http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/20/business/20walmart.html?_r=1&th=&emc=th&pagewanted=print

My Initiation at Store 5476
By STEPHANIE ROSENBLOOM

DEPTFORD, N.J.

JUST after 9 on a rainy December morning, the employees of Wal-Mart Store 5476 gathered in the electronics department and arranged themselves in a circle. This 24-hour supercenter was still sleepy, with only a few customers steering carts slowly through the aisles of Christmas ornaments, Q-Tips and boxes of Toaster Strudel.

Suddenly, the soft electric hum of the store was pierced by the sound of nearly 40 workers shouting in unison: “Good morning, Vickie!”

Their eyes were on an assistant manager, Vickie Smith, as they clapped their hands twice, stomped their feet twice, pumped their fists twice, and topped it all off with a “Whoo-whoo!”

So began a 10-minute meeting that takes place three times a day, at the beginning of every shift, not only here at the Wal-Mart on Cooper Street in Deptford, but at every other Wal-Mart in the nation. That’s 4,200 stores, 12,600 meetings a day.

….ick, ick, ick…

In spring 2004 I appeared on KATU TV’s AM Northwest in Portland, Ore., with the producers of an improbably named film, What the #$*! Do We Know?! Artfully edited and featuring actress Marlee Matlin as a dreamy-eyed photographer trying to make sense of an apparently senseless universe, the film’s central tenet is that we create our own reality through consciousness and quantum mechanics. I never imagined that such a film would succeed, but it has grossed millions.

The film’s avatars are New Age scientists whose jargon-laden sound bites amount to little more than what California Institute of Technology physicist and Nobel laureate Murray Gell-Mann once described as “quantum flapdoodle.” University of Oregon quantum physicist Amit Goswami, for example, says in the film: “The material world around us is nothing but possible movements of consciousness. I am choosing moment by moment my experience. Heisenberg said atoms are not things, only tendencies.” Okay, Amit, I challenge you to leap out of a 20-story building and consciously choose the experience of passing safely through the ground’s tendencies…

The film’s nadir is an interview with “Ramtha,” a 35,000-year-old spirit channeled by a woman named JZ Knight. I wondered where humans spoke English with an Indian accent 35,000 years ago. Many of the films’ participants are members of Ramtha’s “School of Enlightenment,” where New Age pabulum is dispensed in costly weekend retreats.
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from Salon, 2007-Mar-5, by Peter Birkenhead:
Oprah’s ugly secret

…The main idea of “The Secret” is that people need only visualize what they want in order to get it — and the book certainly has created instant wealth, at least for Rhonda Byrne and her partners-in-con…
Worse than “The Secret’s” blame-the-victim idiocy is its baldfaced bullshitting. The titular “secret” of the book is something the authors call the Law of Attraction. They maintain that the universe is governed by the principle that “like attracts like” and that our thoughts are like magnets: Positive thoughts attract positive events and negative thoughts attract negative events. Of course, magnets do exactly the opposite — positively charged magnets attract negatively charged particles — and the rest of “The Secret” has a similar relationship to the truth. Here it is on biblical history: “Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Joseph, Moses, and Jesus were not only prosperity teachers, but also millionaires themselves, with more affluent lifestyles than many present-day millionaires could conceive of.”

…Has Oprah ever done anything that didn’t leave people with mixed feelings?

And at what point do we stop feeling like we have to take the good with the craven when it comes to Oprah, and the culture she’s helped to create? I get nauseated when I think of people in South Africa being taught they don’t have enough money because they’re “blocking it with their thoughts.” I’m already sickened by an American culture that teaches people, as “The Secret” does, that they “create the circumstances of their lives with the choices they make every day,” a culture that elected a president who cried tears of self-congratulation at his inauguration, rejects intellectualism, and believes he can intuit the trustworthiness of world leaders by looking into their eyes. I’m sickened by a culture in which the tenets of the Oprah philosophy have become conventional wisdom, in which genuine self-actualization has been confused with self-aggrandizement, reality is whatever you want it to be, and mammon is queen.

http://www.facebook.com/people/Sean-ONeil/1579664270

yes, i am interested. let me know how to contact you.

chao, kim

One doesn’t need to spend the $$$ to go to law school. One can self-teach with some guidance. If you’d like to head down that road, I’d be happy to serve as your guide/mentor. I enjoy teaching; I was a tutor in law school and have taught continuing legal education classes to admitted lawyers. We could easily do it by email correspondence or something similar.

Here are a few that have changed my thinking, or confirmed that my observations on American capitalism’s huge, destructive flaws are correct:

The Unsettling of America: Culture and Agriculture, by Wendell Berry

The True and Only Heaven: Progress and its Critics, by Christopher Lasch

The Book: On the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are, by Alan Watts

Extraordinary Popular Delusions & the Madness of Crowds, by Charles MacKay

A Civil Action, by Jonathan Harr

The Buffalo Creek Disaster, by Gerald Stern

More than anything, I would suggest going to law school, because that’s where the machinery of American capitalism is given life and carved into timeless stone memorials. But one must go through the process skeptically, not with eyes of adoration and a heart of awe-filled respect.

I’d never heard of sevenoaksmag.com — very impressive! As Seven-Oaks points out, Rebel-sell’s generalization of inner city poverty in Detroit is racist and unforgivable – a seriously good reason not to read the book.

But, affording the book a read, as I do with a right-wing journalists, say — just back from Iraq — I learned something.

I disagree with Seven-oaks analysis, that Rebel-Sell advocates Capitalism — Rebel-sell in no way advocates capitalism. Rebel-sell examines the kinds of interwoven aspects of many ideologies/practices that attempt to confront or refute capitalism, where these practices infact give strength to and enhance the capitalist state.

Much of the topics Rebel-sell has identified to re-think are important topics to be re-thought. That this book is perhaps a kind of rough-draft, as shoddy as it is, place to begin.

For me right now — I feel lost, I am at an intellectual impasse, I am unable to embrace an ideology/strategy and act. If you or anyone can recommend books addressing sociological topics — I would greatly appreciate the help.

Thanx again, Kim

http://whoisioz.blogspot.com/2009/08/ioz-interviews-malcolm-gladwell.html

Anyone who reads Who is IOZ? can probably remember the very humorous take IOZ had on Gladwell’s latest. Gladwell is a bit of a kook, he reminds me of a cultural observer version of Andrew Sullivan, a person who takes newly contrary views because such contrary perspectives create a bit of a scandal and attract the attention of short-memory folks and other fairly-informed-but-not-deep-thinkers. Gladwell’s also a bit like George Lakoff in that he repackages the thoughts of others as if they are newly his.

None of that means I think Gladwell speaks falsely. It just means I think he’s fairly interesting but usually I can do better on my own, and others can and will and have done better on similar subjects. Ultimately, I agreed with IOZ’s comic take on Gladwell.

…………………

A lot of authors have observed these drifts in American culture, drifts that Kim Sky, Michael Anderson and others have noted above. Thorstein Veblen’s “Theory of the Leisure Class” talked about them, Russell Lynes’ “The Taste-Makers” talked about them, Christopher Lasch talked about them quite a bit in his surveys of American socio-economic trends. Paul Fussell lampooned them heavily in his books “Class” and “BAD: The Dumbing of America.” Robert Hughes talked about them more seriously in his book “Culture of Complaint.”

again. The Rebel Sell by Joseph Heath & Andrew Potter

this book takes a good look at a whole set of ideas that have led us to on to self-help, positive thinking, the attack on rationality. simple living and the paradox of antimaterialism. etc.”

Having read it, I have to agree with many of the criticisms Derrick O’Keefe levels at The Rebel Sell. LINK