Just in time for the holidays, Dr. Rob and I round out our series on the “Trifecta of American Hangups,” sex, drugs and death.
Part III: Death
PL: Most people think we’re obsessed with death as entertainment based on the violence and gore we feast on in our movies and television programs, and our apparent appetite for global Manifest Destiny. I don’t think so. I think the American hang-up with death is our refusal to acknowledge it. We race like rats and consume as though toil and collection of material are the only markers in life. To say one’s more interested in experiences and maximizing the number of interesting stories he can amass than buying the biggest home, car and stuffing his 401k to make sure he can live well in the decade before he dies is perceived as strange. I think there’s a willful ignorance at work here. I don’t know exactly the forces at work causing it, but we’re conditioning ourselves with excess to avoid consideration of our finite circumstances. We don’t want to think about death because death forces us to ask whether we’re maximizing the moment, and the answer to that question for almost all of us is “no.” But I don’t think this is sheer delusion. I think on some level we realize that, in order to keep the stores open and the streets clean and lights on, we have to push the reality of our fleeting situations from our minds. Our abstraction of death is the biggest of those white lies that keep the world spinning, keep the systems we accept rolling along.

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If you read this site because you find my insights on law or the horror of institutionalized corporate life amusing, I have a recommendation for you – www.Bitterlawyer.com. There are loads of websites out there satirizing law firm life, but I haven’t found one with the quality of writing and production these guys bring to the program.
The law firm life doesn’t lend itself to humor. You have to pull that out, dig a few layers to mine the absurdity at the heart of thing – those subtle, carnival-of-dysfunction aspects that make every day in a firm feel like a real-life episode of Arrested Development. The guys at Bitterlawyer do exactly that, and then some. From their articles to their webisodes, Living the Dream, the site is easily one of the best sources of law-related comedy on the web.
I did a piece with them today called “The Seven Species of Legal Website Troll” Pretty self-explanatory. We dissect seven common types of commenters who flame, argue with and irritate everyone around them on some of the larger law-related websites on the internet. The targets are geared to lawyers and law students, but I think most of them are universally recognizable – law-themed variations of the general irritants who infect message boards and comment fields all over the web.

For your Monday reading pleasure, Dr. Rob and I continue our discussion of sex, drugs and death, the “Trifecta of American Hangups.” Today’s Part II – Sex:
PL: I think the reason we’re hung up on sex in this country is because we’re a pack of control freaks and sex is the one drive we can’t ever conquer. It’s our White Whale. We can stave off depression, hold cancer at bay, stop heart disease, steer the economies (well, until this year) and in all those things we can feel like we have the wheel, even if it’s just an illusion. But then, passing a high school and seeing a 17 year old Catholic school girl in one of those maddening plaid skirts, we’re suddenly forced to recognize just how little control we really have. Sure, we’re not rabid sex-crazed animals. We won’t act on our filthiest desires. But we’re forced to deal with the concept that even within ourselves, we can never extinguish certain base urges. No matter how much we try, we’re going to think about what’s under that skirt. We’ve harnessed so much in this country, and we seem to think that if we just put the right amount of effort and ingenuity into the endeavor, we can control every force in our society. Master every aspect of our existence, bring it all to our bidding. Make it safe and give us comfort everything’s always going to be alright. I don’t think we can’t deal with the fact that no matter how hard we try, our native sex drives defy our commands. So we do the next best thing – use sex as a device to control others through advertising, entertainment, or chastity as a form of moral currency in religion. Problem is, however much we use sex to control others, it still controls us, every one of us. Can you think of any greater force in the universe than sexual frustration? It’s the root evil under every wrongheaded and infantile ideology in our country, on the planet. I think until people learn to deal with sex as a force beyond our complete control – something utterly incompatible with absolute edicts – it’s going to remain the source of half of our national neuroses.
Dr. Rob: Like pinot noir, football and the Wii, sex is what makes America great. So it can be frustrating to listen to uber-conservatives prattle on about its immorality. And I agree that sex is used as a controlling device in both popular and religious culture. That being said, I caution every young client I see about the inherent vulnerability that comes with sexuality. There’s something in our hard-wiring that makes sex more than just orgasms. Our bodies were created to do it as much as possible, yet the psychological ramifications of it can be huge. When people are forced into it they often never recover, no matter how much therapy or medicine you give them. Men are taught that there’s a direct link between their self-esteem and how much tail they get. Women are labeled as sluts for having sexual expression. And while our bodies are prepped for sex at a young age, our psychological development lags far behind. So if sex is a superior force as you describe, our sexual education needs to focus not just on proper condom use and where to buy a dental dam, but also on how to work with this force so that the sexual experience is more fulfilling from a psychological standpoint. That might help our culture lose some of the neurosis you describe.

