Herculodge

The Recovering Gasbag

I know many people, friends and family members, who have been in therapy for over three decades, for which they have produced no discernible change, no effective result that justifies the time and money spent being analyzed. And yet these individuals keep writing checks to their therapists and sniffling into their tissues as they rehash childhood traumas for the umpteenth time. In the face of overwhelming evidence that they have received no worthwhile benefits from talking to their shrink, their dogged determination to stay in therapy begs the question: Why? The answer is not a flattering one, to be sure, but necessary if we are to understand the underlying motive of the therapy patient. The real purpose of therapy is to indulge the patient’s appetite for talking about himself, with the zeal of an exhibitionist, not only to his therapist but to everyone, strangers and intimates alike.  In other words, the therapy patient is a gasbag. His grotesque exhibitionism is encouraged by therapeutic dogma that would have the patient believe his recovery is contingent on his willingness to divulge his darkest secrets to the public. The patient’s confession,  according to therapeutic orthodoxy, empowers him because he is no longer running away from the demons that haunt him. He is confronting his demons head-on and in the process cleansing his psyche through his fearless ongoing purgation.

If we accept the premise that therapy provides at best marginal benefits while being, at close to $150 an hour, an expensive pursuit, we can conclude that therapy, as a business model, targets well-to-do, narcissistic gasbags who find in therapy justification for their compulsion to talk about themselves all the time to all people at any place and in any circumstance. We can further conclude that if we were to take away the world’s gasbags who enjoy a deep reserve of discretionary income, psychotherapy, as we currently know it, would cease to exist.

Unfortunately, there is no such shortage of gasbags who are eager to find in therapy a way to give their urge to talk about themselves validity. The shrewd, entrepreneurial therapist knows that giving the gasbag a rationale for talking about himself will keep the gasbag patient satisfied with the therapist’s service. Therefore, the therapist who wishes to enjoy a lucrative career would be wise to study those principles that help encourage the gasbag’s proclivity for making himself the center of discussion.

The first principle the aspiring therapist must grasp is that the patient, eager to reveal his most salacious secrets to all, must have the therapist’s assurance that there is nothing too grotesque or shameful for public consumption. To the contrary, it is the therapist’s job to indoctrinate his patient with the belief that the more scandalous the patient’s revelations, the more worthy they are for public viewing. The Nothing-Too-Shameful Doctrine is well described in Wendy Kaminer’s book-length critique of recovery and self-help movements I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional. One of her criticisms is that people in recovery who meet in support groups don’t achieve any real intimacy or community. Instead, they are all trying to outdo the other in a sort of victimization competition where the so-called recovery patients embark on a confession-fest, the more lurid and revolting the details the better chance they have of winning center stage. In some cases, if the gasbag is dramatic enough, he can enjoy visibility on a day-time television talk show. What these recovering gasbags are aspiring towards, Kaminer suggests, is a sort of quasi celebrity:

On talk shows, ordinary people, subject of tomorrow’s scholars, find their voice. Men and mostly women distinguished only by various and weird infidelities or histories of drug abuse and overeating get equal time with movie actors, soap stars, and the occasional hair stylist. Now everyone can hope for sixty minutes of fame, minus some time for commercials.

The aspiring therapist would be wise to heed Kaminer’s observation that for many, the appeal of therapy is to jumpstart one’s career in acting, to become a spokesperson for some cause or other, or to simply enjoy celebrity-scale visibility. Therefore, the successful therapist must understand that he is not so much a therapist as he is an acting coach or an entertainment manager.

Making his patient more entertaining is the second principle the aspiring therapist must grasp. Many therapists will scoff at this notion. They will say that their patients don’t need to be entertaining. What they need is positive change. This is an erroneous assumption. The patient is in fact not at all interested in change. What he desires above all is to be more of the self-centered bore he already is. One tool that the successful therapist knows is effective in his patient’s quest for self-promotion is the fluent knowledge of pretentious psychological jargon so that the patient can use his newly-acquired language at cocktail parties and other venues where he will have a beholden audience. The cunning therapist will therefore during therapy dole out a grandiloquent linguistic bouillabaisse, not only of standard psychological terms borrowed from Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, but comprised of the fashionable German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. A therapist’s cheat sheet or lexicon that he will have taped to his sleeve will include the following:  catharsis, collective unconscious, Dionysian, ennui, hubris,  hypermasculinity, megacognitive, metamorphosis, nihilistic, Oedipal, pathos, scatological, schism, stream of consciousness, succubus, synchronicity,  thanatos, transpersonal, Weltanschauung, Weltschmerz, Ubermensch, Zeitgeist.

Once the patient becomes fluent with the above lexicon, the therapist can be confident his patient will insert the above terms every opportunity he can and that some listeners, envious of the patient’s seemingly esoteric knowledge, will ask the patient for the name and phone number of his therapist so that the envious listener, too, can undergo the rigors of therapy and in turn enjoy the pleasures of a being a pretentious bore.

Another benefit from learning an esoteric vocabulary is that the patient, like the therapist, can use big words to couch obvious and self-evident observations about the psychoanalytical process. Inflating his “recovery journey” with fancy jargon is necessary so that the patient and the therapist are less inclined to see the truth of their endeavor, which is that what they’re doing is vapid and inane. Wendy Kaminer points out in her book that many therapists and self-help gurus are “more like superfluous consultants, mystifying the obvious in jargon and italics to justify their jobs.” To further add to the therapist’s arsenal of lame jargon, he would be well advised to write a self-help book so that the patient can consult the book for even more in-depth fatuities about the “healing process.”

Another way the therapist can make the patient feel remarkably important is to write down the patient’s dreams and to claim that the dreams are so original and so poignant that the therapist would really love, with the patient’s permission, to publish the dreams, in all their surrealistic detail, in one of his books. The idea that the patient’s dreams will be published in the context of some fashionable psychological movement or other will make the patient feel that he is part of history and that his dreams, as case studies, will be poured over and scrutinized by psychologists, professors, and students of psychology for decades to come. Eventually, the patient’s dreams will become as familiar as Pavlov’s dog.  Titillating the patient with these celebrity possibilities will bolster his confidence as a gasbag who is entitled to enlighten others with his unflinching confessions.

Another effective way to embolden the recovering gasbag is for the therapist to indoctrinate his patient with the belief that therapy makes him more sensitive and morally superior to those who are not in therapy. To accomplish this, the therapist must convince his patient that therapy is a heroic journey complete with the slaying of dragons (exorcising one’s inner demons) and the acquisition of the Holy Grail (the attainment of serenity, wisdom, and equanimity). This heroic journey is not limited to neurotics and recovering addicts. It is a journey that all responsible citizens must undertake and it is the recovering gasbag’s obligation to spread the way of his serenity to others. As an enlightened patient, he must now go on a crusade based on his newly-found moral authority. It is an authority, Kaminer tells us, not based on research or science but of experience. Therefore the aspiring psychologist would be wise to teach his patient that his personal experience is the bedrock truth from which all other empirical evidence is measured.

That empirical evidence contradicts the claims of therapy should be concealed by the therapist who must not let his patient know the frightening truth about therapy, which is that self-rumination overemphasizes the self to the point that it is an absurd exercise in excessive naval-gazing.  To sink deeper into his bottomless abyss of self-absorption, the patient accrues more and more tools to analyze his “condition.” He develops a sophisticated language to define who he is to himself and to others. He learns how to interpret his dreams, how to hug himself, how to give himself a self-esteem lollipop whenever his feelings are hurt or whenever he’s feeling rejected. And as he turns more and more inward, the world around him disintegrates and fragments into millions and millions of self-absorbed islands of self. Psychologist James Hillman and writer Michael Ventura have collaborated to write a book that addresses this relationship between the “healing self” and the fallen world outside that self. The book appropriately is titled We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse.  Hillman observes that “We’ve had a hundred years of analysis, and people are getting more and more sensitive, and the world is getting worse and worse. . . . We’re working on our relationships constantly, and our feeling and reflections, but look what’s left out of that.” He answers his own question. What’s left out, he writes, is a “deteriorating world.” Therapy hasn’t noticed its failure to address the “deteriorating world, ” he writes, “Because psychotherapy is only working on that ‘inside’ soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do the job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets—the sickness is out there.”

The aspiring therapist will know that his patient doesn’t want to focus on what is “out there.” He wishes to turn inward and to be the sole focus of the discussion. He is after all the gasbag for whom the therapist is the helium tank forever infusing his patient with the inflated self-importance he demands.

I know many people, friends and family members, who have been in therapy for over three decades, for which they have produced no discernible change, no effective result that justifies the time and money spent being analyzed. And yet these individuals keep writing checks to their therapists and sniffling into their tissues as they rehash childhood traumas for the umpteenth time. In the face of overwhelming evidence that they have received no worthwhile benefits from talking to their shrink, their dogged determination to stay in therapy begs the question: Why? The answer is not a flattering one, to be sure, but necessary if we are to understand the underlying motive of the therapy patient. The real purpose of therapy is to indulge the patient’s appetite for talking about himself, with the zeal of an exhibitionist, not only to his therapist but to everyone, strangers and intimates alike.  In other words, the therapy patient is a gasbag. His grotesque exhibitionism is encouraged by therapeutic dogma that would have the patient believe his recovery is contingent on his willingness to divulge his darkest secrets to the public. The patient’s confession,  according to therapeutic orthodoxy, empowers him because he is no longer running away from the demons that haunt him. He is confronting his demons head-on and in the process cleansing his psyche through his fearless ongoing purgation.

If we accept the premise that therapy provides at best marginal benefits while being, at close to $150 an hour, an expensive pursuit, we can conclude that therapy, as a business model, targets well-to-do, narcissistic gasbags who find in therapy justification for their compulsion to talk about themselves all the time to all people at any place and in any circumstance. We can further conclude that if we were to take away the world’s gasbags who enjoy a deep reserve of discretionary income, psychotherapy, as we currently know it, would cease to exist.

Unfortunately, there is no such shortage of gasbags who are eager to find in therapy a way to give their urge to talk about themselves validity. The shrewd, entrepreneurial therapist knows that giving the gasbag a rationale for talking about himself will keep the gasbag patient satisfied with the therapist’s service. Therefore, the therapist who wishes to enjoy a lucrative career would be wise to study those principles that help encourage the gasbag’s proclivity for making himself the center of discussion.

The first principle the aspiring therapist must grasp is that the patient, eager to reveal his most salacious secrets to all, must have the therapist’s assurance that there is nothing too grotesque or shameful for public consumption. To the contrary, it is the therapist’s job to indoctrinate his patient with the belief that the more scandalous the patient’s revelations, the more worthy they are for public viewing. The Nothing-Too-Shameful Doctrine is well described in Wendy Kaminer’s book-length critique of recovery and self-help movements I'm Dysfunctional, You're Dysfunctional. One of her criticisms is that people in recovery who meet in support groups don’t achieve any real intimacy or community. Instead, they are all trying to outdo the other in a sort of victimization competition where the so-called recovery patients embark on a confession-fest, the more lurid and revolting the details the better chance they have of winning center stage. In some cases, if the gasbag is dramatic enough, he can enjoy visibility on a day-time television talk show. What these recovering gasbags are aspiring towards, Kaminer suggests, is a sort of quasi celebrity:

On talk shows, ordinary people, subject of tomorrow’s scholars, find their voice. Men and mostly women distinguished only by various and weird infidelities or histories of drug abuse and overeating get equal time with movie actors, soap stars, and the occasional hair stylist. Now everyone can hope for sixty minutes of fame, minus some time for commercials.

The aspiring therapist would be wise to heed Kaminer’s observation that for many, the appeal of therapy is to jumpstart one’s career in acting, to become a spokesperson for some cause or other, or to simply enjoy celebrity-scale visibility. Therefore, the successful therapist must understand that he is not so much a therapist as he is an acting coach or an entertainment manager.

Making his patient more entertaining is the second principle the aspiring therapist must grasp. Many therapists will scoff at this notion. They will say that their patients don’t need to be entertaining. What they need is positive change. This is an erroneous assumption. The patient is in fact not at all interested in change. What he desires above all is to be more of the self-centered bore he already is. One tool that the successful therapist knows is effective in his patient’s quest for self-promotion is the fluent knowledge of pretentious psychological jargon so that the patient can use his newly-acquired language at cocktail parties and other venues where he will have a beholden audience. The cunning therapist will therefore during therapy dole out a grandiloquent linguistic bouillabaisse, not only of standard psychological terms borrowed from Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, but comprised of the fashionable German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. A therapist’s cheat sheet or lexicon that he will have taped to his sleeve will include the following:  catharsis, collective unconscious, Dionysian, ennui, hubris,  hypermasculinity, megacognitive, metamorphosis, nihilistic, Oedipal, pathos, scatological, schism, stream of consciousness, succubus, synchronicity,  thanatos, transpersonal, Weltanschauung, Weltschmerz, Ubermensch, Zeitgeist.

