Byrne

Ok

Byrne

Coelho

orneriness

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Nobody had better bring me this shit . No email forwards, no suggestions over lunch, no "hey, I just thought you maybe wanted to, I don't know, improve your life or something..." The Secret just smells like something I'm going to hear about far more than I want to.But let me impart the thing that makes this dangerous and evil. It's from a Newsweek interview with the author, Rhonda, so far so good.Again, this doesn't sound bad. Here's the thing: Rhondasaid this in response to a question about how villagers could have avoided being massacred in Rwanda.Oh yeah she did. She just said that fifty children barricaded into a school then burned alive could have avoided their fate through positive thinking. She just said that half a million people who were shot and chopped up by machetes, often killed by their own neighbors, could have avoided death by thinking their way out of it.From Rwandan genocide to the solution to the American waistline. I love the "many tough things" in quotes up there.Normally this bullshit wouldn't even be on my radar. It would be a little blip that I would listen to politely while my folks drone on about it. Well I'm not taking it if it ever does come. This lady is now on My List, along with Pauloand, to a much lesser extent, Richard Ford: the List of people who not only mean well, who not only think that they're doing good, but who have legions of followers and apologists surrounding them and enabling to lead them further into ignorance. You don't just cast off genocide. You don't compare trying to get down to 116 pounds to hacking off the arms of small children whose "ethnic classification" is slightly different from your own.And, aside from that madness, here's why Marcus doesn't want to hear about yet another pat answer to everything, another simple solution to all of life's problems:Life is complicated. I like it that way. Leave me the hell alone about it, because even though you may all be right and it would actually make my life better, I love my life the way it is already. It'll get rid of my problems? Fuck you, I like my problems. I like my problems and I like myand I like my outlook on life. I like the way I handle my problems. Literature is my self-help. Reading about a man who sprouts horns after falling from the sky, or about a woman who becomes lost in the Saharan desert but finds herself in better company than when she was back home, or about the 16president of the United States who had his own problems: all of these things help me to look at the world from a lens other than my own. This fresh hell is the same garbage we've been getting since phrenology , since bloodletting, or more recently, since What the $#*! Do We Know? Quantum physics my ass. Believe, don't believe, just keep it the hell away from me. No debates, no contradictions, no "but don't you think--". None of it.Read a fucking book written by someone who actually has something to say. Then we can talk.

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