Motivational/Do-It-Yourself Books   I love motivational and do-it-yourself books.   Among my favorite motivational books are How to Win Friends and Influence People by Dale Carnegie, Awaken the Giant Within by Tony Robbins and Make 'Em Pay by George Hayduke.   As for the do-it-yourself books, I have enjoyed many of the Sam's line of books that teach things like HTML, Visual Basic and other computer realted stuff.   However...   There are certain aspects of the whole field that make me crazy, for instance:   The Ayn Rand Syndrome   While I have read and enjoyed Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, I dare not discuss this with others that have also read these works for fear that they might start babbling about the absolute wonderfulness of Rand and her beliefs. While I agree with most of her ideas, she was indeed wrong about certain things. Inevitably, I wind up pissing off the True Rand Believer by expressing this thought and the whole thing blows up.   It goes like this...   ME: Yeah, well she missed the mark on some things. The idea that intuition is a mystical process is wrong. Other than that and a few other minor things, she did pretty good.   TRUE RAND BELIEVER: WHAT? (Note: Randians, like jewelry shopping network hosts, almost always speak entirely in upper case.) ARE YOU SAYING THAT YOU THINK THAT SHE WAS WR, WR, WR, WRONG?!?!   ME: No, I'm not saying that I think that she was wrong, she was wrong.   TRUE RAND BELIEVER: WH, WH, WHAT?!?! OH MY G, G, GOD! I CAN'T BELIEVE THAT YOU SAID THAT! RAND IS RIGHT ON EVERYTHING! JUST LOOK HERE, LEONARD PEIKOFF EVEN SAYS SO IN HIS BOOK... "Ayn Rand is right on everything. If I could, I would dig up her corpse and have sex with it, that's how much I agree with her." DUDE, HE'S WILLING TO PORK HER ROTTING CARCASS, THAT'S HOW RIGHT AYN RAND IS!   ME: Ah, yes, the corpse-porking thing, I forgot all about that.   TRUE RAND BELIEVER: SEE? HOW CAN SHE BE WRONG?!?! HELL, I TOOK UP SMOKING BECAUSE SHE SAID IT WAS A GOOD THING! HOW CAN YOU SAY THAT SHE IS WRONG?!?!   ME: Uh, yeah. OK, you're right. Let's uh, switch gears, OK? So, what do you do for a living?   TRUE RAND BELIEVER: I'M A JANITOR FOR SALVATION ARMY.   ME: Yes, keeping in line with John Galt's ideals. Keep your brain off of the market and watch the world crumble. Sounds like you've taken Rand's lessons to heart. So what are you actually trained in?   TRUE RAND BELIEVER: I'M A JANITOR. I HAVE A BACHELOR'S IN MOPPING FLOORS.   ME: Uh, yeah, great. Well, I gotta go. I think my pet hamster is calling me...   Even worse, the TRUE RAND BELIEVERS are probably the most underachieving set of losers that I have ever seen. Apparently, the only thing that is important in Rand's philosophy is to read Atlas Shrugged. There is no need to read opposing viewpoints. There is no need to further investigate her ideas and probe for possible fallacies. There is no need to look at Rand's personal endeavors and see if they match the ideals set forth in her works. There is no need for anything but Atlas Shrugged.   I bring up Ayn Rand not because she is neccessarily a self-help guru as much as she is an example of how a high-profile personality can interfere with the message that the author is trying to purvey. Guys like Tony Robbins have also had this problem but at least Tony Robbins was willing to tell his True Believers to get a life.   The I've-Read-Every-Self-Help-Book-Ever-Written-and-I'm-STILL-a-Bag-of-Shit Syndrome   Francina was an amazing specimen. Francina had a Masters in psychology and had been working in the psych field for almost twenty years. Francina was still unmarried and was unattached to any significant other.   Some other things about Francina... People couldn't eat around Francina because of her freakiness about food. Anyone eating in front of her felt like a Roseanne at an Ethiopian starvefest. Her eyes would become the size of baseballs and she would start moving her jaw in-sync with the diner's mouth as if pretending to eat along with the diner would allow Francina to actually taste the food. Francina could barely talk about anything for the way she rambled on into uncharted territory. Talking to Francina about a patient's somatic behaviors could land the conversation on Mars with three giggling balls of yarn searching beneath the planet surface for old lasagne pans. Francina could be intimidated by the patients into just about anything. If the patient stated firmly enough to Francina that the patient was sane then, by God, the patient was sane. It didn't matter if the patient sat around half naked watching a blank TV screen waiting for outer space transmissions from psychic toadstools, that patient was, in Francina's estimate, perfectly fine. Oh, by the way, Francina had read nearly every self-help book on earth. I would love to say that this is an isolated incident, but it is not. In fact, most of the people that I worked with in psych were pretty much ready for the rubber sky treatment themselves. In Francina's defense, she at least made an effort to be better.   I remember once talking to her about a book that she was reading and she had described the book as a native American book on how to see the world as it truly is. What struck me was the weird Big Tree approach to psychological health and how Francina refused to acknowledge that many American tribes were violent and regularly engaged in wars with other tribes.   I've often met people that have read Dale Carnegie books and swore that they understood his work only to turn around and start an argument with a coworker about some trivial offense.   Why read it if you're not going to take it to heart...   The McDonald's Approach   While franchising may have brought about things like fast burgers, quick photo developing, and way-the-fuck-expensive coffee, there is a downside to the cut and paste approach to things.   The formulaic do it yourself stuff like A Mongoloid's Guide to Auto Repair, Brain Surgery, and Amateur Pornography Involving Inflatable Farm Animals makes me, quite simply, insane.   First of all, if you are an idiot, there is nothing that will help you learn anything at all.   It's like the joke...   Q: What's better than winning a gold medal in the Special Olympics? A: Nothing! You're RETARDED!!!   The assumption that an idiot would want to learn anything is in itself idiotic. One might as well want to write a book called an Idiot's Guide to Dummy Books.   Worse than this, there books on almost every topic imaginable.   For example: A Total Dumbshit's Guide to Mac Computers. A Head Injury Patient's Guide to AOL. A Mac User's Guide to A Head Injury Patient's Guide to AOL. A News Anchor's Guide to Relatively Simple Truths. Duh, My Nuts Are On Fire. And then there's the whole Chicken Soup fiasco. Believe it or not, there are people who insist on taking a fair-to-middling idea and beating it so far beyond death that even the toppest notch CSI investigators would be unable to extract anything even remotely resembling intellectual DNA.   Chicken Soup titles leave little room for doubt that some things can be taken way too far.   The Chicken Soup for the Left Handed Dyslexic Homophobic Libertarian's Soul is a not-so-good idea gone way past bad.   I wish I knew why someone thought that the Chicken Soup Enema thing was such good idea that the company felt it wise to produce a grand total of 214 variations on this theme. The idea that there are two-hundred-fourteen titles that start out with the phrase "Chicken Soup for the" makes one wish that moveable type had never been invented.   The worst part of the whole Chicken Soup phenomenon is there is little or nothing left to make fun of. With titles like, and I'm not kidding, Chicken Soup for the Prisoner's Soul, I find it nearly impossible to skewer this idiocy.   Are there prisoners that actually read this shit?   Alternative Reading   I've decided that I'm going to go into the field of writing these kinds of books, here are some of my working titles...   "Go Ahead and Pull the Trigger, I'm Not Scared" and Other Relatively Unintelligent Things to Say to Armed Postal Workers. Overcoming Death and its Ability to Seriously Hamper One's Driving Skills. "A Chainsaw is not a Toothbrush" and Other Seemingly Stupid Things Mom Used to Say. When I Grow Up, I Want to Be a San Franciscan Disco Queen in Montana. A Brain Surgeon's Guide to Serial Killing. Fried Cow Turds and Other Grand Junction Culinary Delicacies. Well, I'm better now. I'm gonna get back to my Dianetics book...   Copyright 2002 by Frank Emsley