DO YOU HAVE a problem that you̢۪re just itching to know the answer to?
How to discipline your children when they draw on your newly-painted walls with permanent marker?
How to settle a long-standing dispute with neighbors about who should pay for the length of fence that used to keep his dog out of your yard?
On what occasions you can justify pairing brown garments with black ones?
Don’t worry — Dr. Phil can help.
Maybe you’re not aware, but Dr. Phil, born Phillip Calvin McGraw, functions as the “brain� of America — that is to say, he can answer virtually any questions we have and defuse any threat to our national identity.
He is to the American psyche what Roger Ebert is to America’s awareness and appreciation of film — but he has pretty good taste in movies as well, whereas Ebert’s capabilities in the realm of behavioral psychology are considerably limited.
He can even solve all polynomial equations up to degree 15 in his head without breaking a sweat, if you give him a minute or two.
Okay — maybe not.
But the United States certainly seems to think he can. Either that or all the American media would like to perpetuate the myth of Dr. Phil̢۪s analytical infallibility.
You may have heard about his show — it runs pretty much every day. The show is about an hour long, (38 minutes of content, once we eliminate commercials, credits and standing ovations) which, coincidentally, happens to be just enough time to solve exactly one major world problem.
Several weeks ago, Dr. Phil tackled one of the majorest of the major problems the United States has had to face in the last several years — the death of Anna Nicole Smith. Maybe you’ve forgotten about it since the last time you watched the news, but this was a big story — so big, that a month later, Dr. Phil had to do follow-up show detailing the controversy surrounding Anna Nicole’s young daughter, Danielynn.
During the first show, he implored viewers to show compassion, because at the end of the day, celebrities “are people with feelings; they are people with families, they are people with needs like everybody else.�
Except I̢۪m not entirely certain the public ever forgot it.
And then several days ago, Dr. Phil appeared as part of a panel on Larry King Live, discussing the potential motivations that drove 23-year-old Seung-Hui Cho to wake up last Monday and kill 32 of his schoolmates, including peers and professors. Dr. Phil, following the lead of co-panelist Jack Thompson, says violent video games are at the heart of the massacre.
One more problem solved, one more win to add to Dr. Phil̢۪s largely impeccable record.
Except, I don̢۪t think anybody really takes that assessment seriously.
Consider the following headlines in response to Dr. Phil’s solution: “Virginia shooting restarts media blame game� (Reuters) and “Dr. Phil Also Blames Games for VaTech� (Wired News).
The headlines, of course, are not openly antagonistic to the idea of video games being the catalyst that can make a regular boy want to create an entire media kit detailing his motivations for destroying a college campus and then mail it off to NBC, but they do minimize the notion by referring to the debate as a “blame game� and to violent entertainment as merely “games.�
I̢۪m not about to censure entertainment either, so I don̢۪t really have a problem with their tendency to marginalize the potential of video games to warp our minds and break our souls.
I also don’t have a problem with Phillip McGraw personally — he didn’t run over my cat, or steal a patent from me or put rotting food in my gym locker.
I am, however, against what he represents for our culture — an icon that is supposed to tell us, in 60 minutes or less, everything we need to know to fix ourselves. And even more than that, I am against the idea that we can reduce our cultural ailments to such small proportions that we can solve those problems in the time it takes to make a bowl of Instant Noodles.
Because from the sounds of it, all we need to do is ban video games, or ban gun ownership, or require mandatory gun ownership, or tighten the regulations on buying a gun, or tighten security on college campuses, or lock up every person who̢۪s ever demonstrated potentially psychotic behavior, or punish bullying more severely, and that will ensure that the carnage at Virginia Tech on Monday will never happen again.
Of course, these measures probably won̢۪t ever go into effect, because realistically, the public-at-large understands they won̢۪t really save us when several years down the line, somebody else snaps and decides to take a couple dozen of his colleagues with him.
For an hour each day, Dr. Phil reminds us of the fantasy that saves us from the scary, albeit more realistic alternative: that we did the best we knew how to do, that there might not have been a thing more we could̢۪ve done, and we might not be able to prevent it in the future either.
He is the public face of the myth we like to perpetuate: that for every catastrophe, there is a single, easy answer — a switch we might have flipped and saved the lives of 32 people.
In the words of the man himself: get real.
Jack Wranovics • Nov 24, 2009 at 3:32 pm
Sweeping through the faded sky at 9.667 miles a nanosecond, Gomes' words recall a time back around 1996 before the tragic scent of riboflavin pierced the air. The doctors stood helpless as the pitch-black vision, consumed by several gnomes far from the laughing kinds Bowie so effortlessly crooned the exploits of kicked venom into the vile, mercurial air of Dragoon. Additionally, this article calls into question the basic concept of what defines “literature”. Sure, we've all had images fed to us as written words before, but in our 24-hour-magazine hyperworld, only some sort of demigod could figure it all out. But although Gomes stumbles upon the weight of his majestic text (such as on “impeccable”, a word so defined by the likes of Dave Eggers that touching it is required blasphemy for the “noobs”), so far from prose that it enters the golden realm of pure poetry so untouched by even the finest of human hands, even when crafted in the finest Swedish factories. Read this on a cold night, preferably while taking in the pleasures of Bubba Sparxxx's masterpiece “Dark Days, Bright Nights” and drinking down cup after cup of coffee, so unpretentious and flavorful a wizard's drink, and only then can these words hit your skull at the unholy velocity they must. Don't read it with money on hand, just in case its unpredictable paths rob you at first sight.
Jack Wranovics • Apr 23, 2007 at 10:09 pm
Sweeping through the faded sky at 9.667 miles a nanosecond, Gomes’ words recall a time back around 1996 before the tragic scent of riboflavin pierced the air. The doctors stood helpless as the pitch-black vision, consumed by several gnomes far from the laughing kinds Bowie so effortlessly crooned the exploits of kicked venom into the vile, mercurial air of Dragoon. Additionally, this article calls into question the basic concept of what defines “literature”. Sure, we’ve all had images fed to us as written words before, but in our 24-hour-magazine hyperworld, only some sort of demigod could figure it all out. But although Gomes stumbles upon the weight of his majestic text (such as on “impeccable”, a word so defined by the likes of Dave Eggers that touching it is required blasphemy for the “noobs”), so far from prose that it enters the golden realm of pure poetry so untouched by even the finest of human hands, even when crafted in the finest Swedish factories. Read this on a cold night, preferably while taking in the pleasures of Bubba Sparxxx’s masterpiece “Dark Days, Bright Nights” and drinking down cup after cup of coffee, so unpretentious and flavorful a wizard’s drink, and only then can these words hit your skull at the unholy velocity they must. Don’t read it with money on hand, just in case its unpredictable paths rob you at first sight.