Salon.com > Oliver Burkeman

Positive thinking is for suckers!

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 13:00:00 +0000

The man who claims that he is about to tell me the secret of human happiness is eighty-three years old, with an alarming orange tan that does nothing to enhance his credibility. It is just after eight o'clock on a December morning, in a darkened basketball stadium on the outskirts of San Antonio, and -- according to the orange man -- I am about to learn 'the one thing that will change your life forever." I'm skeptical, but not as much as I might normally be, because I am only one of more than fifteen thousand people at Get Motivated!, America's "most popular business motivational seminar," and the enthusiasm of my fellow audience members is starting to become infectious.

"So you wanna know?" asks the octogenarian, who is Dr. Robert H. Schuller, veteran self-help guru, author of more than thirty-five books on the power of positive thinking, and, in his other job, the founding pastor of the largest church in the United States constructed entirely out of glass. The crowd roars its assent. Easily embarrassed British people like me do not, generally speaking, roar our assent at motivational seminars in Texas basketball stadiums, but the atmosphere partially overpowers my reticence. I roar quietly.

Owning a piece of our brains

Thu, 03 Feb 2005 15:32:00 +0000

In 1990, which is almost unimaginably long ago in Internet years, the notion that computer scientists might one day create an artificial replacement for human memory was the stuff of science fiction. Literally so: The idea was the premise of "Total Recall," the needlessly violent and confusing Arnold Schwarzenegger movie released that year by Twentieth Century Fox. (The future governor of California was cast -- appropriately, some might have argued -- as a man who has had part of his brain stolen.) Real computer science in 1990 was far more modest. At McGill University in Canada, one of its practitioners, a student named Alan Emtage, was busy developing a program that would enable people to find documents on the embryonic computer network known as the Internet. He wanted to call it Archives, but the system he was using didn't allow names that long, so the first-ever search engine had to be called Archie instead.

“Feeding a monster who has the party by its tail”

Fri, 05 Nov 2004 14:45:00 +0000

A mood of elation permeated the ranks of evangelical Christians in the United States Thursday as it became clear that the election marked a watershed moment for their chances of implementing a conservative moral agenda -- above all on the issues of abortion and gay marriage.

Buoyed by exit poll results suggesting that moral issues had weighed on voters' minds even more than terrorism, activists vowed to use their victory to push the second Bush administration to ban same-sex unions at a federal level and to move the Supreme Court to the right. "I think it's quite possible this could be a turning point," said Peter Sprigg of the Family Research Group, a lobbying organization.

"We're seeing from the exit polls that conservative Christian voters turned out in record numbers ... so we certainly will be pressing for action on key items of our agenda, and we will not be shy about claiming that our influence was significant in the outcome of the election."

In a post-election memo obtained by the New York Times, Richard Viguerie, a right-wing direct-mailing campaigner, issued a warning to the Republican Party. "Make no mistake -- conservative Christians and 'values voters' won this election for George W. Bush and Republicans in Congress," he wrote.

“In the U.K. there’d be a riot”

Tue, 02 Nov 2004 12:19:00 +0000

Justice Bekebeke is no stranger to long lines of voters at polling stations, angrily committed to making their vote count. He just never thought he would see it in Florida. "It is something phenomenal," the chief elections officer for South Africa's Northern Cape province said Monday, on a sweltering morning in downtown Miami, as the last of the early voters queued for up to three hours. "To see this passion is really something that could inspire the rest of the world."

To put it bluntly, an inspirational election in Florida would be a best-case scenario.

Bekebeke belongs to one of two delegations of international observers who were taking up their positions across America's swing states Monday to monitor the vote for evidence of long-rumored dirty tricks: harassment of voters at the polls, illegitimate challenges to people's voter registrations and ballot fraud. "Normally we say that the kids learn from the adults, but sometimes it's those wise adults who can learn from the kids," said Bekebeke, fresh from monitoring the Rwandan election last year. "That's the spirit in which I'm here in America."

