Jessica Lynch featured at bizarre motivatinal conference

[Cocoa]

This stuff is as beyond my understanding as religion.

The cast of characters is like something the Simpsons would have put together.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2004/05/24/DDGB16Q3KQ1.DTL

<snip>

Town's presentation came at a marathon Get Motivated! program that played the HP Pavilion and the Cow Palace last week. Tickets sold for $49 to $89. For more than nine hours, speakers from various rooms of life's success mansion poured out a stream of platitudes, pep talks, canned-ham humor, live infomercials, prefab patriotism, Bible Belt Christianity and the barest smattering of concrete advice. Signing up for something -- anything -- was like an involuntary reflex action to being repeatedly, numbingly hammered in the knee.

"In this huddle of life we play hard," ex-49er Ronnie Lott said after tossing a few autographed footballs into the stands. Motivational superstar Zig Ziglar turned another old sports truism, about where nice guys finish, on its ear. "The good guys and the good gals ultimately do win," he said in his broad Mississippi drawl. "Who you are is different from who you are when skill and will come together," offered Ziglar disciple Krish Dhanam, in one of his perky koans. By the time freed prisoner of war Jessica Lynch, quarterback Joe Montana and comedian Jerry Lewis finished off the proceedings, in a bizarre late-afternoon sequence, the day had acquired its own transfixing logic.

It was a cross of boot camp and revival meeting, pep rally and a very large group therapy session. Behind all the hard-sell optimism and draining, calculated energy -- there were original (but dreadful) songs and indoor fireworks, red-white-and-blue confetti storms and a beach ball toss -- this motivational "seminar" seemed strangely attuned to a mordant American mind-set in 2004.

By serving up a self-referential belief system that was finally about nothing other than its own miasma of "success," the day radiated that gnawing sense of unease so many people feel now. These market-minded Get Motivated! hucksters were selling what people were ready to hear, at least for a day off from work in San Jose -- an escapist fantasy of personal empowerment and consumer comforts that would somehow create a shield against the very real and vividly imagined terrors of life in 2004.

With its promises of financial potency for the working single mothers, go- get-'em pluck for salespeople squeezed by the economy and a bullish Bush- Rumsfeld determination for the rest of us -- "Iraq isn't nearly as bad as the media makes it seem," Ziglar assured his audience, with Jessica Lynch in the wings to prove it -- this feel-good-athon built a shining bridge to some mythical, impregnable suburban Xanadu. There everyone lives in big houses and drives nice cars, plays golf or rides horses, sits down for quiet cups of coffee with spouses of 57 years who love them more than ever and enjoys a casual proximity to the immortals.

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[LTR]

1. Those guys always throw together those weird packages

Somebody's idea of motivation.

I'll stick with Tony Robbins. He blows 'em all away.

[barbaraann]

2. I posted about this a few days ago. My sister went to it.

And she came back saying she would vote for Rudy Guiliani for President because she was so impressed with his story about 9-11. She's a Democrat.

[Mountainman]

3. I don't know if these motivational things are worth it.

I think I would not like it. It seems to me to be similar to the Promise Keepers only non religious.

I bought tapes from Anthony Robbins and what I learned from them is that some people make a lot of money selling tapes and some people lose a lot of money buying them.

My in-laws use to go to different seminars and after everyone they had a different way to deal with life. It was hard to keep up with the changes.

I think you need to look within for your motivation. Just because you can smile more easily doesn't mean you are happier.

[tom_paine]

4. Life in Imperial Amerika long ago surpassed the first seasons of the Simps

ons.

Long ago.

That gentle, neurotic nation is dead, perhaps gone forever thou many pray for it to be restored.

We are now Imperial Amerika and all that remains that seperates us from nazis or Soviets is the Wretched Remnanats of the Old Republic (fading fast) and a matter of degree.

Oh, and also the Marketing 101 necessity that tells the Busheviks if they want to reintroduce Totalitarianism, AVOID links or similiarities to Grandpa Prescott's Business Partners...