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For the past few weeks, I’ve been reading reviews and feedback on Happy Hour is For Amateurs. But there have also been critics, and I’ve noticed a lot of them fixate on three subject areas – sex, substance use and mortality (on that last one, more specifically, the suggestion many of us aren’t maximizing the limited time we have). For some, these subjects seem terribly complicated – infused with a good deal of neurotic angst. Addressing these subjects frankly, or lightly, in a comic, unapologetic fashion, seems to tweak a fair number of people.
I know, I know… You’re surprised by that?
Yes. Yes I am. Not in the sense that it’s unexpected, but in the sense that now, here – today – civilized man has been dealing with these things for what? Ten, twelve, fourteen-thousand years? You’d assume the species long ago reached a happy détente with the concepts of fucking, getting high and getting our ya yas out before we kick the bucket.
Apparently not. And this got me thinking, Why? Why do we carry so many neuroses about a biological function like sex? Why are drugs and alcohol postured as a moral issue by so many of us? And in a world where we obsess over avoiding our demise – in retaining or at least giving off the appearance of youth and vigor at all costs – why do we willingly engage in so many endeavors that waste the time we have and require, at least superficially, observation of the fiction we’re immortal?
Again, I know… These are impossible questions.
But that doesn’t mean they aren’t worth asking. And luckily, I had just the person to bounce them off – the author of Shrinktalk and Rudius’ own in-house psychologist, Dr. Rob Dobrenski. Dr. Rob and I had a conversation about the “Trifecta of American Hangups,” sex, drugs and death, and all the myths, phobias and paranoia attached to them. We can’t promise concrete answers, but we touched on a few issues worth considering. Here’s the first part of it.

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Holy shit. He said it all. Everything. Everything I’ve ever thought… Everything I’d ever say if ran into that kind of cash…
Somebody just sent me the screed copied below, and the damn thing shocked me. Almost knocked the Tanqueray and tonic out of my hand. That someone would say it so plain, so obvious… Be so utterly unapologetic. Say what we’re all thinking, or more accurately, what we’d all like to be thinking if we had a bag of “Fuck You” money in the bank.
For a long time I’ve bought into the belief that myopic assholes tend to make the biggest money in their fields. That you had to live your job, make it an obsession – buy into the belief a gig in something like accounting, finance, law, brokering or any of the other “welfare jobs” for overeducated upper middle class kids matters on some intrinsic level (or be a hopeless workaholic toiling to avoid a hole somewhere else in his life) – to hit a mother lode of cash.
I’ve always bought into the notion that the people least able to enjoy the money are the ones who amass the largest piles of it. That here, in our paranoid, envy-addled, “gimme gimme gimme” culture, self-awareness works like a pair of concrete shoes. To build an obscene net worth you had to give your entire life to a job. Be a Zero, with nothing in his head but execution… A hyper-highly functioning variant of those “wind-up dolls” we’ve all been forced to suffer at social gatherings – the sort who speak in industry lingo and talk of nothing but what’s connected the The Work. That a cruel Murphy’s Law keeps those of us who’d spend wealth best watching from the cheap seats while a pack of miserable and clueless greedheads who know nothing but addiction to The Game pile up mountains of cash they’ll never enjoy.

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Author’s Note: This is review/recommendation of a book you should buy only after first purchasing mine.

Unless you’ve been in a cave on Mars for the past two weeks you’ve been reading a lot about Wall Street. Watching Hank Paulson shit his pants in Congressional hearings, hearing about Dick Fuld getting knocked out by an irate trader at his gym… Waiting and wondering when the biggest financial clusterfuck since the Great Depression is going to ease.

Don’t hold your breath.

I’ve got three bits of advice. One, shut off your computer and reroute your mail so you won’t be tempted to open an investment statement for the next year or so. Two, buy up a good stock of liquor – a shopping cart’s worth, as Nick Cage does in Leaving Las Vegas (you won’t want to do much driving… everybody else on the road will be liquored). Three, buy a copy of Leveraged Sellout’s Damn it Feels Good to Be a Banker and read about how all this shit came to pass. Well, at least the half of it Wall Street caused. Might as well laugh at the mess. There isn’t much else to do.

DIFGTBAB is a satire and it is ridiculous – vicious cartoonish descriptions of now extinct uber-banker types Tom Wolfe dubbed “Masters of the Universe.” But damn if it isn’t accurate and laugh out loud hysterical. Some old fuck, I think Faulkner, said “the best fiction is far more true than any kind of journalism.” If that holds, then LSO’s proving here, maybe accidentally, maybe intentionally, that satire paints the clearest picture of the animals a writer skewers. If you’re going to make fun of the ridiculous, why not be ridiculous?

And he is. From the descriptions of the various types of gold-digging trophy wives to the obsessions over clothing, having an Amex Black card and working for the most “prestigious” firms on the Street, LSO nails – hilariously – every closeted insecurity of the breed. But it’s not just biting sarcasm. The guy’s a great writer, with an amazing wit, and the book is packed with brutal insights. The bit on bankers liking simple, dumb music speaks a hundred volumes to the narrowness he’s mocking at every turn. The hierarchy of business schools he describes, with the attendant paranoia it fosters in the “lower tier” graduates, is a perfect example of the premium the industry places on superficial intelligence… The type of vacant “surface meritocracy” that creates limited minds who’ll blind rely on the sorts of financial models that created this mess. Hiring purely by academic credential will get a firm, well, academic analysis. Hard to imagine anybody but a pure egghead would think the risk accruing from obvious malfeasance and lax oversight in the mortgage lending industry could be nullified with a mathematical formula.

You want a brutally funny, scathing look at the incompetents who insured defaults on the mortgages on all those empty McMansions you might have driven by lately? Want a look at the ex-Masters of the Universe who got taken for a ride by a pack of street-level mortgage brokers, speculators in non-recourse venues, loan sharks like Angelo Mozillo and the twice-as-clever-as-they-were securitizers in their firms who grabbed buckets of bonus money as they knew the house of cards was teetering? I’m sure a lot of people think this book is terribly timed, and not very funny at the moment. Those people are crazy. Damn it Feels Good to be a Banker only got funnier in the past two weeks.

Why get mad at Wall Street when you can laugh at it? We all need some humor and this book delivers it in spades. Go out and buy a copy. What else are you going to do with the money, invest it?

Over on Shrinktalk, Dr. Rob and I conclude our three part conversation on the Intersection Between Work and Life with a bit on something every American worker understands, Exhaustion.
But there’s a little more to it than that. Dr. Rob asked me a curious question at the end. What I’d think of my career, law and writing at the end of my life. That’s a hell of a thing to pop on somebody, and I tried to answer it. You can read that over on Dr. Rob’s site. But if I had an image – a way I’d like to look back on it all when I pulled my eyes up from the newspaper and realized I was standing in front of an oncoming train with nowhere to run – I hope it’d be something like this: