A great source of anxiety for young people making their way in the world today is the mindless advice that is regularly rolled out – like a length of artificial lawn – by professional advice-givers and well-meaning but misguided friends and relatives.
Advice is very much like the low-impact aerobic skiing machine you bought from a late-night infomercial – you hang on to it for a while, not really paying it much attention, then you pass it along to someone else. It is the only thing to do with advice and aerobic skiing machines, because you never actually use them yourself.
There is an awful lot of bad advice knocking about. For instance, there is that whole cultural reservoir of frankly puzzling hand-me-down wisdom that has been loitering about for centuries, being rightfully ignored then punted ahead like a rusted soup can for the next generation to pick up, ignore, then punt ahead in their turn.
Why, for instance, do we insist on declaring that a stitch in time saves nine, rather than, as recent studies seem to suggest, a number closer to seven-and-a-half? And what thinking parent would voluntarily tell their child that a watched pot never boils? That is the quickest way to shatter the myth of parental infallibility. All the little tyke needs is a pot, some water, a heat source and a pair of eyes, and soon he will know that you are all busk and bunkum, just like your parents before you.
Nor does the falsehood end there. Unless he is irretrievably drunk, he who laughs last, far from laughing longest, usually stops abruptly with an embarrassed look on his face. The next time you are tempted to solemnly intone that a rolling stone gathers no moss, take a gander at Keith Richards’ teeth. What’s more, I would be very surprised if the rain in Spain really does stay mainly on the plains. Does Spain even have plains? Bulls, yes, and haciendas, and women in red skirts, but I have never noticed any plains. Perhaps I have been looking in the wrong places.
I don’t suppose it really matters what the meteorological profile of Spain is – unless of course you happen to be an itinerant Spanish umbrella salesman looking to unload your stock – but my point is that people throw around that sort of casual counsel with merry disregard for the truth. How many times has someone said to you: “Cheer up. Things can only get better”? This sort of bare-cheeked dishonesty is nothing short of insulting. If things have one common property upon which we can all agree, it is surely that they can always get worse. Given half a chance, things deteriorate faster than the second half of a Jim Carrey movie.
Another piece of advice that has me clucking and tutting at its sheer muddle-headed wrongness is the one that goes: “Always be yourself.” Have you ever heard anything so appalling? Civilisation and all standards of human decency are precisely predicated on us not being ourselves. Haven’t you ever read Lord of the Flies? Or tussled with another person for the last parking space at the mall? Underneath our glossy hairstyles, we are animals.
Even leaving aside the nature–nurture debate, being yourself is fraught with peril. Most of us, deep down, are sneaking, skulking, sometimes snivelling scaredy-cats, emotionally ambivalent, morally tenuous and possessed of a hidden liking for certain kinds of popular music that we would not under any circumstances reveal in public. Why should we be that person? In a world of people who seem rather more interesting than we are, why should we be stuck with ourselves? If being yourself were so great, there’d be queues of people wanting to be you.
What makes the advice worse is that it is usually being offered to someone who has conclusively demonstrated that themself is precisely the wrong person to be in that particular situation. If you have asked a girl to your matric dance and she has not only rejected you out of hand but insisted on singing a mocking song that rhymes aloud her opinion that you are not merely physically unattractive but also have a distasteful personality and many annoying habits, I think the message you should be getting is that if you want her to go to the dance with you, “yourself” is the very last thing you should continue to be.
Even worse is how people say “Be yourself” without so much as a moment’s consideration of whom they are addressing. I am haunted by mental images of the young Jeffrey Dahmer approaching the school guidance counsellor with a couple of questions about certain troubling dreams he’d been having lately, and the counsellor nodding and frowning while really thinking about a beer and his afternoon nap, and telling him: “My best advice to you, young man, is to always be yourself.”
So the crux of what I’m saying is: Don’t feel you have to always be yourself. Be someone else if necessary. For instance, if you are Slobodan Milosevic, be someone who isn’t a genocidal villain. If you are George W. Bush … but no, I promised myself no more George W. Bush jokes in this book.
I am not suggesting, mind, that you attempt to improve yourself. Oh no. That takes time and effort, almost invariably doesn’t work, and still leaves you stuck with being you. Just be someone else for a while. This world is too varied to allow you to persist successfully with being only one person. “I am large,” said Walt Whitman, “I contain multitudes.” At least I think it was Walt Whitman. Or it might have been Goldfinger, in that scene where Sean Connery is strapped to the table with the laser beam.
If you are just a run-of-the-mill slob, with no special talents or burning interests, well, join the club. There are billions of us, with many more behind us and trillions still to come. In fact, it is my considered opinion that in the history of the world there have only been seven or eight unique or original people, and everyone else just tries to imitate one or more of them, with varying degrees of success. (I know you are expecting me to reveal who those people are, but I am too wily an author for that. I will say, however, that none of them is John Lennon. Or Shirley MacLaine. Or anyone with whom you or I are personally acquainted.)
If you have mastered the art of handling your ostrich egg, you will by now have realised that all things are possible. Which is to say: all things can be faked. You can be anyone you want to be.
“You can be anyone you want to be.” As I wrote those words I realised they sounded familiar. Then I remembered: I hear them on Oprah all the time. Oprah is fond of telling you that you can be anyone you want to be, no matter how poor, downtrodden or black-in-a-southern-state-of-the-USA you are. This is because, by telling you that, she is reminding you that she was once poor, downtrodden and black-in-asouthern-state-of-the-USA, but now she has more money than there are catfish in the Louisiana bayou.
In fact, to hear Oprah talk about it, you would think that she only escaped her childhood by buttering up her wrists, slipping them from the manacles and fleeing the chain-gang just before she and her sisters were loaded onto a paddle-steamer to be sold up the Mississippi, Simon Legree lashing at their bloodied shoulders with a rawhide bullwhip. I keep wanting to remind Oprah that she only acted in an Alice Walker story; she didn’t actually live there.
Oprah has a segment on her show called “Remember your spirit”. Now what on earth does that mean? Are you going to find yourself on a hiking trek in the mountains, going through your backpack in your tent in the evening, saying, “Let’s see now, flashlight, waterproof matches, snake repellant, groundsheet … say, where’s my spirit? Dang, I’ve forgotten my spirit again. WHO MOVED MY SPIRIT?!”
Are you going to find yourself facing the final question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, with the host saying, “For a million bucks, Mavis, can you identify the immortal part of you that will live on after death?” And afterwards will you be walking away looking ashen, muttering over and over: “I can’t believe I forgot my spirit. I can’t believe I forgot my spirit”?
(Incidentally, I seem to remember that a few years ago South African Breweries had a campaign that involved placing signs in bottlestores that read: “Don’t forget the beer.” I’m not pointing any fingers, but I think someone might owe someone royalties.)
But you have to hand it to Oprah: she handles her inner ostrich egg like a champ. See how she keeps a straight face while she informs a universe of unhappy homebodies that they, with a little faith, could be her. That’s right, honey – if you follow your bliss you too could be sitting up there next to Oprah, chatting to Denzel Washington and Maria Shriver and Gary Zukav and that bald-headed marriage counsellor whose name I have never bothered to remember.
That is what Oprah tells them, and she doesn’t even blink when she says it. She looks them in the eye and tells them something that can’t possibly be true, and they love her for it. Because no one can be Oprah. Because not even Oprah is Oprah. Oprah the phenomenon is just an idea whose time had come, and Oprah the person was just smart enough and sufficiently inert to let herself inhabit the idea, and to let the idea to take her shape.
Oprah doesn’t bring her personality to the show, and she doesn’t really have anything to talk to her celebrity guests about, besides casual references to other celebrity guests. She just billows in and lets the momentum of the idea that is Oprah take over. She becomes the ostrich egg, and allows a grateful audience to fill her up with whatever they prefer to imagine.
You too can be like Oprah, and I don’t just mean by eating more banana cream pies and extra helpings of hominy grits than is strictly necessary. I mean you can let yourself flow as she flows. She doesn’t appear to flow – she appears to just sit there like a silo – but she’s flowing all right. She’s flowing in a non-flowing kind of way, if that doesn’t sound too much like Deepak Chopra.
(Hell, it does sound too much like Deepak Chopra. I have been reading too many self-help books. I’d better move along, and sharpish.)
Oprah embraces the egg, and although she appears to be an egg-filler and a guff-merchant, you can be sure that inside she is just as you and I would wish to be. When she’s sitting up there, she’s not thinking about angels and walking toward the light. She’s thinking about who to hire to write her next self-help book, or about doing the carpet-aardvark with Shaquille O’Neal, or how to get Gary Zukav to sit up straight when he’s on television, or buying a Lear jet so that the next time she flies somewhere she doesn’t have to sit next to all those people who could be just like her. She tries to pretend otherwise, but we can see through her. And that is as it should be.
You know, just thinking about Oprah has made me hungry. I always associate Oprah with food, because I have a photograph of Oprah glued to my refrigerator door, along with a message, spelt out in those little magnetised letters that annoying people use to compose snatches of ghastly poetry.
I think they write that poetry to dissuade me from going into their fridges. There is nothing quite so distasteful as other people’s idea of poetry. Although in this case I use the word “poetry” kindly. They are never really more than gloopy lyrical outbursts, or sticky snatches of pastel-coloured soft porn, four or five words long. I have to keep fighting the urge to grab these people by the collar and say: “Look, here is a pencil and paper. If you must write poetry, sit down and write it properly, not in the length of time it takes you to swig from the milk carton and scratch your belly. And when you have written your poetry on this piece of paper, put this paper in a drawer or a shoebox where unsuspecting visitors do not have to read it.”
And then I also want to add: “And by the way, putting three words next to each other that all start with the same letter does not make it poetry.”
But I am not talking about fridge-magnet poetry. I am talking about the message that is on my fridge underneath the photograph of Oprah. The message is this:
“Lard is no barrier to success, as long as you can fake it.”
And that brings me to the subject of my next chapter.