The Road To Wellness - Witch Doctors, Roots And Vines, Healing, And The American Dream

What one wants in America is a perfect fit - supply and demand - and Harlan Baker's operation was one of these beautifully consonant meshes.  He was a simple, uncomplicated man of limited intellectual resources but with a good social sense - an antenna for what works.  His clients were equally unencumbered by intelligence, insight, or ambition and wanted only the easy, naturally occurring safe haven of Harlan's garden.

Who wouldn't want to be treated by him, given his lite, lovely, unthreatened experience? At the very least is was an hour of happy times, at best it illuminated some of life's conundrums.  Nothing serious or mind-changing, but little helpful insights. 

'What a great country', Harlan said to his New York relatives who had come to visit; and indeed it was.  Here was a simple man who meandered here and there and then found his niche.  Along with the Zuckerbergs, Gates, Bezos, and Huangs, here are the little guys making a profit, keeping people happy and the cash register ringing.

Harlan Baker was a Wellness Counselor in Chillicothe, Ohio. He hung out his shingle after six months of training in Cleveland - a combination of bloodwort, 'psychology lite', and the art of healing. 

He had gotten into the profession in a roundabout way - a badly demented mother who had refused therapy and drugs and had gone completely 'round the bend when Harlan was a young teenager.  One day she put on lipstick and eyeliner, left the casserole in the oven, and disappeared, only to be found the next day in an Ace hardware parking lot on Route 7 as naked as a jaybird, singing the Kyrie Eleison. 

That and an obsessive-compulsive classmate who kept touching him and himself inappropriately, solving advanced quadratic equations, and dismissed for 'behavior unbecoming', a light sentence given the censorious tenor of the times. 

These two individuals clearly needed help when none was to be given.  Yes, there were psychiatrists but old-school, Freudian and Jungian throwbacks who had lost sight of wellness and dithered in dream theory and world consciousness.  They had few clients. The people of Chillicothe were hardy souls, independent minded people who had always sorted out their own problems; so Dr. Phipps got only those referred from Welfare Services and Family Assistance - people who if they didn't agree to psychiatric evaluation and counselling would appear before the court. 

Harlan was not much - an ordinary student, a diffident farmer, an impulsive teenager - but after he left Chillicothe Vocational School where he had learned something about drills and bits, he found himself, for no other reason than money, at his father's feed store as a stock and errand boy.  He set the rat traps, checked the dunnage, ran to the post office and the bank, and swept the floors - just about all that can be said from a rather slow, uninspiring boy with limited intentions. 

Yet even in the lesser among us, inspiration can come suddenly and unexpectedly.  'I will treat others', he said one day and made himself available at the Bright Beginnings Wellness Center, a 'clinic for all', a friendly, homey, unintimidating place of welcome and good faith.  Clients were treated as friends not patients, and given all the love and affection that they were missing in their personal lives.  

The Director of the Center, Barnaby Allen, thought of himself as a father or older brother.  Yes, he applied many of the precepts he had learned in training, a 'beautiful quilt' of ayurveda, the psychedelic mysteries of the Sonoran desert, the spiritual nature of Gaia and the environment, and the spiritual high of the Tantra. 

'Available' meant serving the master of the trade, an acolyte but more a sycophant in the service of a genius. However, Harlan did learn from Allen, rounded up money for the fees required at the Cleveland training college, went through his course, and found an associate position with Barnaby Allen and Bright Beginnings. 

Now, the whole affair was cockamamie nonsense - a potpourri of New Age psycho-drama, feelgood counselling, and a homemade brew of roots, tubers, vines, and leaves from the local flora.  It didn't take much to be accepted as a client, little in fees, and even less in commitment, but customers left their sessions feeling elevated and far more hopeful and positive than when they went in. 

Bright Beginnings' clientele was not a very demanding lot - idlers mostly, young adults without the brains or initiative to make anything of themselves - and so the counselling never had to probe very deeply into their psyches.  The clinic's clients were as shallow as can be, most without an original thought in their heads, and were only there because they drifted in. 

Eventually Harlan decided to go out on his own, attract a more troubled and needy clientele.  He wanted to help, to make a difference, and to make people well. After that the routine at Bright Beginnings would be just child's play. 

It took him a while to build up a following, but he became known for his patient, highly professional approach to psychological trauma.  He still prescribed his 'witches' brew' but applied for a license to dispense bloodwort, a mildly psychoactive natural substance that 'frees the spirit' and allowed the counselor to join the journey with the patient into the recesses of his past. 

This was by no means Freudian therapy - a harsh facing of facts - but a pleasant Child's Garden of Verses, mediated happiness. 

Armed with their bag of herbal cures, selections from Rumi and the Ascended Masters for reflection, and an appointment card for a return visit, clients spread the word, and before long Harlan had a going business. 

As has been noted, Harlan was no rocket scientist and 'treating people' was a pastime rather than a calling, but it now more than paid the rent and a down payment on a used Tesla. Life was good. 

Before judging Harlan too harshly, for his 'practice' was nothing more than voodoo, smoke, and mirrors and his clients only credulous, emotional wastrels, perhaps one should look at the state of America.  In such a chaotic, rootless, desperately inchoate place, who doesn't need a bit of love?

Places like Barbary Allen's Wellness Center and Harlan Baker's private practice are sprouting up everywhere.  What is needed more than Freudian psychoanalysis - fat in the fire, bringing up long forgotten, painful memories to add to the misery all around us - is a refuge, a comforting emotional home, away from bitching wives, ankle-biting children, pissy bosses, and bad pay.  Harlan loves his clients, treats them warmly, comfortingly, and kindly.  

Who cares if he cures them?  Most of them suffer from no more than living short, nasty, brutish lives like the rest of us. 

How A Very Unattractive Man Found His Political Niche - Beauty Has No Place In Doing Good

Henry Towson was ill-favored in the genetic luck of the draw.  The child of attractive parents, he came out with none of their distinguishing, notable features.  He was, for lack of a more generous and forgiving term, misshapen.  Nothing seemed to go where it belonged, so misaligned were his features and so exaggerated.  He had none of the classic facial symmetry which has characterized beautiful men and women and featured in the sculptures of Ancient Greece and Rome.  

 

His hair was untamed, a bit of the warlock, neither fully curly nor straight, but a nasty whorl.  His nose was long, but not aquiline, graceful, and Roman, but serrated and casting a long shadow.  His ears, while not exactly pendulous, were noticeable for their unusual size and oversized lobes. 

This was all bad enough in a world which prized beauty, but his parents were not just attractive, but Hollywood ready.  His mother in fact had modelled as a young woman, and his father chosen to represent his firm in their national brochure; so when they went out in public with their son, it was an embarrassment.  Of course they loved him and wished him well, and would give him all the social and financial advantages they had had, but still felt uncomfortable when friends and neighbors met them on the street, peered into the baby carriage, and could only manage a, 'Wow, what a baby', unable to gin up the usual fawning words. 

He soldiered his way through school, did his best to swallow the taunts and ridicule of his classmates, kept his head down and mind straight, but could not help but feel hurt and hopeless.  As he grew older, he watched his friends charm and win the most beautiful girls while they gave him little notice.  Many of these boys were as dumb and clueless as apes, but still were put in the front row, favored, privileged, and honored by teachers. 

There was something about physical beauty which prevailed and superseded any other more substantive characteristic or talent. 

The bias in favor of physically attractive people is robust, and has been proven again and again by researchers, most notably Pierce, Hendriks et al with attractive people being perceived as more sociable, happier and more successful than unattractive people   Attractiveness biases have been demonstrated in such different areas as teacher judgments of students, voter preferences for political candidates, and jury judgments in simulated trials 

Recently researchers at Harvard investigated the “beauty is goodness” stereotype in U.S. films and found that attractive characters were portrayed more favorably than unattractive characters on multiple dimensions across a random sample drawn from five decades of top grossing films.  

The authors also found that participants watching a biased film (level of beauty and gender stereotyping) subsequently showed greater favoritism toward an attractive graduate school candidate than participants watching a less biased film.  In the area of employment decision making, attractiveness also influences interviewers’ judgments of job applicants. 

Just as there are bell curves for intelligence, talent, and athletic ability; so is there one for beauty.  The marvelously beautiful and the pitifully ugly lie near the asymptotic ends of the curve, and are small percentages of the population. 

Unfortunately Henry Towson fell very close to asymptotic end of the curve.  He was definitely not grotesquely ugly or even moderately so, but no amount of finagling, fancy dress, or hours at the spa, could move him up and out from the awful penumbra of brutal unattractiveness. 

He was stuck with his his genetic legacy - attributed to Great Uncle Lawson who no matter what the pose, the lighting, his outfits, or attractive, modifying backdrops of his photographs came out as ugly as sin with the same lack of symmetry, misshapenness, and naturally glowering looks of his descendent. 

At some point, Henry decided to accept the bad hand he was dealt, and still find ways to win at life's poker table.

At his university, the protest movement was in full swing.  The progressive faction of the student body had their fingers in every social disorder.  They were at the barricades demonstrating for social justice just like their parents and grandparents had been in the Sixties.  They were outraged, angry, and full of hatred for the oppressive, racist powers that be.  The world was a viperous nest of malignity - a population which dismissed the coming climate catastrophe, which consigned the black man to perpetual dysfunction, which marginalized the gay man, lesbian and transgender, and which demanded closed borders to keep out deserving asylees. 

Curiously and surprisingly, Henry found that the most radical student organizations were represented by men and women like him - sorrowfully unattractive - and yet there was something heady and happy about the gatherings, the marches, and the protests.  Ugliness disappeared in an atmosphere of joyful purpose.  Young men and women hugged and kissed, embraced with love and unity, sang songs of protest but with love and emotional power.  

When they returned home from Washington and the National Mall, they reverted to form -  dowdy, disheveled, and brutally ugly.  The meandered through the days, an undesirable breed apart, and only when it was time to show their reformist colors were they transformed into happy couples.

They were dismissed and marginalized by the elite of the university - those attractive, desirable, privileged classmates with classically handsome and beautiful looks; the young men and women who, observed by the researchers from Harvard and Duke, would always be the first to be chosen, feted, honored, and obeyed.  To these Adonises, members of Harry's group were little more than apes in the monkey house. 

Not only were they insignificant and irrelevant, they were so ugly they were avoided, shunned, and disregarded.  As a result they banded together even more, and became a cluster of unattractiveness. 

None of this mattered to Harry who like everyone else, wanted to feel at home someplace; and this progressive cabal was just it.  So generously inclusive was it that he forgot his misfortune, and felt accepted, happy, and positive. 

He had been so convinced of the rightness of the political causes espoused at the university, that he continued on this path of social justice after graduation.  Not only would he still be a member of a particular, if peculiar social group, he would be working for social betterment. 

In the progressive movement both ideas merged.  Not only were the objectives of social reform existentially important, but that beauty was a symbol of the settled, ignorant, idle bourgeois class. Those classmates who had summered on Nantucket and wintered in Gstaad, those blond airheads of inherited wealth and privilege were the faces of the enemy.  Ugliness was a symbol of commitment, political honor, and righteous belief. 

The life of a progressive was the mirror image of the Mount Olympus of physical beauty.  Unattractiveness was the ticket to political and social success, but just the opposite of that of the rich, talented, and beautiful.  Henry's life was to be one of significance, not airy indifference. 

And so it was that he made his way with what he had - or more properly exploited his physical misfortune like a savvy miner.  He found the seam of gold in a society of black coal...Or so it was that he thought of himself. 

He made his way up through the progressive ranks, being more and more recognized as a liberal's liberal, undaunted and outspoken on every social issue, eloquent, persuasive, and insistent.  So much so that his audiences forgot his miasmic ugliness and only listened to his words. 

He had found his home.  He married a girl from the movement, and unlike his parents who had produced a physical outlier, they produced one of their kind, a 'Wow, what a baby' boy who if he was lucky would follow the same anointed trajectory of his parents. 

The Bliss Of Ignorance - Life Is So Much Easier With True Belief, The Saga Of A Credulous Woman

For Vicki Samuels there was not a scintilla of doubt that each and every item in the progressive canon was true and undeniable.  As such there was no reason to doubt or to question. It was all received wisdom - the climate, the borders, the black man, transgenders, capitalism, and racism. These were the philosophical pillars of American society, deep, strong, unimpeachable, and eternal.  It felt good every morning to know that God was in his heaven and all was right with the world. 

Yet everything was wrong with the world - the black man continues to be oppressed in a world of white supremacy, the climate shows no signs of healthy reversal, the gay man, the lesbian, and the transgender are still marginalized and hated, needy refugees are turned back at the border or rounded up and deported once here, and Wall Street keeps up its predatory, acquisitive behavior favoring the rich and well-to-do; but everything is on the right path for renewal, transformation, and return. 

Vicki used to be a voracious reader, but the more she read now, the less she learned or discovered.  The world was exactly as forecast, on a downward spiral of hate, incineration, and misery.  There was no need to read about sea level rise and the barrage of Atlantic hurricanes because global warming was a fait accompli, an undeniable, unquestioned phenomenon.  Whatever the vicissitudes of weather, the trajectory was the same - a disastrous, violent, destructive climate Armageddon. 

Every day white, privileged men exerted undue power over the vulnerable, fomented hatred of all other races, genders, and ethnicities. Gestapo SS storm troopers were rounding up legitimate asylees, loading them on cattle cars and shipping them back to the concentration camps of origin.   Gay clubs and the lesbian beer halls of Bernal Heights were raided, and men and women were sent to far northern reservations far worse than Soviet gulags. Black men were hanged from sycamore limbs as often as during the days of Jim Crow and segregation. 

Vicki knew this absolutely and needed no confirmation for her beliefs.  The time for inquiry and investigation were over. 

Now, of course none of these assumptions were true, vetted, parsed, and studied. Vicki took them all on face value, matters of principle, divine injunction, and an almost Biblical faith.  

How did this viral possession of an ordinary, reasonably intelligent, uninspiring but good woman happen.  As a child she believed in Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy; but as she got older forgot them, relegated them like old dolls she played with as a toddler, kept them in a favorite, soft part of her memory but never once looked at them as anything more than enduring myth. 

She was tricked by older children - stones collected from a giant's lair, a space alien's tooth, and the magical potion of wild berries and pine root - but those too were dismissed in normal childhood evolution.  

She believed boys were actually interested in her although she had none of the charm, beauty, and sexual allure of her classmates.  She primped in the mirror seeing only Helen of Troy, not the rather unattractive offspring of unattractive parents.  She believed it when class activists told her that she had a mission to reform others, and that the world needed young women like her. 

There was no indication that she would necessarily fall off the rails or into the deep end.  For a long time she retained her equilibrium, chose and acted sensibly; but as she grew older, it was as though all intellectual reserve had crumbled.  She had become a credulous, naive, and totally vulnerable woman. 

It wasn't that the progressive canon was so new, revolutionary, or existential. Far from it.  It was as fantastical as any other utopian movement, filled with aspirations, dreams, happy hopes for an impossible paradise of harmony, universal justice, and love but with no foundation, no historical precedent or relevance.  Vicki's immediate, whole-hearted, absolute embrace of the liberal canon was not based on logic, objectivity, analysis, or exegesis.  Something else was the matter. 

Professor Howard Rubenstein of Harvard, noted social scientist and bio-ethics researcher, had this to say about the nature of true belief:

True Belief, the passionate embrace of a utopian future, the jettisoning of rational doubt and in its place installing an altar to hopefulness is a common phenomenon, rooted somewhere in the dimly remembered events of childhood, maturing in the fiercely hostile world of adolescence, and growing inalienable in the heady atmosphere of political righteousness.  True Believers, unlike the normally skeptical and patient, wait for the illogical epiphany which will finally release them from the confines of the real world and let them gambol in fantasy. 

 

Vicki lives in a leafy neighborhood of Washington, DC, a politically uniform, universally liberal enclave of the city.  Each and every resident is of the same political absolutism.  No one needs look any farther than the mirror to confirm their hatred of Donald Trump and his MAGA followers.  There are things in the world that need no inquiry.  There is no need to deconstruct to discover political cadence, meter, or tone.  To a man and in complete lockstep Vicki's neighbors march to the same drummer. 

This unquestioning neighborhood of foundational belief was the perfect home for Vicki who by this time had rid herself of any niggling, residual doubts of progressive righteousness.  It was time to rest from debate and animus and lie back in the knowledge that history had come to an end. 

A few years ago the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama had concluded that with the fall of the Soviet Union, the world had come to 'the end of history', that is that it was now united in democratic principle, and would never more be subjected to tyranny and political evil. 

Where he got his news has always been a mystery, but for a few years after the demise of Communist Russia, the world believed him in a wave of idle hopefulness.  It wasn't long before the idyll ended and the world fell apart in a miasma of territorialism, religious fanaticism, and political hatred. 

So the residents of University Park should have known better.  History will never end, human nature will continue to drive territorial ambition, self-interest, and aggressiveness.  If there is such a thing as received wisdom it is the absolute ineluctability of human nature. 

Ignorance is indeed bliss for the True Believer who has chosen to escape the hurly-burly world of political difference and to reside in a world which needs no confirmation.  And who can blame them? Who would not want to live in an unencumbered, uncontested world? The happiness principle, the new ethos of political absolutism.