human process.
Also
by Donald Dewey:
The
Finger
Smoke
Blowers
Self-Reservation
Noticing
Death
Passive
Resistance
Not
Playing It Safe
The
Expectation Medium
Crisis
in Critics
Words
Not to Live By
Knowing
the Killer
Racism
to the Rescue
Punk
Times
Not
Playing It Safe
Meeting
the Author
The
Overwriting Syndrome
Writers
As Ideas
Let
Them Entertain Us
It's
a Kindergarten Life
Being
and Disconnectedness
History
of Humour in the Cinema
Cartoon
Power
FRANCHISEMENT:
THE ALAN GIBB STORY by DON DEWEY
Before
becoming the world's most respected life, death, and everything
in between coach, Alan Gibb shared that common frustration over
the failure of astrology, numerology, and similar religions
to direct all aspects of human behavior. They might have all
been sacred systems for establishing a personal identity, but
there was a rusty screw at their core. Even when the revolutionary
tenets of Franchisement occurred to him, he knew they might
remain stillborn without the attacks, arrests, and tragedies
customarily accompanying an original vision. Happily for Gibb
and the tens of thousands of his fellow believers, he was assaulted
in physical, mental, and dietary ways and hauled in as a fraud,
thug, and stalker even as he pressed forward on his crusade
to share Franchisement with the hordes crying for it as a national
pastime superior to baseball. More happily, the tragedies struck
others, not him, enabling him to enjoy the millions Franchisement
brought through the Internet, the telephone, and pay-on-demand
cable. As he noted repeatedly, the delivery vehicle was unimportant
as long as a customer thought he wanted what he was getting.
"If you listen to people, the world is divided between
the Yankees and the Red Sox," he liked to chuckle fondly.
"Tell that to those with a crush on the Minnesota Twins.
A vision that isn't comprehensive sees only its own nose."
WHAT
OTHERS ARE SAYING:
"Granted
there are many similar books too numerous to count, but this
book is sui generis." --- Benjamin Acocella, S.J., President
of the Council for Mental Observances.
"This
book changed my life when it most needed changing." ---
Sidney Willinger, Leisure Sciences Department, University of
Indiana.
"Sometimes
love is a 13-letter word." --- Jennifer Pryor, Harvard
School of Theoretical Business.
"Gibb
demonstrates how life is more than steak knives and storm windows."
--- Joel Sternheim, Informercials Institute.
MILFORD
HOUSE PRESS
Trade Paperback - 6 x 9 x .7
9781620063408
150 Pages
FICTION / Humorous / General
FICTION / Satire
FICTION / Sports
Arts
& Opinion, a bi-monthly, is archived in the
Library and Archives Canada.
ISSN 1718-2034