Once the patient becomes fluent with the above lexicon, the therapist can be confident his patient will insert the above terms every opportunity he can and that some listeners, envious of the patient’s seemingly esoteric knowledge, will ask the patient for the name and phone number of his therapist so that the envious listener, too, can undergo the rigors of therapy and in turn enjoy the pleasures of a being a pretentious bore.

Another benefit from learning an esoteric vocabulary is that the patient, like the therapist, can use big words to couch obvious and self-evident observations about the psychoanalytical process. Inflating his “recovery journey” with fancy jargon is necessary so that the patient and the therapist are less inclined to see the truth of their endeavor, which is that what they’re doing is vapid and inane. Wendy Kaminer points out in her book that many therapists and self-help gurus are “more like superfluous consultants, mystifying the obvious in jargon and italics to justify their jobs.” To further add to the therapist’s arsenal of lame jargon, he would be well advised to write a self-help book so that the patient can consult the book for even more in-depth fatuities about the “healing process.”

Another way the therapist can make the patient feel remarkably important is to write down the patient’s dreams and to claim that the dreams are so original and so poignant that the therapist would really love, with the patient’s permission, to publish the dreams, in all their surrealistic detail, in one of his books. The idea that the patient’s dreams will be published in the context of some fashionable psychological movement or other will make the patient feel that he is part of history and that his dreams, as case studies, will be poured over and scrutinized by psychologists, professors, and students of psychology for decades to come. Eventually, the patient’s dreams will become as familiar as Pavlov’s dog.  Titillating the patient with these celebrity possibilities will bolster his confidence as a gasbag who is entitled to enlighten others with his unflinching confessions.

Another effective way to embolden the recovering gasbag is for the therapist to indoctrinate his patient with the belief that therapy makes him more sensitive and morally superior to those who are not in therapy. To accomplish this, the therapist must convince his patient that therapy is a heroic journey complete with the slaying of dragons (exorcising one’s inner demons) and the acquisition of the Holy Grail (the attainment of serenity, wisdom, and equanimity). This heroic journey is not limited to neurotics and recovering addicts. It is a journey that all responsible citizens must undertake and it is the recovering gasbag’s obligation to spread the way of his serenity to others. As an enlightened patient, he must now go on a crusade based on his newly-found moral authority. It is an authority, Kaminer tells us, not based on research or science but of experience. Therefore the aspiring psychologist would be wise to teach his patient that his personal experience is the bedrock truth from which all other empirical evidence is measured.

That empirical evidence contradicts the claims of therapy should be concealed by the therapist who must not let his patient know the frightening truth about therapy, which is that self-rumination overemphasizes the self to the point that it is an absurd exercise in excessive naval-gazing.  To sink deeper into his bottomless abyss of self-absorption, the patient accrues more and more tools to analyze his “condition.” He develops a sophisticated language to define who he is to himself and to others. He learns how to interpret his dreams, how to hug himself, how to give himself a self-esteem lollipop whenever his feelings are hurt or whenever he’s feeling rejected. And as he turns more and more inward, the world around him disintegrates and fragments into millions and millions of self-absorbed islands of self. Psychologist James Hillman and writer Michael Ventura have collaborated to write a book that addresses this relationship between the “healing self” and the fallen world outside that self. The book appropriately is titled We've Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse.  Hillman observes that “We’ve had a hundred years of analysis, and people are getting more and more sensitive, and the world is getting worse and worse. . . . We’re working on our relationships constantly, and our feeling and reflections, but look what’s left out of that.” He answers his own question. What’s left out, he writes, is a “deteriorating world.” Therapy hasn’t noticed its failure to address the “deteriorating world, ” he writes, “Because psychotherapy is only working on that ‘inside’ soul. By removing the soul from the world and not recognizing that the soul is also in the world, psychotherapy can’t do the job anymore. The buildings are sick, the institutions are sick, the banking system’s sick, the schools, the streets—the sickness is out there.”

The aspiring therapist will know that his patient doesn’t want to focus on what is “out there.” He wishes to turn inward and to be the sole focus of the discussion. He is after all the gasbag for whom the therapist is the helium tank forever infusing his patient with the inflated self-importance he demands.

The Authoritative Gasbag

The authoritative gasbag is someone whose sense of incredulity and outrage at the world’s utter absence of common sense and moral decency forever vexes him. Tormented, he is overcome by the need to complain to anyone who will listen to him as he explains that he bears excruciating hardships because he alone assumes responsibility in a world of sloths, frauds, and libertines.

Like the novelist John Kennedy Toole’s rotund loudmouth fictional creation  Ignatius J. Reilly, the authoritative gasbag feels he is a genius surrounded by a “confederacy of dunces.” He deems himself as an unappreciated original thinker who longs to have more power, perhaps that of a monarch, to implement his views.

Why can’t people be as good as he is? Why can’t they see things as clearly as he does? Why can’t they at least attempt to conform to his worldview and thereby benefit from his superior ways? Forever befuddled and embattled, the authoritative gasbag assumes that the world’s hordes are obdurate, contumacious children who, incapable of being reasoned with, must be controlled by elaborate rules, regulations, and constant nagging. He of course takes it upon himself to do the nagging and therefore becomes in the process what is commonly known as a “busy body.” He will mettle in other people’s affairs and will often assume authority he does not possess.

For example, he will like to be the self-appointed life guard at a public pool. He will admonish people for running across the pavement while pointing at the “No Running” rule on a nearby sign.  Or he will remind people that bottled beverages and alcohol of all kinds are strictly prohibited. During the “kid’s time” in the pool, he will expel adults still lingering in the pool and vice versa during “adult’s time.” He will discourage loud splashing, rough-housing, and any other ruckus he deems inappropriate even though he has no credentials or official sanction to perform such policing.

When he cannot police and control others to his satisfaction, he will become a tattletale. For example, he will make a stink when he sees other airline passengers violating the no-more-than-two-carry-on rule and will gloat with self-satisfaction as he watches the airline attendant force the offending passenger off the plane in order to check in the third carry-on piece. Or he will notify an usher when he sees that a theater patron has, rather than purchase overpriced concession candy, smuggle champagne and fried chicken into the theater and he will watch with glee as the offending patron is expelled from the premises or forced to throw away his food stuffs and libations.

In true gasbag fashion, the authoritative gasbag cannot withhold his opinions so be leery if he is standing behind you in the grocery line. He will scrutinize the products in your cart and then admonish you for your lack of fresh fruits and vegetables and your preponderance for frozen microwave dishes rich in saturated fats, even going so far as to equate your shoddy food choices with the neglect and abuse of your children. A shopping cart full of too many sugar-laden cereals and trans-fats can spur this gasbag into getting out his cell phone and speed-dialing the Department of Social Services. 
When not inspecting strangers’ grocery choices, the authoritative gasbag is commonly known to take on the mantle of neighborhood watchdog. In addition to keeping a sharp eye on suspicious loiterers, he will be the official dog crap monitor. Whenever a neighbor leaves a dog deposit on his lawn, he will insert a toothpick flagged with the time and date of the offense and photograph the deposit for evidence that he is amassing against the offending neighbor. The more high-tech gasbag will install security video cameras around his front yard and show, via live video streaming on the Internet, the dogs and their owners violating community codes of dog ownership, and in the process succeed at humiliating his neighbors for using his lawn as a dog dumping ground.

This gasbag’s love of wielding authority will draw him to types of employment that will maximize his dictatorial excesses. He may be a police officer. He may be a security guard at the shopping mall. He may be a school administrator or, as he likes to call himself, an “educator.” He may become a personal trainer, a nutritionist, a martial arts instructor, a fire safety expert, a neighborhood crime watch organizer, a health inspector, a social worker, a technology geek, a PTA leader, a marital advice columnist, or an inspector of television, radio and Internet smut.

Or if you are as unfortunate as I am, he may be your condo association president. I am thinking specifically of a man I will call Mel Barnes, the condo president of a condo unit I once owned. Mel was silver-haired and strong-jawed with cobalt blue eyes that roiled beneath a stare of perpetual self-righteousness and moral clarity. His proclivity for eating steak, a habit while growing up in Texas, gave him a pot belly on an otherwise slender body. He was, as are many condo association presidents, retired, and this gave him the time necessary to do all of a condo president’s duties, which were many. One of his most unpleasant chores was fining the condo owners, as laid out in the condo bylaws, fifty dollars every time they parked in the guest parking, or threw their weeds and garden trimmings in the dumpsters, or didn’t replace their batteries in their home fire detectors, or didn’t keep their cats inside their condos so that their cats illegally roamed the area and used other people’s flower beds as latrines, or didn’t lock the back gate that separated our collective back yard from the tennis courts so that any riffraff could get inside our property.

Mel Barnes was so distressed and frustrated over his vigorous condo duties that he had developed high blood pressure, ulcers, and Temporo-Mandibular Joint Syndrome. He grew to resent those who did not appreciate his vigilance and who did not follow all the rules and bylaws.

During my first week at the condo as I was tossing moving boxes into the dumpster Mel tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I hate to be persnickety but you need to tear those boxes into smaller pieces to make room for the rest of us.”

I did not want to get on Mel’s bad side and began shredding the boxes to his satisfaction.

About a week later I was in my little front patio area taking off my muddy shoes after jogging near the beach when Mel sauntered over, leaned over my wrought iron gate and told me a burglar had broken into our subterranean parking garage by squeezing through a window and using a garden hose as a ladder. Several items were stolen out of people’s cars, including a laptop computer. He told me the gardeners would have to disconnect the garden hose and keep it in the tool shed before and after every use. I apologized as if the problem were somehow my fault while he flexed his jaw muscles and looked down at my muddy shoes and my front patio with displeasure. After clearing out the weeds and brush, I had not planted anything yet. There was nothing but a bunch of dirt clods. 
“My, your front patio looks rather bare. I suppose you weren’t planning on doing anything to it?”

I immediately went to a garden store and bought a bunch of “hearty” flowers, hoping that might keep Mel off my back. 
He was appeased but only temporarily. A week later he came over to tell me my downstairs toilet was too loud. He could hear it all the way from his condo. He speculated that perhaps the water level in the tank was set too high. Or the tank ball was rotted and not sealing correctly so the tank got too low and was always filling. Or perhaps the fill valve was too long and was siphoning into the overflow pipe. I pretended to understand what he was saying, then called a plumber who recommended that I just get a whole brand new toilet, which I did.

The next morning I heard someone standing on a squeaky stepladder behind my master bedroom. I stepped outside and saw Mel using his bare hands to apply gobs of Crisco shortening to the top of our gate. I asked him what he was doing and he explained that kids had been trying to climb over the seven-foot high enclosure. The shortening would help deter their efforts.

“They could slip and break their necks,” I said.

“That’s not my problem. If they want to ignore our ‘No Trespassing’ sign that’s their business.”

He explained that we might have to tap our emergency fund to add another five feet, including barb wire, to the gate. Then he said, “I hate to think what this place would do without me.”

A week later he informed me that the mud clumps collected under my rafters were wasp nests. I knocked down one of the nests with a broom stick and almost got stung by a testy wasp. When I told him what happened, he chastised me for not using the proper equipment. He came over with his stepladder and a can of wasp spray. As he climbed up on the stepladder and sprayed under my rafter, dozens of pale winged insects flew outside. He said I had a problem far worse than wasps—termites. Winged termites, known as “swarmers,” provided evidence that termites were breeding inside my house.

“Any termite droppings inside your house?” he asked me.

I described some strange gritty substance I kept finding on my living room carpet. It looked like orange pencil shavings. Mel admonished me for not telling him about this earlier, disappeared, then returned with a flashlight and a pad and pencil. He knelt before a small mound of termite droppings on my living room carpet, then announced we had an infestation. He would sue the termite exterminators who, three years ago, gave the condo a ten-year guarantee when they fumigated the premises. The litigation could be lengthy and we didn’t have the reserves to pay for another full-out fumigation. But there were cheaper and safer alternatives that would not require that we tent up the entire condo and subject ourselves to poisons that would harm us and our pets.  He had a relative in Orange County who could get him a special deal on XT-2000, a termite killer made from orange peel oil. He would also look into other phenolic compounds, liquid nitrogen, high heat, baiting, and topical fungus. His eyes gleamed and he sounded excited as if he were planning for a great war. For the next several days I would see him flooding other condo owners with technical information they did not want to know about the killing of termites. Polymethoxylated flavonoids just might do the trick, he said.

I realized that Mel was never so happy as when he was immersed in a crisis that allowed him to assume the role of an authority. Yes, he was a malcontent who loved to complain and talk about the enormous difficulties he faced as our condo manager, but take those difficulties away and Mel would have lost something vital to his being, something that kept him happy and alive, his excuse to talk ad nauseam about the woes and challenges that had befallen him.

The authoritative gasbag is someone whose sense of incredulity and outrage at the world’s utter absence of common sense and moral decency forever vexes him. Tormented, he is overcome by the need to complain to anyone who will listen to him as he explains that he bears excruciating hardships because he alone assumes responsibility in a world of sloths, frauds, and libertines.

Like the novelist John Kennedy Toole’s rotund loudmouth fictional creation  Ignatius J. Reilly, the authoritative gasbag feels he is a genius surrounded by a “confederacy of dunces.” He deems himself as an unappreciated original thinker who longs to have more power, perhaps that of a monarch, to implement his views.

Why can’t people be as good as he is? Why can’t they see things as clearly as he does? Why can’t they at least attempt to conform to his worldview and thereby benefit from his superior ways? Forever befuddled and embattled, the authoritative gasbag assumes that the world’s hordes are obdurate, contumacious children who, incapable of being reasoned with, must be controlled by elaborate rules, regulations, and constant nagging. He of course takes it upon himself to do the nagging and therefore becomes in the process what is commonly known as a “busy body.” He will mettle in other people’s affairs and will often assume authority he does not possess.

For example, he will like to be the self-appointed life guard at a public pool. He will admonish people for running across the pavement while pointing at the “No Running” rule on a nearby sign.  Or he will remind people that bottled beverages and alcohol of all kinds are strictly prohibited. During the “kid’s time” in the pool, he will expel adults still lingering in the pool and vice versa during “adult’s time.” He will discourage loud splashing, rough-housing, and any other ruckus he deems inappropriate even though he has no credentials or official sanction to perform such policing.

When he cannot police and control others to his satisfaction, he will become a tattletale. For example, he will make a stink when he sees other airline passengers violating the no-more-than-two-carry-on rule and will gloat with self-satisfaction as he watches the airline attendant force the offending passenger off the plane in order to check in the third carry-on piece. Or he will notify an usher when he sees that a theater patron has, rather than purchase overpriced concession candy, smuggle champagne and fried chicken into the theater and he will watch with glee as the offending patron is expelled from the premises or forced to throw away his food stuffs and libations.

In true gasbag fashion, the authoritative gasbag cannot withhold his opinions so be leery if he is standing behind you in the grocery line. He will scrutinize the products in your cart and then admonish you for your lack of fresh fruits and vegetables and your preponderance for frozen microwave dishes rich in saturated fats, even going so far as to equate your shoddy food choices with the neglect and abuse of your children. A shopping cart full of too many sugar-laden cereals and trans-fats can spur this gasbag into getting out his cell phone and speed-dialing the Department of Social Services. 
When not inspecting strangers’ grocery choices, the authoritative gasbag is commonly known to take on the mantle of neighborhood watchdog. In addition to keeping a sharp eye on suspicious loiterers, he will be the official dog crap monitor. Whenever a neighbor leaves a dog deposit on his lawn, he will insert a toothpick flagged with the time and date of the offense and photograph the deposit for evidence that he is amassing against the offending neighbor. The more high-tech gasbag will install security video cameras around his front yard and show, via live video streaming on the Internet, the dogs and their owners violating community codes of dog ownership, and in the process succeed at humiliating his neighbors for using his lawn as a dog dumping ground.

This gasbag’s love of wielding authority will draw him to types of employment that will maximize his dictatorial excesses. He may be a police officer. He may be a security guard at the shopping mall. He may be a school administrator or, as he likes to call himself, an “educator.” He may become a personal trainer, a nutritionist, a martial arts instructor, a fire safety expert, a neighborhood crime watch organizer, a health inspector, a social worker, a technology geek, a PTA leader, a marital advice columnist, or an inspector of television, radio and Internet smut.

Or if you are as unfortunate as I am, he may be your condo association president. I am thinking specifically of a man I will call Mel Barnes, the condo president of a condo unit I once owned. Mel was silver-haired and strong-jawed with cobalt blue eyes that roiled beneath a stare of perpetual self-righteousness and moral clarity. His proclivity for eating steak, a habit while growing up in Texas, gave him a pot belly on an otherwise slender body. He was, as are many condo association presidents, retired, and this gave him the time necessary to do all of a condo president’s duties, which were many. One of his most unpleasant chores was fining the condo owners, as laid out in the condo bylaws, fifty dollars every time they parked in the guest parking, or threw their weeds and garden trimmings in the dumpsters, or didn’t replace their batteries in their home fire detectors, or didn’t keep their cats inside their condos so that their cats illegally roamed the area and used other people’s flower beds as latrines, or didn’t lock the back gate that separated our collective back yard from the tennis courts so that any riffraff could get inside our property.

Mel Barnes was so distressed and frustrated over his vigorous condo duties that he had developed high blood pressure, ulcers, and Temporo-Mandibular Joint Syndrome. He grew to resent those who did not appreciate his vigilance and who did not follow all the rules and bylaws.

During my first week at the condo as I was tossing moving boxes into the dumpster Mel tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I hate to be persnickety but you need to tear those boxes into smaller pieces to make room for the rest of us.”

I did not want to get on Mel’s bad side and began shredding the boxes to his satisfaction.

About a week later I was in my little front patio area taking off my muddy shoes after jogging near the beach when Mel sauntered over, leaned over my wrought iron gate and told me a burglar had broken into our subterranean parking garage by squeezing through a window and using a garden hose as a ladder. Several items were stolen out of people’s cars, including a laptop computer. He told me the gardeners would have to disconnect the garden hose and keep it in the tool shed before and after every use. I apologized as if the problem were somehow my fault while he flexed his jaw muscles and looked down at my muddy shoes and my front patio with displeasure. After clearing out the weeds and brush, I had not planted anything yet. There was nothing but a bunch of dirt clods. 
“My, your front patio looks rather bare. I suppose you weren’t planning on doing anything to it?”

I immediately went to a garden store and bought a bunch of “hearty” flowers, hoping that might keep Mel off my back. 
He was appeased but only temporarily. A week later he came over to tell me my downstairs toilet was too loud. He could hear it all the way from his condo. He speculated that perhaps the water level in the tank was set too high. Or the tank ball was rotted and not sealing correctly so the tank got too low and was always filling. Or perhaps the fill valve was too long and was siphoning into the overflow pipe. I pretended to understand what he was saying, then called a plumber who recommended that I just get a whole brand new toilet, which I did.

The next morning I heard someone standing on a squeaky stepladder behind my master bedroom. I stepped outside and saw Mel using his bare hands to apply gobs of Crisco shortening to the top of our gate. I asked him what he was doing and he explained that kids had been trying to climb over the seven-foot high enclosure. The shortening would help deter their efforts.

“They could slip and break their necks,” I said.

“That’s not my problem. If they want to ignore our ‘No Trespassing’ sign that’s their business.”

He explained that we might have to tap our emergency fund to add another five feet, including barb wire, to the gate. Then he said, “I hate to think what this place would do without me.”

A week later he informed me that the mud clumps collected under my rafters were wasp nests. I knocked down one of the nests with a broom stick and almost got stung by a testy wasp. When I told him what happened, he chastised me for not using the proper equipment. He came over with his stepladder and a can of wasp spray. As he climbed up on the stepladder and sprayed under my rafter, dozens of pale winged insects flew outside. He said I had a problem far worse than wasps—termites. Winged termites, known as “swarmers,” provided evidence that termites were breeding inside my house.

“Any termite droppings inside your house?” he asked me.

I described some strange gritty substance I kept finding on my living room carpet. It looked like orange pencil shavings. Mel admonished me for not telling him about this earlier, disappeared, then returned with a flashlight and a pad and pencil. He knelt before a small mound of termite droppings on my living room carpet, then announced we had an infestation. He would sue the termite exterminators who, three years ago, gave the condo a ten-year guarantee when they fumigated the premises. The litigation could be lengthy and we didn’t have the reserves to pay for another full-out fumigation. But there were cheaper and safer alternatives that would not require that we tent up the entire condo and subject ourselves to poisons that would harm us and our pets.  He had a relative in Orange County who could get him a special deal on XT-2000, a termite killer made from orange peel oil. He would also look into other phenolic compounds, liquid nitrogen, high heat, baiting, and topical fungus. His eyes gleamed and he sounded excited as if he were planning for a great war. For the next several days I would see him flooding other condo owners with technical information they did not want to know about the killing of termites. Polymethoxylated flavonoids just might do the trick, he said.

I realized that Mel was never so happy as when he was immersed in a crisis that allowed him to assume the role of an authority. Yes, he was a malcontent who loved to complain and talk about the enormous difficulties he faced as our condo manager, but take those difficulties away and Mel would have lost something vital to his being, something that kept him happy and alive, his excuse to talk ad nauseam about the woes and challenges that had befallen him.

The Re-entry Student from Hell

For the most part, I am impressed with my re-entry students’ zeal for learning. Whereas many of my younger students are too shy, socially awkward, self-absorbed, or apathetic to contribute to classroom discussions, my re-entry students show a passion for the subject matter, an articulate “voice” rooted in their strong sense of self, and a wisdom that eclipses my own and leaves me humbled.

Regardless of my good students' power to humble my hubris-soaked soul, my displeasure is stirred by a certain class of re-entry gasbags, returning students whose interest isn’t so much in learning but in controlling the direction of the class, admonishing the other, younger students for their “ignorance,” and monitoring the instructor’s behavior. These re-entry students will find fault in the instructor’s “insensitivity,” tape-record the lectures in order to pour over them later with a fine-toothed comb so that they can find “offenses” that may be turned in as evidence if they should wish to file a grievance. 

Worse than filing dubious grievances, these re-entry students will do all in their power to make themselves the center of attention.  As far as they’re concerned, the entire class should be focused on addressing their personal dramas and obsessions, for self-centeredness is their most salient characteristic. 

The main reason for this self-centeredness is that a certain type of re-entry student has been hibernating for many years, if not decades, and has re-entered the college environment and society at large without a sense of boundaries and propriety.  For twenty years or so these re-entry students have soaked their fatty livers with Jack Daniels inside a dark, reeking tavern, flailed their limbs inside the seething bowels of a dysfunctional marriage, developed Carpal Tunnel Syndrome inside the cold dehumanizing cubicle of their soulless office space, or escaped some other indescribable hell. 

But then miraculously something woke them up from their private hell. It could have been anything. An inspirational film, a television program, a book, a meeting with a spiritual counselor.  Or they were overcome by the conviction they would forever live in poverty and squalor unless they furthered their education.  Whatever the source of their awakening, they developed the desire to matriculate through college and find a loud voice to counterbalance their many years of suffering in silence. 

Their silent suffering has at last come to an end, for now inside the college classroom they have found a place where people must listen to them. They are finally free to vent their pent-up grievances, their wrenching aches, and their ceaseless victimization. In short, they have become re-entry gasbags.

The re-entry gasbag can be an insufferable classroom presence and the source of a college instructor’s greatest nightmares. There are three major reasons for this gasbag’s chafing presence on the instructor and the students. The first is the gasbag’s determination to hijack the class discussion into an Oprah-style forum of touchy-feely chitchat in which the unfiltered expression of feelings is mistaken for the highest form of learning. This re-entry student is eager to share lurid tales of family abuse, addictions suffered, or graphically described medical ailments that, because of their very grotesquerie, somehow qualify as being “thought provoking.”

For example, one "thought-provoking" student, a middle-aged woman wearing a conspicuous greenish-blond wig and a sweat shirt that said, “CHOCOLATE IS MY BEST FRIEND,” interrupted a classroom discussion by standing up and describing her hysterectomy and her depression-induced bulimia. This gasbag glared at us with an expression of both anger and neediness. On one hand, her glare dared us to criticize her for spilling her guts, as it were, in the discussion. On the other hand, she wanted all of us to hug her, to wipe her red, teary cheeks with tissues, and to say how much we loved her. 

Predictably, none of her classmates nor I had any love to give her. Instead, I nodded politely at her, told her that her story was a compelling one, then tried to steer the discussion back to our reading assignment, but by then it was too late. The students were still wincing and squirming with discomfort from the woman’s confession and I was forced to end the class early.

The re-entry gasbag’s penchant for pre-maturely ending a class is matched by his or her delusion of “expertise,” usually the result of earning an “A” grade in the previous semester’s Introduction to Psychology class. Suddenly this gasbag feels free to bloviate on the “super ego,” “transference,” “projection,” “the unconscious,” and “co-dependency” as if he or she had authored these terms. This psychobabble is rarely relevant to the discussion and is bandied about so carelessly that it makes no sense and serves no purpose other than to draw attention to the gasbag’s “expertise.” 

Not limited to psychology, this “expertise” is also derived from the gasbag’s fanatical observance of programs airing on the Hallmark Hall of Fame and the Oprah Winfrey Show. Predictably, this gasbag will write essays cherry-picked from these lachrymose melodramas. Over time, the gasbag’s essays will all look the same since every composition will be a slight variation on the same motif:  A community of close-minded buffoons experiences “emotional growth” that results when an idealistic and courageous outcast, usually the gasbag, pits his or her will against the society’s backward ways and proves, once again, the triumph of the human spirit over the dark forces of learned helplessness and ignorance. 

Hell-bent on showing just how helpless and ignorant we are, the re-entry gasbag bullies and lectures us with his or her self-proclaimed expertise on all matters known to man.

A telltale sign of these re-entry gasbags is their rolling a book cart into the classroom. Resembling a homeless person’s caravan, this book cart has virtually of all their personal possessions—backpack, bottled water, extra sweaters, jackets, sun visor, umbrella, unguents, lip balm, snack items, laptop computer, electronic dictionary, and in extreme cases, an oxygen tank since these students usually suffer an allergy or condition that requires “purified” air. The sheer difficulty of pulling these elephantine book carts slows these students down and they are forever late to class. They saunter twenty minutes late with clanking, sometimes squeaking, wheels on their carts. Then comes the protracted “settling in” process. Out of breath, they loudly unzip their coat and backpack and are usually slurping loudly on coffee or some other steaming beverage. Invariably, they will spill their drink all over the floor. By the time they waddle to the bathroom, return with an entire dispenser of brown industrial-grade paper towels, and soak up the hot liquid, the class period is half-way over.

Now that the coffee spill has been somewhat cleaned, the student must get “up to speed” on the lecture so that he or she feels compelled to whisper in a loud hissing manner to another student with several questions. These transactions often involve the loaning of pens, pencils, paper, and other forgotten materials.

Then there is the eating. These gasbags, suffering from a dubious medical condition like low blood sugar or some other "affliction," unabashedly open zip-lock baggies of apple slices, cheese wedges, bagels, and peanut butter crackers. Or in some cases they have just returned from a fast-food eatery so that they open Styrofoam packaging from which they gorge on Cesar salads, submarine sandwiches, football-sized burritos, teriyaki chicken, and chow fun noodles so that the classroom is now redolent of a greasy all-you-can-eat buffet. 

Worse, between the smacking of their lips and the slurping of their drinks, they interrupt the class discussion by steering the conversation to a “co-dependent” relationship they are currently in. Or they will tell us that they have “come to terms with” or have “achieved closure with” some sociopathic relative who stole their identity and charged up all their credit cards. By the time they have finished settling in, eating several thousand calories, and lecturing us on the importance of “letting go” and achieving “closure,” the class is over and they must now go through the painstaking task of repacking all their belongings and rolling their cart to the next class where they again will be late and start their settling in, spilling of hot beverages, feasting, and monopolizing the class discussion all over again.

Because these re-entry gasbags have no real interest in learning  and are motivated by the possibility of having in every class an audience beholden to their strident confessions, these students never intend to graduate. To postpone their exit from college, they change their major every year or so or work on multiple majors, claiming that a variety of studies makes them more “well rounded.” Attending the college for over a quarter of a century or longer, many of these gasbags outlive their professors and in fact their noxious presence has been attributed as the cause for many of the professors’ premature deaths.

Old age, infirmity and decrepitude are not even sufficient to keep these re-entry gasbags away from campus. Well into their eighties, they can still be found hobbling past the campus theater or alehouse. They’re usually unbathed, have rotten teeth, rancid breath, head lice, and are dressed in the tattered attire of a professional vagabond. They’ll often have a bundle of old newspapers secured under their armpit while holding a cup of coffee. But no matter how grave their ailments, there’s something they find in the opportunity to impose their gasbag ways on the instructors and students that empowers and emboldens them. Perpetually confessing their life story to a helpless classroom audience is their magical elixir that keeps them invigorated and enlivened seemingly forever.

For the most part, I am impressed with my re-entry students’ zeal for learning. Whereas many of my younger students are too shy, socially awkward, self-absorbed, or apathetic to contribute to classroom discussions, my re-entry students show a passion for the subject matter, an articulate “voice” rooted in their strong sense of self, and a wisdom that eclipses my own and leaves me humbled.

Regardless of my good students' power to humble my hubris-soaked soul, my displeasure is stirred by a certain class of re-entry gasbags, returning students whose interest isn’t so much in learning but in controlling the direction of the class, admonishing the other, younger students for their “ignorance,” and monitoring the instructor’s behavior. These re-entry students will find fault in the instructor’s “insensitivity,” tape-record the lectures in order to pour over them later with a fine-toothed comb so that they can find “offenses” that may be turned in as evidence if they should wish to file a grievance. 

Worse than filing dubious grievances, these re-entry students will do all in their power to make themselves the center of attention.  As far as they’re concerned, the entire class should be focused on addressing their personal dramas and obsessions, for self-centeredness is their most salient characteristic. 

The main reason for this self-centeredness is that a certain type of re-entry student has been hibernating for many years, if not decades, and has re-entered the college environment and society at large without a sense of boundaries and propriety.  For twenty years or so these re-entry students have soaked their fatty livers with Jack Daniels inside a dark, reeking tavern, flailed their limbs inside the seething bowels of a dysfunctional marriage, developed Carpal Tunnel Syndrome inside the cold dehumanizing cubicle of their soulless office space, or escaped some other indescribable hell. 

But then miraculously something woke them up from their private hell. It could have been anything. An inspirational film, a television program, a book, a meeting with a spiritual counselor.  Or they were overcome by the conviction they would forever live in poverty and squalor unless they furthered their education.  Whatever the source of their awakening, they developed the desire to matriculate through college and find a loud voice to counterbalance their many years of suffering in silence. 

Their silent suffering has at last come to an end, for now inside the college classroom they have found a place where people must listen to them. They are finally free to vent their pent-up grievances, their wrenching aches, and their ceaseless victimization. In short, they have become re-entry gasbags.

The re-entry gasbag can be an insufferable classroom presence and the source of a college instructor’s greatest nightmares. There are three major reasons for this gasbag’s chafing presence on the instructor and the students. The first is the gasbag’s determination to hijack the class discussion into an Oprah-style forum of touchy-feely chitchat in which the unfiltered expression of feelings is mistaken for the highest form of learning. This re-entry student is eager to share lurid tales of family abuse, addictions suffered, or graphically described medical ailments that, because of their very grotesquerie, somehow qualify as being “thought provoking.”

For example, one "thought-provoking" student, a middle-aged woman wearing a conspicuous greenish-blond wig and a sweat shirt that said, “CHOCOLATE IS MY BEST FRIEND,” interrupted a classroom discussion by standing up and describing her hysterectomy and her depression-induced bulimia. This gasbag glared at us with an expression of both anger and neediness. On one hand, her glare dared us to criticize her for spilling her guts, as it were, in the discussion. On the other hand, she wanted all of us to hug her, to wipe her red, teary cheeks with tissues, and to say how much we loved her. 

Predictably, none of her classmates nor I had any love to give her. Instead, I nodded politely at her, told her that her story was a compelling one, then tried to steer the discussion back to our reading assignment, but by then it was too late. The students were still wincing and squirming with discomfort from the woman’s confession and I was forced to end the class early.

The re-entry gasbag’s penchant for pre-maturely ending a class is matched by his or her delusion of “expertise,” usually the result of earning an “A” grade in the previous semester’s Introduction to Psychology class. Suddenly this gasbag feels free to bloviate on the “super ego,” “transference,” “projection,” “the unconscious,” and “co-dependency” as if he or she had authored these terms. This psychobabble is rarely relevant to the discussion and is bandied about so carelessly that it makes no sense and serves no purpose other than to draw attention to the gasbag’s “expertise.” 

Not limited to psychology, this “expertise” is also derived from the gasbag’s fanatical observance of programs airing on the Hallmark Hall of Fame and the Oprah Winfrey Show. Predictably, this gasbag will write essays cherry-picked from these lachrymose melodramas. Over time, the gasbag’s essays will all look the same since every composition will be a slight variation on the same motif:  A community of close-minded buffoons experiences “emotional growth” that results when an idealistic and courageous outcast, usually the gasbag, pits his or her will against the society’s backward ways and proves, once again, the triumph of the human spirit over the dark forces of learned helplessness and ignorance. 

Hell-bent on showing just how helpless and ignorant we are, the re-entry gasbag bullies and lectures us with his or her self-proclaimed expertise on all matters known to man.

A telltale sign of these re-entry gasbags is their rolling a book cart into the classroom. Resembling a homeless person’s caravan, this book cart has virtually of all their personal possessions—backpack, bottled water, extra sweaters, jackets, sun visor, umbrella, unguents, lip balm, snack items, laptop computer, electronic dictionary, and in extreme cases, an oxygen tank since these students usually suffer an allergy or condition that requires “purified” air. The sheer difficulty of pulling these elephantine book carts slows these students down and they are forever late to class. They saunter twenty minutes late with clanking, sometimes squeaking, wheels on their carts. Then comes the protracted “settling in” process. Out of breath, they loudly unzip their coat and backpack and are usually slurping loudly on coffee or some other steaming beverage. Invariably, they will spill their drink all over the floor. By the time they waddle to the bathroom, return with an entire dispenser of brown industrial-grade paper towels, and soak up the hot liquid, the class period is half-way over.

Now that the coffee spill has been somewhat cleaned, the student must get “up to speed” on the lecture so that he or she feels compelled to whisper in a loud hissing manner to another student with several questions. These transactions often involve the loaning of pens, pencils, paper, and other forgotten materials.

Then there is the eating. These gasbags, suffering from a dubious medical condition like low blood sugar or some other "affliction," unabashedly open zip-lock baggies of apple slices, cheese wedges, bagels, and peanut butter crackers. Or in some cases they have just returned from a fast-food eatery so that they open Styrofoam packaging from which they gorge on Cesar salads, submarine sandwiches, football-sized burritos, teriyaki chicken, and chow fun noodles so that the classroom is now redolent of a greasy all-you-can-eat buffet. 

Worse, between the smacking of their lips and the slurping of their drinks, they interrupt the class discussion by steering the conversation to a “co-dependent” relationship they are currently in. Or they will tell us that they have “come to terms with” or have “achieved closure with” some sociopathic relative who stole their identity and charged up all their credit cards. By the time they have finished settling in, eating several thousand calories, and lecturing us on the importance of “letting go” and achieving “closure,” the class is over and they must now go through the painstaking task of repacking all their belongings and rolling their cart to the next class where they again will be late and start their settling in, spilling of hot beverages, feasting, and monopolizing the class discussion all over again.

Because these re-entry gasbags have no real interest in learning  and are motivated by the possibility of having in every class an audience beholden to their strident confessions, these students never intend to graduate. To postpone their exit from college, they change their major every year or so or work on multiple majors, claiming that a variety of studies makes them more “well rounded.” Attending the college for over a quarter of a century or longer, many of these gasbags outlive their professors and in fact their noxious presence has been attributed as the cause for many of the professors’ premature deaths.

Old age, infirmity and decrepitude are not even sufficient to keep these re-entry gasbags away from campus. Well into their eighties, they can still be found hobbling past the campus theater or alehouse. They’re usually unbathed, have rotten teeth, rancid breath, head lice, and are dressed in the tattered attire of a professional vagabond. They’ll often have a bundle of old newspapers secured under their armpit while holding a cup of coffee. But no matter how grave their ailments, there’s something they find in the opportunity to impose their gasbag ways on the instructors and students that empowers and emboldens them. Perpetually confessing their life story to a helpless classroom audience is their magical elixir that keeps them invigorated and enlivened seemingly forever.

An American Gasbag Makes Her Presence Felt in an Italian Restaurant

A nefarious type of gasbag is the provincial American tourist who travels abroad, not to learn about different cultures, but to show how vastly superior his own culture is. My friend once witnessed the appalling behavior of such a tourist while dining in a fine restaurant, somewhere in Rome. The tourist in question, an American, was a corpulent, porcine-faced woman in her mid-forties dressed in a muumuu and wearing cat-eye glasses. In a domineering southern accent, she ordered the Italian waiter to fetch her an orange soda and after he quickly returned and poured her beverage, she looked disdainfully at the glass and said she’d like some ice with it. The waiter apologized and said there was no ice available. Undeterred, she told him to run his little tootsie across the street or wherever it was he had to go and get her some ice. He apologized again and explained that there was no ice, not across the street, not in a neighboring town, not anywhere. Upon hearing this, the woman’s enormous body trembled, her face reddened, her eyes widened with rage, and her nostrils flared as she pointed her accusatory finger at the waiter and spit out the following words: “IN AMERICA WE GIVE ICE TO OUR DOGS!”

My friend, also an American tourist, said he sunk in his seat and lowered his head, ashamed to be associated with the ugly American stereotype, an insolent spoiled brat ordering people around and complaining over the most trivial things with a sour expression that evinced that her travels abroad would make her incurably miserable.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps her moment of self-righteous indignation in the face of the restaurant’s not having any ice was her moment of triumph, an opportunity to lecture to the Italian waiter about her American superiority. After all, his not having ice proved that he, an Italian living in the backward ages, was such a pitiable figure that he lived several stratums below an American canine. Perhaps the glory and pleasure of the woman’s Italian travels was her assuming the role of the know-it-all who had the right to impose her strong opinions on the ignorant natives whom she graced with her advanced education and good breeding. Moreover, when she returned to America, she could repeat over and over to all her friends how she had established her American dominance by putting the waiter in his place. We can therefore safely conclude that her motive for traveling abroad was not to enrich herself with new experiences but to provide herself with material that she could use for her know-it-all routine when she got back home.

A nefarious type of gasbag is the provincial American tourist who travels abroad, not to learn about different cultures, but to show how vastly superior his own culture is. My friend once witnessed the appalling behavior of such a tourist while dining in a fine restaurant, somewhere in Rome. The tourist in question, an American, was a corpulent, porcine-faced woman in her mid-forties dressed in a muumuu and wearing cat-eye glasses. In a domineering southern accent, she ordered the Italian waiter to fetch her an orange soda and after he quickly returned and poured her beverage, she looked disdainfully at the glass and said she’d like some ice with it. The waiter apologized and said there was no ice available. Undeterred, she told him to run his little tootsie across the street or wherever it was he had to go and get her some ice. He apologized again and explained that there was no ice, not across the street, not in a neighboring town, not anywhere. Upon hearing this, the woman’s enormous body trembled, her face reddened, her eyes widened with rage, and her nostrils flared as she pointed her accusatory finger at the waiter and spit out the following words: “IN AMERICA WE GIVE ICE TO OUR DOGS!”

My friend, also an American tourist, said he sunk in his seat and lowered his head, ashamed to be associated with the ugly American stereotype, an insolent spoiled brat ordering people around and complaining over the most trivial things with a sour expression that evinced that her travels abroad would make her incurably miserable.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps her moment of self-righteous indignation in the face of the restaurant’s not having any ice was her moment of triumph, an opportunity to lecture to the Italian waiter about her American superiority. After all, his not having ice proved that he, an Italian living in the backward ages, was such a pitiable figure that he lived several stratums below an American canine. Perhaps the glory and pleasure of the woman’s Italian travels was her assuming the role of the know-it-all who had the right to impose her strong opinions on the ignorant natives whom she graced with her advanced education and good breeding. Moreover, when she returned to America, she could repeat over and over to all her friends how she had established her American dominance by putting the waiter in his place. We can therefore safely conclude that her motive for traveling abroad was not to enrich herself with new experiences but to provide herself with material that she could use for her know-it-all routine when she got back home.

An American Gasbag Makes Her Presence Felt in an Italian Restaurant

A nefarious type of gasbag is the provincial American tourist who travels abroad, not to learn about different cultures, but to show how vastly superior his own culture is. My friend once witnessed the appalling behavior of such a tourist while dining in a fine restaurant, somewhere in Rome. The tourist in question, an American, was a corpulent, porcine-faced woman in her mid-forties dressed in a muumuu and wearing cat-eye glasses. In a domineering southern accent, she ordered the Italian waiter to fetch her an orange soda and after he quickly returned and poured her beverage, she looked disdainfully at the glass and said she’d like some ice with it. The waiter apologized and said there was no ice available. Undeterred, she told him to run his little tootsie across the street or wherever it was he had to go and get her some ice. He apologized again and explained that there was no ice, not across the street, not in a neighboring town, not anywhere. Upon hearing this, the woman’s enormous body trembled, her face reddened, her eyes widened with rage, and her nostrils flared as she pointed her accusatory finger at the waiter and spit out the following words: “IN AMERICA WE GIVE ICE TO OUR DOGS!”

My friend, also an American tourist, said he sunk in his seat and lowered his head, ashamed to be associated with the ugly American stereotype, an insolent spoiled brat ordering people around and complaining over the most trivial things with a sour expression that evinced that her travels abroad would make her incurably miserable.

Or perhaps not. Perhaps her moment of self-righteous indignation in the face of the restaurant’s not having any ice was her moment of triumph, an opportunity to lecture to the Italian waiter about her American superiority. After all, his not having ice proved that he, an Italian living in the backward ages, was such a pitiable figure that he lived several stratums below an American canine. Perhaps the glory and pleasure of the woman’s Italian travels was her assuming the role of the know-it-all who had the right to impose her strong opinions on the ignorant natives whom she graced with her advanced education and good breeding. Moreover, when she returned to America, she could repeat over and over to all her friends how she had established her American dominance by putting the waiter in his place. We can therefore safely conclude that her motive for traveling abroad was not to enrich herself with new experiences but to provide herself with material that she could use for her know-it-all routine when she got back home.

The Technological Gasbag

We can safely say that men, more than women, are more susceptible to being technological gasbags, for there is something masculine about bragging about having the most potent technological gadgetry available, especially those gizmos that can be clipped around the lap or crotch area. Men like to clutter their crotch with cell phones, pagers, personal organizers, MP3 players. The male lap is a now a hive of activity, none sexual, to the point that when it comes to sex, the technological gasbag is stimulated by showing off his new cell phone camera since he is accustomed to using artifice as a demonstration of masculine strength. This gasbag is also less potent biologically and would rather demonstrate his potency by utilizing the contraptions that crowd his lap area, his 60-gig iPod, his Personal Data Assistant or his handheld GPS satellite tracking system.  The latter device allows him to boast to strangers that he is “triangulating” signals and makes him feel like he is tracking a spy or a terrorist on some TV crime show when in fact he is simply monitoring the whereabouts of a pizza-delivery truck that is fifteen minutes late to his office.

It should be noted that the technological gasbag’s propensity for cluttering his lap with electric gadgets generates heat, which is deadly to human sperm, so the technophile essentially negates his reproductive abilities in several ways, not the least of which is the sperm bake that is going on in his testicles on a daily basis. The male body was not designed for all these gadgets hanging on a man’s crotch like electric talons. Biologically speaking, the scrotum was designed to hang below savage loincloths and stay cool, but now it is bound up in jock straps, athletic underwear, tight corduroy jeans, and cups of hot coffee. Combine all these factors with the clipped-on cell phones, pagers, and organizers around the crotch area and over time the technological gasbag’s testes shrivel and make him even more dependent on technologically impressive phallic substitutes.

Creating a technological façade to conceal one’s inadequacies is nothing new. Many years ago the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset wrote that Americans are a primitive people camouflaged behind their latest inventions. What Gasset might have added is that many Americans aren’t really hiding behind their inventions at all. Instead, they are on the forefront as they try to persuade the world that these “inventions” are mankind’s salvation. The promoters of new gadgetry are, in other words, technological gasbags, true believers in the idea that we can indeed build an indestructible titanium Tower of Babel and be like the gods.

We’ve already witnessed the Technological Crotch Monger who uses gadgets to aggrandize his masculine potency. Another common type of technological gasbag is the Troubleshooter who does a house call when your computer is on the fritz. He is typically the friend of your brother’s wife’s sister’s cousin’s friend. He is typically in his thirties or forties, is fifty pounds overweight, has never had a girlfriend, has never had a real job, and still lives with his mother. You manage to contact him because you are too cheap to have your computer serviced through a reputable company. You’ve been promised that the Troubleshooter is a “real bargain” and actually knows more about computers than the legitimate companies. But as soon as this gasbag arrives at your home and dismantles your computer, you are disavowed of these notions and a sick feeling settles in your stomach.  The first thing you will notice is that he is lonely and is in no rush to return to Mother’s. He will therefore prolong his stay at your house unnecessarily, for over twelve hours, sometimes several days, as he scans for viruses, changes modem scripts, checks and resets IP addresses, formats and re-formats disks, and deletes supposedly conflicting software packages. For show, every twenty minutes or so this gasbag will exclaim, “Ah-ha—there’s your problem.” These minor updates and repairs, combined with dozens of “necessary” shutdowns and restarts, will extend the Troubleshooter’s stay at your home to the point that you feel obliged to have him sit with your family at dinner. Needless to say, his hygiene and table manners are so horrendous that you and your family will suffer from lost appetites as you watch this heavy-breathing man wolf down most of your casserole and after-dinner pie, ice cream, and coffee.

After dinner when you’re tired and wish he would go home, he feels “refreshed” and is ready to tackle your computer crisis with renewed vigor. Bear in mind this Troubleshooter is so lonely that it is in his interest to actually sabotage your computer in order to justify his staying longer. The more cunning of these Troubleshooters can embed elusive viruses and malware into your hard-drive so that you will forever be beholden to their “services.”

I have known people who have hired these Troubleshooters in the interest of saving money and are, a year later, still not even half-way done with their project. Aside from the unbearable aggravation, when you factor in all the coffee, donuts, and dinners that the Troubleshooter mooches off you, you actually lose money in these “build-your-own” arrangements.

We can sympathize with those who try to save money while trying to keep their computers up-to-date since the computer industry is hell-bent on making our computers and software systems obsolete within six months, a condition that keeps gouging our checking accounts. Feeling constantly behind in our software systems, constantly being harassed by our operating system to conduct software updates, always downloading patches to repel viruses and worms, forever afraid that we have to engage in these tedious tasks because our “whole life” is on our computer, we feel that our computer management is a re-dramatization of the Myth of Sisyphus--one step ahead, three steps backwards.

The Gym Gasbag

The gym gasbag exudes an obnoxious pride in his belief that self-punishment and dietary austerity make him superior to the unenlightened pot-bellied sinners who languish in their life of sloth and gluttony. He is also quick to judge those who neglect the gym’s rigors, accusing them of a particular brand of moral bankruptcy. Convinced of his moral superiority, the gym gasbag is eager to lecture the nonexerciser about his flaws and the burden his unconditioned body imposes on society. Escalating health care costs are the fault of the nonexerciser. As is the paucity of garden burger choices in the supermarket. Failing to conform to society’s belief that fitness is a sort of holy edict, the nonexerciser is a modern-day leper. As Mark Greif points out in his essay, “Against Exercise”: “The person who does not exercise, in our current conception, is a slow suicide. He fails to take responsibility for his life. He doesn’t labor strenuously to forestall his death. Therefore we begin to think he causes it.”

The gym gasbag is not content condemning those who avoid intense physical activity. He must also approach strangers in the gym, presumably workout novices, and give them pointers, which are often stretched out into lectures and longwinded critiques about the novice’s shortcomings.  These lectures will include demonstrations of proper exercise method and the insistence that the novice repeat the gym gasbag’s exercise to insure that he can implement the correct form in a meticulous fashion.  Out of politeness the stranger often complies with the self-appointed gym sheriff’s instructions. However, this acquiescent gym novice should be warned that if he complains that the gasbag’s method causes pain and discomfort, the gym sheriff will simply dismiss the complaints as the result of the stranger not having acclimated to the correct method and that even though he is experiencing excruciating pain, he should “work through it” because in the long run he will benefit immeasurably from the gasbag’s unsolicited tutelage.

Further distinguishing himself from the world’s bloated infidels, the gym gasbag engages in vulgar attention-getting rituals, such as keeping a workout journal, gulping bright colored “energy” drinks, and photographing himself between exercises with his cell phone camera.  His grotesque ostentation is well described in Mark Greif’s essay:

Exerciser, what do you see in the mirrored gym wall? You make the faces associated with pain, with tears, with orgasms, with the sort of exertion that would call others to your immediate aid. But you do not hide your face. You groan as if pressing on your bowels. You repeat grim labors as if mopping the floor. You huff and you shout and strain. You appear in tight yet shapeless Lycra costumes. These garments reveal the shape of the genitals and the mashed and bandaged breasts to others’ eyes, without acknowledging the lure of sex.

These rituals are part of the gym gasbag’s mask of supreme invincibility, his absurd belief that punishing exercise results in immortality. My gym is frequented by several gasbags whose very strict adherence to body conditioning betrays their limitations and their inevitable decay. A dramatic case in point was revealed to me by one of the gym’s personal trainers, Laura. One day while I was running on the treadmill, Laura told me she was in the woman’s locker room when she saw a seventy-five-year-old, artificially-tanned, bleach-blonde woman stripping out of her gym tights while lecturing to the other woman about how energized she was from her carrot juice drinks fortified with spirulina, a blue-green algae. As she rhapsodized about the health benefits of the protein-dense algae, she continued to undress, revealing her spectacular, smooth, milky white silicone breast implants. Laura said that about ten other breast-augmented women, mostly in their early twenties, had their eyes fixed on the seventy-five-year-old’s nude body and all at once their jaws dropped. It wasn’t the upward-pointing, massive artificial breasts that made the old woman such a frightening sight. It was the stark contrast of those missile-like breasts, the appendages of a nineteen-year-old, with the woman’s nicotine-coated, wrinkled, leathery body, her skin’s creases and grooves reminiscent of an aged elephant’s sun-cracked hide.

The old woman ignored the open-jawed looks of horror as she expounded on the “complete proteins” found in spirulina. What terrified the young women, Laura explained to me, is that in that instant that they knew they were on the same path as the old woman. Thanks to their chain smoking, their breast-enlargements, and their frequent trips to the tanning booths, they knew they would someday look just like her. While listening to the retired porn star lecture on the health benefits of spirulina, they had access to a sort of nicotine-stained crystal ball that afforded them a snapshot of themselves a half century later, and what they saw inside that crystal ball made them gasp and shudder with fear.

The aging porn star is merely one of several gym members who are, contrary to their self-image, deteriorating both physically and mentally. The gym’s most notorious gasbags are in denial of this fact. A prime example is Regina, the health club’s part-time smoothie bar hostess. If she wasn’t so overtly needy, she might be considered attractive. In her late thirties, she is naturally dark skinned with straight black hair, she has slightly oversized teeth and is noticeably svelte—perhaps too much.  Medium height, small boned and presumably blessed with a fast metabolism, she appears skeletal, anorexic and teatless in her white, body-hugging workout tights. Apparently energized from her cardio-induced leanness, she walks very quickly and urgently everywhere she goes with her hands clenched at her sides, signaling great purpose and mission.

Completely sexless with her military bearing, she doesn’t so much talk to people as blurt and bellow insufferable workout clichés at them: “Gotta make it past the pain barrier, babe!” and “When the going gets tough, the tough get going!” are two of her favorites. There is something hostile about her friendliness. She asserts herself on people with such perkiness and intensity that you get the feeling that if you don’t reciprocate her “kindness” with equal enthusiasm she will bare her sharp white teeth and harbor great animosity against you. And you will of course be quite accurate in your assessment.

Perhaps what is most repellent is Regina’s laugh. It is more of an ape-like shriek, actually, a forced sound effect designed to suggest camaraderie with the other employees and gym members. Her laugh is a hideous cry for help, the howling of a wounded psyche. Because she has no life at home and no friends that I can imagine, she is at the gym from early morning till late at night.

Consequently, her forced laughter echoes almost continuously throughout the gym like a soundtrack, the official health club chorus of existential angst and despair.

The gym members, men especially, avoid Regina and appear tense and weary in her presence. It isn’t that she is physically unappealing, as lots of underweight and undernourished women enjoy a certain sexual cachet in our society. It’s that she exudes a strong whiff of neediness that even the most coarse dullard can detect. She can’t help but advertise that she is looking to attach herself to a host with relentless tenacity. The result is a shrillness that breaks through her thin, fitness-hostess veneer and betrays her as the tightly-wound lunatic she really is. For example, she once drenched me with her pocket-sized anti-fungal and anti-bacterial sprays while she was cleaning the treadmills, explaining that, unwashed, they presented a health hazard to the public.

On another occasion, I was working out on the Stairmaster Crossrobics machine and noticed she had all three televisions tuned to her favorite soap opera. When a young woman changed one of the channels, Regina had a tantrum, explaining that she needed all TVs tuned to the same channel so she could see her program from all angles, depending on her vantage point. Once someone turned off the overhead fans in the Elliptical Cardio Station Room and Regina got off her Elliptical Cross Trainer, walked toward the fan breaker switches and turned the fans back on. Then baring her teeth and shaking her finger at the guilty woman, she said, “Only authorized personnel are to have access to these switches. Do you understand me?”

Regina’s status as “authorized personnel” seems at best ambiguous. Her job as part-time smoothie-bar hostess is somewhat sporadic and there seems to be some question as to just what her relationship is to the gym. My feeling is that she has imposed herself on the gym’s management and they pity her to a certain degree so they allow her to do menial tasks, sterilizing the exercise machines, putting away the weights and dumbbells and working the smoothie bar, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they don’t pay her. In fact, she appears so desperate for a sense of belonging that she perhaps pay them to allow her to spend all her waking hours there.

Her status as a marginalized society member was reinforced one day when she passed me by and afforded me the stench of her gamey odor. Immediately, it occurred to me that she spent so much time at the gym that she did not have a clean change of clothes. Her only hygiene came from giving herself a “paper towel shower,” which is to say she was rubbing her sweaty body with dozens of wetted paper towels in the ladies’ room.

The use of the gym as a second home, or even a first home, is common with gym gasbags. Some have them perhaps once enjoyed CEO positions and were axed in cost-cutting measures. Unable to wield their authority in high places, they now haunt the gym and become self-appointed gym sheriffs, telling novices how to exercise and diet. Or they are escaping marital difficulties, finding in the gym a sense of control and mastery they cannot find in their chaotic domestic life. In other words, the gym gasbag suffers from a sense of frustration and personal failure and uses the gym as a fantasy where he is Lord of the Treadmill’s Start-Up Grid.

A more repugnant type of gym gasbag is the so-called “certified personal trainer,” whose personality is born from an overwhelming sense of inadequacy. One such specimen, Randy, embodies the desperate need to assert his masculine dominance. He is nineteen, stands barely over five feet tall, weighs no more than 155 pounds, but walks as if he were gloriously burdened with so much muscularity that if he turned around to acknowledge your greeting, you are supposed to be grateful that he has considered you worth the effort. He exudes a certain hostility that seems rooted, in part, by the fact that he is frustrated with himself—his puny, short-limbed body and his button-nosed baby face, his red chubby cheeks, his freckles, his dull, languid brown eyes. All his affectations are an attempt to compensate for what is essentially the face and body of a nine-year-old boy. He therefore goes for the “butch” look, wearing thick, black leather wrist bands, black Doc Martin boots with a pair of baggy black genie pants to minimize the unattractive squat shape of his legs. He often wears an oversized red flannel shirt with the sleeves cut off or an ultra tight white, crew-necked T-shirt. He also has a gold “pirate” earring and a cell phone attached to a Velcro fanny pack. His hair is difficult to describe, only because he seems to change it from week to week. It is naturally black and straight, but I have seen it permed into curls, I have seen it in corn rows, I have seen it buzzed Marine style, and I have seen it with thick stripes of white, yellow, and blue in order to achieve the “skunk” look. In his most recent styling, he has bleached his hair blond with some “spike” action on top. He seems pleased with himself for having hair that stands up like blades of grass. I imagine he enjoys what he believes is a fearless warrior image, but in fact the patch of erect hairs above his head make him look more like an effete ostrich.

But his far worst affectations are his attempts to compensate for his short man’s complex. For several years he has developed strategies to appear taller. He avoids standing in groups unless he can find a bench to stand on. He is very terrified of water grates as they represent the lowest point on a plane and getting caught on the lowest point is one of his great fears. His most drastic method of compensating for his short stature is walking for prolonged periods on his tiptoes, a habit that bent his spine so severely that I heard through the grapevine that he once required surgery.
Like Regina, Randy is a nuisance in that he is always giving unsolicited training advice, especially to the attractive women. When his exercise expertise fails to impress, he resorts to telling the women he writes children’s books.

Once, while I was running on the treadmill Randy had the audacity to approach me and ask if I was interested in hiring him as my personal trainer. His request was  ludicrous. Number one, I am stronger and have more shapely muscle mass than him. Number two, I have less body fat than him. Number three, I know more about nutrition and exercise in my prostate gland than all of him knows. I simply told him I was happy with my training progress and assumed he would leave it at that.

But he didn’t. He told me I should “stagger” my training and my diet in order to “shock” my body into making more drastic gains. I resented his implication that my body was not responding dramatically enough to my training regime. Nor did I have any interest in “staggering” or “shocking” myself into faster progress, so I politely refused his solicitation, hoping he would leave it at that.
But he didn’t. “If you don’t want to go to that higher level,” he said, “that’s your business.”

I ignored him, hoping he would stop talking to me. But he didn’t.

“How long have you been running?”

“Why?”

“You’ve been running a long time. At least an hour by now.”

“Yeah? So?”

“After ninety minutes your metabolism will go into shut-down mode and you’ll actually start to burn muscle tissue.”

“Thanks.”

“Check’s in the mail.”

“What?”

“Check’s in the mail.”

He shrugged and walked away. I thought our communication would be finished. But I was wrong. Now that he knew I would never hire him as my personal trainer, Randy showed his resentment by giving me a strange greeting whenever we passed. He would tighten his neck and make a mocking growling sound, which in some instances could be interpreted as playful, but which seemed belligerent.

Randy’s growling. Regina’s shrieking. And of course their constant talking. I suppose I should feel sorry for them. They are after all gym gasbags because of fear more than anything else. Kierkegaard was aware of the manner commotion was used to distract people from their worst fears. He wrote about the puritans, recently settled in America, banging pots and pans at night in order to drown the demonic howls they believed they could hear in the dark New England forests. Randy and Regina are compelled to make their own cacophony in order to distract them from their most abject fear, which is that the exercise gospel they preach is a patent lie.

Exercise does not result in eternal youth and immortality. Just take a look at the greasy spoon diner adjacent to our gym. In the blink of an eye, gym members wake up and find themselves tired, aching and incontinent—hapless victims to brutal old-age, indigestion, and decay so that faced with the humiliating prospect of wearing diapers and wetting themselves, they can no longer attend the gym’s grueling workout fests and must, against their will, find exile in at the diner, so accommodating it is to the geriatric demographic that basic table condiments like catsup, mustard, and A-1 Steak Sauce have been replaced with dark brown plastic bottles of molasses-flavored laxatives.

Peek through the windows at the diner and you will see senior citizens, former gym members, with glazed, enervated expressions squeezing liquid Ex-Lax over their runny eggs Benedict. In a stupor and apparently unaware of the bright egg yolk stuck to their gray mustaches, these over-the-hill exercise junkies seem to be asking themselves, “What happened? What happened to me?”

The Do-Gooder Gasbag

During a cold winter I had just finished playing dodge ball at recess. With my bulky corduroy coat still on, I rushed inside the classroom, sat down at my desk and prepared to listen to my second grade teacher Miss Sue explain who was going to get what roles in K.R. Smith Elementary’s annual Christmas Pageant. Students were still settling in their seats, taking off their damp scarves, their knit caps and their gloves while I sat snugly wrapped in my coat.  My coat had one of those bad zippers that kept getting caught on the fabric and I was content with leaving the coat on and not having to deal with the anxiety of struggling with the zipper in front of my fellow students. As I contemplated my warmth and wellbeing, I noticed Donald Beagle, an oversized bovine blond-haired kid, was looking at me with a look of consternation. He stood up from his desk, approached me, bent forward in a solicitous manner and politely whispered a warning: Keeping my coat on inside a heated classroom after playing outside would do something harmful to my internal body temperature making me at risk for catching the flu, rheumatic fever, or perhaps even pneumonia. Immediately, I suspected he was passing along some lame misinformation he had received from his idiotic parents, who no doubt relied on fear tactics to manipulate their children.  But the pity I had for Donald compelled me to thank him for his misguided counsel and to take off my coat. I did not want to hurt his feelings or burst his illusion that he was the possessor of invaluable health tips, which quite possibly could save a classmate’s life. After all, Donald Beagle was somewhat of a homely sad sack and it seemed his delusion that he was aiding his fellow students with bogus medical warnings was perhaps one of the few things that gave his dismal life any savor.

However, my pity for him turned to contempt a day later when I saw him saying the same thing to Tina Lambart and then the following week to Joe Skyles. These poor kids look terrified upon hearing that keeping their coats on in the heated classroom could possibly result in their deaths. It was then that I saw Donald Beagle for what he was, a particular type of know-it-all, the do-gooder, a needy soul groveling for attention under the veil of spreading valuable advice or performing good works, charity, and advocacy. I would later learn that Donald Beagle belonged to the most benign category of do-gooders, the lonely attention-getter who imposes all sorts of dubious advice on others in order that he may enjoy the high regard of an authority figure or expert. On the danger scale, this relatively harmless do-gooder sits at the bottom. There are far more malignant types of do-gooders who impose their “expertise” on the rest of the world.

One notch above the needy attention-getter in menace is the do-gooder who suffers from a protracted adolescence. His stagnation results from a variety of maladies, not the least of which are his laziness, his lack of talent, and his general incompetence. Desperate for change, this do-gooder resorts to re-inventing himself as a sort of shrill do-gooder rebel. He typically comes from an upper class background and feeling guilty for his excessive privileges he attempts to join some countercultural movement from which he can rail against his parents for belonging to a system that bestows upon them luxuries at the expense of exploiting the less fortunate. In truth, this frustrated adolescent scapegoats his parents for his own failing to define his identity and to mature into a productive citizen. His failing of course is his own. Spoiled, lacking initiative and without purpose, the privileged brat is too narcissistic to take responsibility for his own weaknesses so he relies on creating an imperious do-gooder mask from which he will taut his alleged moral superiority over others.

A young man whom we’ll call Prescott provides a striking case study. Coming from old money in Santa Barbara, Prescott attended college in a small, relatively obscure central California town in order to conceal his wealthy background to his fellow students. He left the brand new Mercedes his father had bought him as a high school graduation gift back home and drove a rusted Volkswagen Beetle to the small town in order to conceal his identity. He grew hobo dreads, a straggly beard and wore tattered clothing. He did not bathe.  He sought out the “oppressed,” working in migrant farms and living among the homeless. After two weeks of self-induced squalor, where he lived in a homeless shelter and slept on a thousand-dollar “posturepedic” mattress his mother had purchased for him, he felt he had suffered enough and returned to his apartment a new man, ready to take on the world as an angry outspoken member of the oppressed class. His self-proclaimed status as a member of the “downtrodden” became his excuse for his lack of popularity. It explained why people would stop calling him a few weeks after meeting him. It explained why he always got low grades on his college essays. In truth, his essays earned failing grades because they were incoherent rants. People avoided him because he had few real social skills, he had poor hygiene, he often smelled badly and he was rude and insulting, believing that people deserved to hear his blunt social critiques directly and should react positively to his derogatory stabs as if they were salient epiphanies.

Soon Prescott became infuriated that he wasn’t excelling in school, he dropped out of college and persuaded his parents to give him enough money to travel through Europe where he changed his name to Vandal, joined a German electronic band and performed “protest songs.” The band broke up soon enough, with the socially-conscious young men fighting over a couple of groupies, and Vandal, as he now insisted on being called, returned to California where he used his father’s connections to get a job selling organic, mildew-resistant melons to movie stars in Beverly Hills. The job was short-lived however when he drove the truck with thousands of dollars of watermelons, honeydew and cantaloupe to a political demonstration  and, leaving the truck unattended, had all his merchandise stolen.

Spoiled do-gooders like Prescott follow similar paths. They wander in and out of college. They travel to Europe to find themselves. They join political causes for the same purpose.  They identify with some oppressed group or other. They perform at poetry slams portraying themselves as victims of some hideous trauma revealed to them in hypnosis therapy. Or they join some religious cult that demands a life of complete self-denial while it siphons their hefty allowance and teaches them to hate their parents, who are of course the very source of that allowance. The pain they cause is usually limited to their family and themselves. Their shrill nature makes them far more annoying than the needy attention-getter but their ranking on the danger scale is far below that of a more virulent do-gooder, the bully.

The do-gooder bully usually belongs to an organization, often one with claims to divine revelation, that picks on phony societal issues while ignoring society’s real problems. Not wanting to address anything that would require complex thought or target an opponent that might fight back, these do-gooder organizations usually bully some harmless and helpless target, libraries and public schools being two common examples. The do-gooder bully will campaign against a book that is too gritty or shows a “lifestyle” that doesn’t conform to the bully’s puritanical, sanitized ideal or is simply “too disturbing” for a child’s consumption. Or these bullies will spend endless hours watching TV or listening to some juvenile radio personality while they eagerly wait for the utterance of a “bad” word, at which time they will salivate with glee and then post a report of the naughtiness on their website and congratulate themselves for performing such a good deed.

Another subcategory of the do-gooder bully is the Health Police, an organization dedicated to removing or taxing what it deems unhealthy sugar- and fat-laden foods such as movie popcorn, Mexican food, Chinese food, pizza, soda pop, and fast-food burgers. As someone well-versed in vegetarian cooking and the daily practice of yoga, I am, according to some, a likely candidate for supporting the Health Police’s agenda. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. I am much too pessimistic about the rapacious appetites that are so firmly entrenched in America’s culture that I see the Health Police’s mission to reform the typical American’s gluttonous, slothful lifestyle as a lame and feeble exercise.  Contrary to my skepticism, the Health Police will argue that we must “educate” the public. But “educating” the public has already proven to be a complete waste of time. The nutritional facts have long been available. It’s been pounded into our brains that inactivity combined with a diet of processed foods sodden with fat and sugar will make us obese, afflict us with diabetes and eventually kill us. Yet in the face of this obvious and all-too-easily-accessible data most Americans still indulge in troglodyte eating habits, venturing into all-you-can-eat buffets and slopping incongruous heaps of food matter on platters the size of surf boards and going to “steak houses,” which are in actuality fantasy theme parks, the fantasy being “let’s be Cro-Magnon Man for a day.”

If the Health Police wants to see how their attempts to stifle Americans’ appetites will end up, I refer them to the days of Prohibition when do-gooders attempted to curb America’s love of alcohol. Forbidding and taxing what people want simply creates a  underground market and violent crime. Of course, the Health Police are too busy congratulating themselves on their enlightened healthy lifestyle to take a an objective look at history.
Another group that ignores history and facts is the most dangerous of all the do-gooders, the ignorant and sanctimonious Westerner who feels compelled to enlighten other cultures but succeeds only in colonizing them. Or with the help of a humanitarian organization, he brings food and other supplies to a country afflicted with famine, draught and pestilence only to find that without the proper foresight and operational competence, cunning warlords in the region will steal those supplies and sell them to amass weapons which they will use against the very people the humanitarian supplies were intended. Or this Westerner will try in his ignorance to impose his notion of democracy on a nation so fragmented by ethnic and religious strife and so recalcitrant to anything resembling Western democracy that the Westerner’s presence only incites hostility, insurgency, and confirms the region’s deeply-rooted suspicions that the Western “intervention” has an ulterior motive, usually focused on exploiting the region’s natural resources.

One can look at America’s 2003 invasion of Iraq as a painful case study in the do-gooder’s utopian fantasy turning into a nightmare that is being grieved by people of all political persuasions and could very well make the small circle of do-gooder neocons, who arguably authored the Iraqi Invasion, one of the most ignominious, misguided political movements in U.S. history.

No matter his scale of importance, the do-gooder is a pious fraud and a frustrated failure who, as Eric Hoffer points out in The True Believer, hides his insignificance by joining mass movements that ostensibly exist to perform good deeds or force social upheaval throughout the world. But the do-gooder’s excessive zeal combined with his conspicuous absence of expertise cause his missions to end in disaster. The do-gooder’s role in creating unintended catastrophes combined with his chafing know-it-all personality justify our contempt for him, with the Western Imperialist being the most contemptuous of all.

The Proselytizing Gasbag

In the summer of 2005 Even Kleiman, the executive chef of Angeli Caffe and host of KCRW’s radio program "Good Food," ruined my life. In an act of recklessness bordering on the criminal, Kleiman featured Dr. Robert Small, professor of food and wine at Cal Poly University, Pomona, to discuss his “handcrafted” Dr. Bob's Ice Cream, some of which is made with Scharffen Berger chocolate. Dr. Bob, as he is called, brought some samples to the radio studio and Even Kleiman tasted them on the air, expressed her orgasmic delight, then proceeded to tell her viewers where Dr. Bob’s products could be found. Tragically, she informed her listeners that his ice cream is sold at the Redondo Beach Bristol Farms, about a mile from my house. My instincts told me that Kleiman’s praise of Dr. Bob’s ice cream was more than hype. I had to try some, the sooner the better, so before her show was over, I drove to the store in question and stocked up on Dr. Bob’s chocolate flavors, “The Works” and “Really Dark.” When I got home I skimmed the partially melted ice cream from the top and tasted it. Immediately, thousands of serotonin neurotransmitters buzzed inside my brain, tingled down my spine and raced all the way down to my big toes. My knees buckled. My head moved upwards. All you could see were the whites of my eyes.

While this euphoric chemical upheaval was going on inside of me, the phone rang. It was probably my wife, Carrie, making a long-distance call from Croatia, where she was spending a three-week vacation with her family. Because of the time differences between Croatia and California, there was only a small window in which we could talk to each other, but I could not answer the phone. Or rather I refused to answer it because it seemed sacrilegious to interrupt what I would later call my Dr. Bob’s Experience.

A half hour later my wife called again. This time I answered the phone but the entire conversation was not about the tender calamari she was having by her family’s seaside restaurant. It was about Dr. Bob’s ice cream. I urged Carrie to get home early, if at all possible, so that she could try some Dr. Bob’s before I ate it all. She had to have a taste of Dr. Bob’s ice cream, not just so that she would enjoy it, but so that, like me, her life could be gloriously “ruined.” In other words, nothing short of her having a religious experience would suffice in order to validate my own blissful encounter with my newly discovered ice cream.

Sharing the pleasure with my wife wasn’t enough. Soon I sent dozens of e-mails to friends and acquaintances about Dr. Bob’s. I told my students about it. I talked about it at parties. I warned people that eating Dr. Bob’s ice cream would render all other ice creams obsolete. I claimed that a single bite of Dr. Bob’s ice cream would provide the absolute template to measure all other types of ecstatic experiences. During a subsequent visit to Bristol Farms when the cashier bagged my Dr. Bob’s, she asked me if it was any good and I said, “Don’t eat it. Not unless you want to become a helpless addict to a food product that clogs the arteries and rots your teeth.”

People in line were moved by my “sales pitch” and they rushed to the ice cream section and had to try it because they wanted their lives, like mine, to be “ruined.” Further visits to Bristol Farms revealed that there were lower stocks of Dr. Bob’s. Often it was gone entirely. Dr. Bob’s had become a hit and while I was alarmed that there wasn’t as much for me as before I blabbed about it, I was deeply gratified that I was presumably responsible for Dr. Bob’s taking off the way it did. As the ice cream’s number-one advocate, I had become, in short, a proselytizer.

I am not referring to proselytizing in its limited definition in which people use their persuasive gifts and moral certitude in order to convert others to their faith.  I am talking about the broader definition, the one that has emerged in our blog-soaked world where everyone can post their worldview, not to mention their daily burps, trifles, and naval-gazing musings, so that a more prevalent form of proselytizing has been born in which the proselytizer zealously, and I might say obsessively, touts something he deems worthy of everyone’s attention—an obscure rock band, an herbal remedy, a fiendishly-readable book, a subversively hip television comedy, to name a few examples—so that people will be “turned on” to the proselytizer’s newly-found treasure.

This compulsion to “convert” others is rooted firstly in egotism, the need to champion and affirm one’s tastes and opinions by watching others become equally enthusiastic and then to take credit for their pleasure and satisfaction. The proselytizer’s impulse to point others to the way or lead them to places of heavenly delight arises from his need to see himself as a sort of pioneer or a Prometheus figure who, because of his superior instincts and courage, forages in places most people will not or cannot go, steals fire from the gods and in a act of magnanimity shares the fire with his worthy cohorts of which he in a way lords over, gloating with satisfaction as he watches them embracing something he discovered, fashion, art, music, food, which, without him, they would have never  had the privilege of enjoying.

Much of the proselytizer’s egotism is fueled by his need to see himself as an Ultimate Guide or Authority Figure who is constantly sought after by the media so that he may give the definitive analysis on his chosen specialty after which he gathers great delight from watching himself bloviating on television or seeing his words quoted in print or, for maximum ego gratification, listening to people in high places quote his expertise in order to bolster their credibility.

Secondly, the impulse to proselytize is rooted in loneliness. It is the unbearable feeling that comes with discovering a sublime pleasure or ecstasy and having no one to share that feeling with. Sharing this new discovery gives the proselytizer a sense of intimacy and community, which, due to his virulent egotism, is painfully lacking in his life. For it is in solitude that the proselytizer makes his discoveries, but it is only by casting his net into the marketplace of ideas and opinions that he has a chance of sharing those findings.

The proselytizer, however, can only enjoy so much mass appeal. A small but significant number of converts, equated with a cult following, is the proselytizer’s optimum number of enthusiasts, for the small but loyal clique attests to a certain intellectual elitism that confirms the proselytizer’s sense of uniqueness and genius. If too many people follow tow, then the authenticity and special quality of the discovery is cast into doubt. Therefore, when a mass following embraces the proselytizer’s findings, he sometimes feels compelled to abandon his crusade.

A cruel example of something I once loved being ruined by a mass following or overexposure occurred with the 1990 pop song, “Here the Story Ends,” written and performed by The Sundays. I was heading north to visit my family in the San Francisco Bay Area during the Easter vacation break when, passing along the Altamont Pass in Livermore, California at 3:34 P.M., I saw several majestic windmills atop the rolling green hills. This was the breakthrough point where my radio could finally receive more than country and fundamentalist AM signals. I tuned to San Francisco’s KRQR 106.7 FM and heard The Sundays’ Harriet Wheeler sing the band’s wistful single and stopped at the closest music store so that I could buy the CD. My family vacation then consisted of me calling people and telling them they had to buy The Sunday’s Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic CD.  Five years later I was not prepared to hear “Here the Story Ends,” in Muzak form, inside a Bakersfield supermarket while I browsed through the yams and Maui onions.

Perhaps an entire book could be written about beautiful songs ruined once they’ve been converted into Muzak or used in television commercials. Pink Floyd’s “Dark Side of the Moon” was bastardized in the San Francisco Bay Area when in the early 1980s a local electronics store aired that song on a television ad for several years so that it was impossible to hear the song without associating it with a perky-voiced gentleman announcing an unbeatable stereo sale and free popcorn and baby-sitting while you shopped.

The commercialization of a private experience kills the proselytizer’s drive to share that experience with others. He must move on to some other worthy obsession that will remain elusive in the minds of the masses while finding appeal in smaller, niche audiences.  Thus the proselytizer is constantly navigating a fine balance between broadening his following on the one hand and narrowing his following to a worthy, “educated” audience on the other.

Finally, the passion to proselytize is rooted in the need to find an Absolute and a sense of Transcendence so that the proselytizer can rhapsodize endlessly about a brand of sinfully rich ice cream, irresistibly creamy cashew butter, butter-soft comfortable walking shoes, or an especially sensitive radio in a way that sounds like he has just discovered a new religion. The use of religious hyperbole to tout his discovery makes the proselytizer a great marketer, a salesman who pitches Product as Salvation. Thus the proselytizer, when he is convincing, has much in common with Madison Avenue. When he’s not convincing however he is revealed for what he truly is, a longwinded crackpot who, in his obsessive quest to find the Ultimate Ice Cream, Transcendental Cashew Butter, or Radio Uber Alles has lost all sense of proportion and has become a sort of delusional Messiah figure trying in vain to convert others to his consuming chimeras and caprices. 

The Authoritative Gasbag

The authoritative gasbag is someone whose sense of incredulity and outrage at the world’s utter absence of common sense and moral decency forever vexes him. Tormented, he is overcome by the need to complain to anyone who will listen to him as he explains that he bears excruciating hardships because he alone assumes responsibility in a world of sloths, frauds, and libertines.

Like the novelist John Kennedy Toole’s rotund loudmouth fictional creation  Ignatius J. Reilly, the authoritative gasbag feels he is a genius surrounded by a “confederacy of dunces.” He deems himself as an unappreciated original thinker who longs to have more power, perhaps that of a monarch, to implement his views.

Why can’t people be as good as he is? Why can’t they see things as clearly as he does? Why can’t they at least attempt to conform to his worldview and thereby benefit from his superior ways? Forever befuddled and embattled, the authoritative gasbag assumes that the world’s hordes are obdurate, contumacious children who, incapable of being reasoned with, must be controlled by elaborate rules, regulations, and constant nagging. He of course takes it upon himself to do the nagging and therefore becomes in the process what is commonly known as a “busy body.” He will mettle in other people’s affairs and will often assume authority he does not possess.

For example, he will like to be the self-appointed life guard at a public pool. He will admonish people for running across the pavement while pointing at the “No Running” rule on a nearby sign.  Or he will remind people that bottled beverages and alcohol of all kinds are strictly prohibited. During the “kid’s time” in the pool, he will expel adults still lingering in the pool and vice versa during “adult’s time.” He will discourage loud splashing, rough-housing, and any other ruckus he deems inappropriate even though he has no credentials or official sanction to perform such policing.

When he cannot police and control others to his satisfaction, he will become a tattletale. For example, he will make a stink when he sees other airline passengers violating the no-more-than-two-carry-on rule and will gloat with self-satisfaction as he watches the airline attendant force the offending passenger off the plane in order to check in the third carry-on piece. Or he will notify an usher when he sees that a theater patron has, rather than purchase overpriced concession candy, smuggle champagne and fried chicken into the theater and he will watch with glee as the offending patron is expelled from the premises or forced to throw away his food stuffs and libations.

In true gasbag fashion, the authoritative gasbag cannot withhold his opinions so be leery if he is standing behind you in the grocery line. He will scrutinize the products in your cart and then admonish you for your lack of fresh fruits and vegetables and your preponderance for frozen microwave dishes rich in saturated fats, even going so far as to equate your shoddy food choices with the neglect and abuse of your children. A shopping cart full of too many sugar-laden cereals and trans-fats can spur this gasbag into getting out his cell phone and speed-dialing the Department of Social Services.
When not inspecting strangers’ grocery choices, the authoritative gasbag is commonly known to take on the mantle of neighborhood watchdog. In addition to keeping a sharp eye on suspicious loiterers, he will be the official dog crap monitor. Whenever a neighbor leaves a dog deposit on his lawn, he will insert a toothpick flagged with the time and date of the offense and photograph the deposit for evidence that he is amassing against the offending neighbor. The more high-tech gasbag will install security video cameras around his front yard and show, via live video streaming on the Internet, the dogs and their owners violating community codes of dog ownership, and in the process succeed at humiliating his neighbors for using his lawn as a dog dumping ground.

This gasbag’s love of wielding authority will draw him to types of employment that will maximize his dictatorial excesses. He may be a police officer. He may be a security guard at the shopping mall. He may be a school administrator or, as he likes to call himself, an “educator.” He may become a personal trainer, a nutritionist, a martial arts instructor, a fire safety expert, a neighborhood crime watch organizer, a health inspector, a social worker, a technology geek, a PTA leader, a marital advice columnist, or an inspector of television, radio and Internet smut.

Or if you are as unfortunate as I am, he may be your condo association president. I am thinking specifically of a man I will call Mel Barnes, the condo president of a condo unit I once owned. Mel was silver-haired and strong-jawed with cobalt blue eyes that roiled beneath a stare of perpetual self-righteousness and moral clarity. His proclivity for eating steak, a habit while growing up in Texas, gave him a pot belly on an otherwise slender body. He was, as are many condo association presidents, retired, and this gave him the time necessary to do all of a condo president’s duties, which were many. One of his most unpleasant chores was fining the condo owners, as laid out in the condo bylaws, fifty dollars every time they parked in the guest parking, or threw their weeds and garden trimmings in the dumpsters, or didn’t replace their batteries in their home fire detectors, or didn’t keep their cats inside their condos so that their cats illegally roamed the area and used other people’s flower beds as latrines, or didn’t lock the back gate that separated our collective back yard from the tennis courts so that any riffraff could get inside our property.

Mel Barnes was so distressed and frustrated over his vigorous condo duties that he had developed high blood pressure, ulcers, and Temporo-Mandibular Joint Syndrome. He grew to resent those who did not appreciate his vigilance and who did not follow all the rules and bylaws.

During my first week at the condo as I was tossing moving boxes into the dumpster Mel tapped me on the shoulder and said, “I hate to be persnickety but you need to tear those boxes into smaller pieces to make room for the rest of us.”

I did not want to get on Mel’s bad side and began shredding the boxes to his satisfaction.

About a week later I was in my little front patio area taking off my muddy shoes after jogging near the beach when Mel sauntered over, leaned over my wrought iron gate and told me a burglar had broken into our subterranean parking garage by squeezing through a window and using a garden hose as a ladder. Several items were stolen out of people’s cars, including a laptop computer. He told me the gardeners would have to disconnect the garden hose and keep it in the tool shed before and after every use. I apologized as if the problem were somehow my fault while he flexed his jaw muscles and looked down at my muddy shoes and my front patio with displeasure. After clearing out the weeds and brush, I had not planted anything yet. There was nothing but a bunch of dirt clods.
“My, your front patio looks rather bare. I suppose you weren’t planning on doing anything to it?”

I immediately went to a garden store and bought a bunch of “hearty” flowers, hoping that might keep Mel off my back.
He was appeased but only temporarily. A week later he came over to tell me my downstairs toilet was too loud. He could hear it all the way from his condo. He speculated that perhaps the water level in the tank was set too high. Or the tank ball was rotted and not sealing correctly so the tank got too low and was always filling. Or perhaps the fill valve was too long and was siphoning into the overflow pipe. I pretended to understand what he was saying, then called a plumber who recommended that I just get a whole brand new toilet, which I did.

The next morning I heard someone standing on a squeaky stepladder behind my master bedroom. I stepped outside and saw Mel using his bare hands to apply gobs of Crisco shortening to the top of our gate. I asked him what he was doing and he explained that kids had been trying to climb over the seven-foot high enclosure. The shortening would help deter their efforts.

“They could slip and break their necks,” I said.

“That’s not my problem. If they want to ignore our ‘No Trespassing’ sign that’s their business.”

He explained that we might have to tap our emergency fund to add another five feet, including barb wire, to the gate. Then he said, “I hate to think what this place would do without me.”

A week later he informed me that the mud clumps collected under my rafters were wasp nests. I knocked down one of the nests with a broom stick and almost got stung by a testy wasp. When I told him what happened, he chastised me for not using the proper equipment. He came over with his stepladder and a can of wasp spray. As he climbed up on the stepladder and sprayed under my rafter, dozens of pale winged insects flew outside. He said I had a problem far worse than wasps—termites. Winged termites, known as “swarmers,” provided evidence that termites were breeding inside my house.

“Any termite droppings inside your house?” he asked me.

I described some strange gritty substance I kept finding on my living room carpet. It looked like orange pencil shavings. Mel admonished me for not telling him about this earlier, disappeared, then returned with a flashlight and a pad and pencil. He knelt before a small mound of termite droppings on my living room carpet, then announced we had an infestation. He would sue the termite exterminators who, three years ago, gave the condo a ten-year guarantee when they fumigated the premises. The litigation could be lengthy and we didn’t have the reserves to pay for another full-out fumigation. But there were cheaper and safer alternatives that would not require that we tent up the entire condo and subject ourselves to poisons that would harm us and our pets.  He had a relative in Orange County who could get him a special deal on XT-2000, a termite killer made from orange peel oil. He would also look into other phenolic compounds, liquid nitrogen, high heat, baiting, and topical fungus. His eyes gleamed and he sounded excited as if he were planning for a great war. For the next several days I would see him flooding other condo owners with technical information they did not want to know about the killing of termites. Polymethoxylated flavonoids just might do the trick, he said.

I realized that Mel was never so happy as when he was immersed in a crisis that allowed him to assume the role of an authority. Yes, he was a malcontent who loved to complain and talk about the enormous difficulties he faced as our condo manager, but take those difficulties away and Mel would have lost something vital to his being, something that kept him happy and alive, his excuse to talk ad nauseam about the woes and challenges that had befallen him.