Capturing dirty deeds

Mon, 01 Nov 2004 12:43:00 +0000

Filmmaker Michael Moore has announced a large-scale effort to combat dirty tricks during Tuesday's election by stationing hundreds of people with video cameras outside polling stations.

"I'm putting those who intend to suppress the vote on notice: Voter intimidation and suppression will not be tolerated," Moore said in a statement, wading into a controversy in which Democrats accuse Republicans of trying to reduce turnout, especially among ethnic minorities, by employing thousands of people to stop voters at the polls and challenge the validity of their registrations.

Moore, the director of the documentary "Fahrenheit 9/11," said 1,200 professional and amateur videographers would descend on polling stations in Florida and Ohio, the two battleground states that have been the focus of the most serious allegations. The last few months have seen an unprecedented drive to register new voters, especially in black neighborhoods of Florida and throughout Ohio. But the new registrations could be deemed invalid as a result of errors made on the forms, from corner cutting by workers paid to sign people up or from deliberate fraud.

“Bush has been adroit at exploiting” 9/11

Mon, 25 Oct 2004 13:15:00 +0000

George W. Bush has exploited the suffering of Sept. 11 and turned back decades of efforts to make the world a safer place, former President Jimmy Carter said in an interview with the Guardian.

Attacking Bush and Tony Blair over Iraq, Carter called the war "a completely unjust adventure based on misleading statements." He also criticized Bush for "lack of effort" on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and accused him of abandoning nuclear nonproliferation initiatives championed by five presidents.

The U.S. "suffered, in 9/11, a terrible and shocking attack ... and George Bush has been adroit at exploiting that attack, and he has elevated himself, in the consciousness of many Americans, to a heroic commander in chief, fighting a global threat against America," Carter said. "He's repeatedly played that card, and to some degree quite successfully. I think that success has dissipated. I don't know if it's dissipating fast enough to affect the election. We'll soon know."

Oh, please, not again

Tue, 19 Oct 2004 14:28:00 +0000

Gordon Sasser first got the feeling that something strange was going on when the telephone pierced the silence of a weekday afternoon at his house on the swampy fringes of Tallahassee, in northern Florida. An automated voice had some surprising news: Did he know that he could now cast his presidential vote by phone, and could do so right now, using the keypad? Sasser's suspicion that somebody was trying to trick him into thinking he was casting a vote -- presumably so that he wouldn't cast a real one -- was far from unique.

James Scruggs, another Tallahassee resident, remembers a similar unease about the young woman who phoned him at home, insistently offering to collect his absentee ballot to ensure its safe delivery.

Then there was the elderly woman who called the local elections office last week to register her husband for an absentee vote. According to office staff, as she hung up she made a point of thanking them: She wouldn't have thought to get in touch about her husband, she said, if it hadn't been for their helpful call the night before, when someone had taken her own details, assuring her that she was now registered and would receive a ballot. But the elections office makes no such calls.

Roots of Abu Ghraib

Mon, 13 Sep 2004 13:32:00 +0000

Evidence of prisoner abuse and possible war crimes at Guantánamo Bay reached the highest levels of the Bush administration as early as autumn 2002, but Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld chose to do nothing about it, according to a new investigation published exclusively in the Guardian today. The investigation, by veteran journalist Seymour Hersh, quotes one former Marine at the camp recalling sessions in which guards would "fuck with [detainees] as much as we could" by inflicting pain on them.

The Bush administration repeatedly assured critics that inmates were granted recreation periods, but one Pentagon advisor told Hersh how, for some prisoners, they consisted of being left in straitjackets in intense sunlight with hoods over their heads.

Hersh provides details of how President Bush signed off on the establishment of a secret unit that was given advance approval to kill or capture and interrogate "high-value" suspects -- considered by many to be in defiance of international law -- an officially "unacknowledged" program that was eventually transferred wholesale from Guantánamo to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq.