Only the most boring questions have answers. For example, here are three of the world’s most interesting and least answerable questions, which are posed at the beginning of Douglas Adams’ space odyssey, The Hitch Hikers Guide to the Galaxy: “Why are we born? Why do we die? And why do we spend so much of the intervening time wearing digital watches?”

These are good questions, and not many of us can rise to these standards of perplexity. When I was young, before the days of IQ tests, my parents used to quiz me with such teasers as “How long is a piece of string?” and “If oranges are called oranges, why aren’t bananas called yellows?” Of course I failed these tests every time, which is the mark of a good test. But they did give me a lifelong taste for unanswerable questions. Here are some of my favorites.

How do the airlines manage to arrange that your incoming flight is invariably late, while your connecting flight is always on time? Why do they call the Long Island Expressway an Expressway? Are we having fun yet? How are you? Does anybody know what time it really is?

Mr. Robert Dylan provided many of the most unanswerable questions of the past century, such as: “How many roads must a man walk down, before you can call him a man?” and, even more difficult, “How many years must a mountain exist, before it is washed to the sea?” Mr. Dylan suggested that the answers were blowing in the wind, which is more or less what one would expect.

French intellectuals are also particularly good at baffling us with unanswerable questions. Roland Barthes asked: “Is the essence of a myth to be found in its form or in its content?” It’s anybody’s guess, really. One of the greatest obfuscators of all time, Michel Foucault, offered this brain-teaser: “How can we deny the autonomy of discourse?” It beats me. I will think twice in future, before I deny the autonomy of discourse.

Here is a truly profound question from a more mundane source. A magazine subscription reminder arrived in the mail the other day. Across the front of the envelope was printed, in large red letters, a message right out of a play by Samuel Beckett: the entirely unanswerable question, “What Are You Waiting For?”

Copyright: David Bouchier

Twelfth Night is supposed to mark the end of the Christmas season. Before midnight, unless we want to risk bad luck all year, the decorations must be taken down, and the last traces of the holiday removed. Our neighbors don’t know this. The morning after Twelfth Night, January 6, we’re still surrounded by houses draped in colored lights and ribbons, the owners entirely oblivious to the fact that they are tempting providence. In early January, some homes in our subdivision still have rotting pumpkins outside, suggesting a lamentable failure to turn over the pages of the calendar at all. Retailers continue to bang the holiday drum, doing their best to persuade us that the season of excess goes on forever.

Traditionally, Twelfth Night was the last big splurge of the season, a night of feasting and merrymaking presided over by the Bean King. The Bean King was chosen for the evening in the following way: traditional twelfth night cakes were handed out, in one of which a bean was concealed. I don’t know what kind of bean – let’s assume a baked bean. Anyway, whoever found the bean was declared Bean King. I wondered whether this method might be worth considering as an alternative, cheaper, and probably more effective way of choosing presidents. But no doubt the election committees would soon be spending billions of dollars on electronically traceable beans.

The point is that Twelfth Night drew a line under the winter Saturnalia. After that it was back to reality, back to work. Boundaries are good, beginnings and endings are good, even limits are good. They give life some sort of structure. But boundaries and limits are not popular these days. They interfere with commerce. If twelve days of Christmas are profitable, three dozen days of Christmas must be even more so. And if the season must end, let it lead straight into another equally joyful and equally expensive celebration.

And so one selling season flows indistinguishably into the next. I have it on good authority that the first Valentine’s cards and heart-shaped chocolate boxes were spotted in a store in Dix Hills, Long Island, on December 26. The florists shovel out heaps of unsold poinsettias with backhoes, to make space for roses. Right behind the chocolates and roses, the Easter bunnies are already getting in line. And so it goes through the year until, some time in August, the next wave of Christmas catalogs begins to arrive, and there we go again. Indeed, in my travels in New England, I have been amazed to see establishments called Christmas Shops, that actually do trade in tinsel and plush Santa Clauses and plastic trees all year long.

Oscar Wilde once said: “Anything becomes a pleasure if one does it once too often.” It was intended as irony, no doubt. But the real irony is that Wilde’s quip has become the ruling philosophy of the modern world. Only too much is enough.

Perhaps we need to recover that simple word “enough” for regular daily use. That’s enough on my plate; that’s enough space for a family to live in; that music is loud enough; that’s enough time to spend on Christmas Of course, we all need something to look forward to. That’s where history, as always, is instructive. The medieval calendar was packed with saint’s days and feast days, Holy days, tumbling one upon another. But these events came and went quickly. Today is Saint Crispin’s Day, but tomorrow is just Tuesday. We don’t want Saint Crispin’s Day sales, songs, souvenirs, TV specials and unrepeatable holiday offers rolling on through March. Even the best holiday loses its savor when it never stops.

Shakespeare’s play Twelfth Night was written to be performed on January 5th, in the year 1601. It opens with these lines, spoken by Orsino, Duke of the imaginary kingdom of Illyria.

“If music be the food of love, play on. Give me excess of it, that surfeiting the appetite may sicken, and so die.” Four centuries later, we can understand just how Orsino felt, on the twelfth day of Christmas. At the end of the play, the clown Feste reminds the audience that the holiday, by its nature, is brief, that the future is uncertain, that youth will not endure, and (just by way of a punchline) that the rain it raineth every day.

Twelfth Night has come and gone: the party’s over.

Copyright: David Bouchier

We are sliding into the thirteenth year of the twenty-first century. It’s no longer a novelty. Most people write the date on their checks correctly, and we’ve learned to say “two thousand twelve” with great panache. The twentieth century already seems almost as remote and historic as the nineteenth.

As history moves along, the frontier of real memory moves with it. As long as there are people around who remember particular years or events, those things still seem “real” to those of us who came along later. When nobody remembers, those events disappear into the history books. So the first decade of the twentieth century has almost vanished from human memory. It’s a sepia photograph, a flickering silent movie, a scratchy recording of a forgotten tune.

That still leaves a large chunk of the last century that is very much alive in the memories of our more senior citizens, and it’s worth remembering what we remember. Those of us who were born before World War Two have memories of life before television, before penicillin, polio shots, frozen foods, Xerox, contact lenses, videos, and the pill. We were here before radar, credit cards, split atoms, laser beams and ballpoint pens, before dishwashers, tumble dryers, electric blankets, domestic air conditioning, drip-dry clothes, or global positioning systems.

When we arranged a date, computers were not involved. We got married first and then lived together. It’s very difficult to get young people to believe this. We thought Fast Food was what you ate in Lent, and that a Big Mac was an oversized raincoat. We managed our family lives without househusbands or day care. We never heard of FM radios, CDs, disposable cameras, artificial hearts, word processors, or young men wearing earrings. For us a “chip” was a piece of wood, or a fried potato, “hardware” meant nuts and bolts, and “software” wasn’t even a word.

Who would have thought, even twenty years ago, that television would come down the wire and the telephone would be wireless? Who could have predicted students who don’t study, accountants who don’t account, or scientists who cheat on their experiments? Who could ever have predicted that young people would not always be clean, respectful, moral and hard working – the way we were?

We’ve had to absorb a lot of changes, and some of us may agree with James Thurber, who said: “Progress was all right; it just went on too long.” I would add: not just too long but too fast.
What so annoying about the headlong rush to change everything is that we never get to achieve the one and only benefit of age: superior knowledge. Age may bring wisdom to some of us, if we’re paying attention. But who needs wisdom? When your computer screen goes blank you can be as wise as Solomon, and it will stay blank. Knowledge is what we need, and we have less and less of it as we grow older. The instant we learn something it’s already out of date, and any ten-year-old kid knows more. Seniors are eternal freshmen in the fast-moving world of high technology.

The only consolation is that exactly the same thing will happen to today’s smug kids, and even faster. In a very few years they will have to ask their kids how to switch on the three-dimensional holographic home entertainment system – and those of us who remember the crystal set or the 78 record will be history.

Copyright: David Bouchier

I can’t seem to stop sending Christmas cards. I had planned to give it up this year but, when the cards started coming in, I felt guilty, wrote two or three, then twenty, then fifty, just like last year. It seems to be one of those habits learned in childhood that are almost impossible to break. If anybody knows about a twelve-step recovery program for Christmas card addicts, please call me.

Looking back, what I remember best from my childhood was the business of choosing the cards. They didn’t come in boxes then, and each one was selected with an individual in mind. We had dozens of aunts and uncles and cousins, so selection was a complicated business. It was a major social embarrassment if two relatives received the same card, although I never understood why.

My mother had an uncanny knack for picking out cards, some mysterious understanding of images that allowed her to say: “This will be just right for aunt Edith.” And it would be just right – a revolting pastiche of fat little angels that somehow fit aunt Edith’s personality exactly. These days, my mother would be a big executive in advertising, choosing precisely the right picture to sell us soap, or sun tan lotion. In our family, everybody got the card they deserved, and sometimes they didn’t speak to us for months afterwards.

It’s good to keep up a family tradition. But a lot of the fun has gone out of the choice, because it’s become so complicated. When I was a kid, most of the cards were at least vaguely religious. Today, a big card store literally has a card for every taste, from Unitarianism to militant atheism, and a great many cards for people with no taste at all.

It is an incredible, overwhelming blizzard of images. Ancient pagan symbols of the winter solstice, like logs and fir trees and candles, clash with Victorian snow scenes and Christmas puddings. Charles Dickens must take the blame for those, I fear. Then there are thousands of low-grade imitations of Currier and Ives prints, hundreds of innocent child angels – a nice change from the child devils so popular in movies the rest of the year – red-nosed reindeer courtesy of Walt Disney, funny animal cartoons courtesy of Gary Larson, wreaths and penguins and bears, and Santa Clauses and robins and doves and partridges in pear trees. There are even a few Christmas cards done in Islamic style this year, which takes some explaining even in a multicultural society.

Searching through this barrage of icons produces a severe case of visual vertigo and psychological overload. How can the brain process all these images, and make sense of them? What does it all mean? How do the angels relate to the penguins, for example? What’s the connection between snowmen and poinsettias? I would recommend everyone visiting a card shop to take along a French post-structuralist intellectual, just to unravel these little problems.

Here and there among the ranks of cards one finds a nativity scene, almost shocking in that crude company. Oh yes, we’d forgotten about that.

But still, I enjoy choosing Christmas cards, and sending them. It’s a fairly painless way to keep in touch with people, and remind them that you’re not dead yet, and that they owe you a letter, and possibly money. It’s fun to get cards too, and hang them on strings around the living room. We have a little competition in our house, as I suppose most people do: the most insipid card, the most ghastly sentimental verse, the most inappropriate image, and so on. The oldest aunts win every category, every year.

Advertising people talk about the need to “Break through the clutter” to get your message across. Christmas cards are a classic case of this difficulty. I just don’t think the Christmas message is getting across. It’s lost out there in the clutter, somewhere between the sleigh bells and the dancing elves. If a bright star rose in the east now, it would be lost too, in the sodium glare from the car parks around the shopping malls.

The Three Wise Men didn’t send a card, or even three cards. They visited in person, they made the journey. Because this was the only way they knew to break through the clutter, and to see for themselves.

Copyright: David Bouchier

During the month of December, driving around the suburbs at night can be a profoundly surrealistic experience. Most of the residential streets are dull and dark, as usual. But sometimes you turn a corner and see a multi-colored glow in the sky, as if aliens had landed on the next block. It’s another Christmas light extravaganza.

On the whole, I enjoy the tradition of celebrating Christmas with a display of lights. It’s a dark time of year. There’s nothing much to look forward to except the dark days of January, then more of the same chilly darkness through February and March. We may as well cheer ourselves up with a few colored lights, just as our ancestors pushed away the winter blues with extravagant displays of candles.

Candles are beautiful, especially in the windows of old houses. However, most people use electric candles, which are a bit of a cheat. They don’t create that lovely wavering effect, as the flame flickers in the draft, and they don’t provide the same employment for the local fire department. When I was a very young child, people still used candles on Christmas trees, and the fire services were busy all night. You don’t get that kind of entertainment with electric candles.

A modest display of Christmas lights is charming. Our little town is a good example. The “downtown” area, which is extremely modest, has one decorated tree outside the church, and a frosting of tiny white lights on the trees around the duck pond. It’s not Rockefeller Center, but it looks festive and sincere.

But, when it comes to Christmas lighting, some people don’t know when to stop. Their homes and front yards blaze out with whole galaxies of lights: reindeers with flashing red noses, blinking Santa Clauses, glittering sleighs, and cute little elves, glowing like survivors of a nuclear accident. Some of these displays even have sound effects, which must drive the neighbors very close to homicide. It has become a competitive thing. There are homes, and whole blocks of homes on Long Island that are famous for their annual illuminations. They start working on these projects in August, and some have more than thirteen thousand lights. The impact is stunning, especially when you come on them unexpectedly.

There is a whole Christmas lights sub-culture out here in the subdivisions. There are catalogs full of new and more impressive displays: lighted mobile reindeer sculptures, giant back-lit revolving wreaths, illuminated nativity villages, angels in neon, snowflakes with mini-lights, icicles, falling stars, and rotating trees. The only gesture towards economy I could find was a half-Christmas tree, conveniently flat on one side so that it will fit right up against the wall. I suppose that saves something on the utility bill.

Do these elaborate displays outside people’s homes indicate that a particularly strong Christmas spirit prevails within? Henry David Thoreau would say that we have to live up to our decorations. But how hard it would be to rise so high.

But my real problem with these over-decorated suburban homes is that they remind me of something else entirely. They remind me of Las Vegas. They remind me of the seaside resorts in England we used to visit as a child, to “see the lights” – hundreds of thousands of colored bulbs strung along the seafront and the pier. They remind me of the circus, the fairground, the carnival. They don’t remind me of Christmas at all. When I pass these glittering houses, I just think about the electricity bills. Such waste would embarrass a Renaissance prince.

But when these gaudy displays are switched off (as they should be) on Twelfth Night, when these insubstantial pageants have faded, I will actually miss them. They may have nothing to do with Christmas, but they certainly brighten up our suburban lives for a few weeks. Perhaps, at this time of year, it is better to light a candle, even thirteen thousand electric candles, than to curse the darkness.

Copyright: David Bouchier

When I came to live in suburban Long Island, New York, people would say “You must go to The Mall,” as if it was the local equivalent of the Sistine Chapel. I noticed that The Mall was always capitalized in speech, like The Catholic Church.

Eventually, reluctantly, I made my way to The Mall. It was a shock: a huge ugly building, with no windows, apparently designed by someone who used to build chemical factories in Siberia, and surrounded by a car park the size of an airport. When finally I found an entrance, it was like fairyland inside, or maybe I mean Disneyland – all cozy and clean and bright colored, with schmaltzy music dribbling down from the ceilings like warm chewing gum. This was not like the shopping experience I grew up with. No rain, no traffic, no litter or street characters to make it interesting, just shops.

In the middle of the day The Mall was full of people, many of them mother-and-daughter pairs strolling the polished aisles that mimic small-town high streets, and looking at the shops. It struck me at once that I had stumbled into a great mystery – shopping in its purest form divorced from need, and even from desire. In spite of the carefully-managed atmosphere of tranquility, everyone looked very serious, even anxious, because shopping is a serious ritual. And here I was, like an atheist at a church service, blundering about with no real idea how to shop at all.

The Mall, as I now understand, is a kind of Cathedral. The structure is shaped like a rough crucifix, with special holy temples at three points labeled Sears, Macys, A & S. This is where people come to pay homage to the great enigma of consumer society: where does all this stuff come from? And, more to the point, why?

I’ve been working on this problem in my spare time and, although I don’t have the final answer, I do have an idea.

Come with me back to the lovely islands of Melanesia in the South Pacific in the early decades of this century. When westerners began to settle in the islands, the innocent natives saw for the first time the full cornucopia of consumer society. Where there had been only palms and sea and sunshine, suddenly they saw ice machines and artificial lights and airplanes and toaster ovens and designer clothes and fashionable shoes. The natives lost their innocence, abandoned their traditional gods and built new religions around these new holy objects.

Anthropologists called the religions “Cargo Cults” because the consumer goods arrived as cargo, on planes or boats. The benighted Melanesians had no idea where all this stuff came from, but they assumed it must come from a very powerful God. So they started praying to the Cargo God to send them some of the same good things, so their lives would be fulfilled and they would become happy again.

Is this beginning to sound familiar? The stuff in The Mall arrives like cargo, out of nowhere, with fanciful labels saying “Made in Singapore” or “Made in Taiwan.” Is it really credible that all this gaudy junk is shipped thousands of miles across the globe, just to occupy space in a suburban American Mall?

No, the cargo cultists were right. There’s something very strange going on here. One clue is in the shoe shops. There were twenty of them in the Mall I visited, bursting with shoes, sandals, boots and sneakers, more than the whole population of the state could wear out in a hundred years. Then the clothing shops, forty nine of them, mostly feminine, with enough frocks to equip an Amazon army well into the next century. The Mall itself looks weird, bit like something dropped from another planet.

Yes, I hate to be the one to tell you, but the aliens are at it again. Somewhere out there on the Pacific Rim of the Galaxy, someone, or something, is dumping their surplus rubbish on us. We don’t know much about them yet, but I can guess what they must be like: a bunch of highly industrious transvestites with eight legs and no taste.

As for us humans, what we have going here is the biggest, most successful cargo cult in the history of the universe.

Copyright: David Bouchier

If we could travel back in time about two hundred years, and find one of the famous 18th century rationalists – say Voltaire – and bring him back with us to enjoy Halloween at the end of the twentieth century, what would he make of our world? Well, he’d certainly be impressed by the technology, stunned by the shopping malls and terrified by the traffic and the crime. But my guess is that Voltaire would be most amazed by how superstitious we still are.

In the eighteenth century, philosophers like Voltaire confidently expected that superstition – “That infamous thing” as he called it – would soon vanish, and that the world would move into a golden age of reason and science. How disappointed he would be to see us now, still captivated by some of the oldest and silliest superstitions and magical beliefs. We have plenty of science as well, of course. Science produces the clever plastics that make our Halloween masks; science beams movies about ghosts and witches into our homes via satellite; science can even deal with our child’s chocolate overdose, or our own demon-filled nightmares.

We have science, yes, but we seem to want magic too.

In medieval times, magic flourished in spite of the church’s disapproval, because magic offered all kinds of powers and services that people urgently wanted. The arts of divination and astrology, for example, claimed to foretell the future – and everyone wants to know the future, or at least a reassuring version of it. Nowadays you can get your astrological signs read by a computer program. Now there’s a collision of science and magic to make your head spin.

Necromancers claimed to raise the spirits of the dead and put them into communication with the living, just as spiritualistic mediums do nowadays. And alchemy, perhaps the most highly-organized form of magic, offered the alluring prospect of unlimited gold out of dross – exactly like a modern-day investment analyst, and with very similar results.

The trouble with magic always was that it didn’t work. And the trouble with human beings was and is that they want to believe in it anyway.

There’s a dark side of magic, of course. Witches were burned right into Voltaire’s time, because their powers were believed to come from the devil. In the shadow of the third millennium, we seem to like the dark side especially. It speaks to us with its tales of vampires and werewolves, hobgoblins and bad fairies, unquiet spirits and tormenting demons that still haunt our dreams and provide the imagery for some of our most popular movies. Perhaps we like them because they seem so keen to be with us?

So if my old friend Voltaire, arrived in Long Island today, we would find alive and well many of the magical and superstitious beliefs he sneered at on his deathbed in 1778. He would find people wearing lucky charms and copper bracelets, telling fortunes, playing with Tarot cards, insisting that bad news comes in threes, and buying lottery tickets. He would see us watching Superman movies (pure medieval magic stuff), crying every year over the Wizard of Oz, and playing sword and sorcery video games. He could go to bookstore and look at the New Age section (a label Voltaire would surely have found hilariously funny), and find shelves of books about reincarnation, mysterious earth forces, magic crystals, flying saucers and every kind of superstitious twaddle handed down to us from the dark ages, which weren’t called the dark ages for nothing.

Voltaire had already despaired of the human race in 1778. He would certainly despair all over again today, when he would find us preparing to celebrate All Hallows Eve, the Eve of Witches.

But just perhaps we aren’t really as dumb as all that. Science, after all, doesn’t explain everything. In fact there’s scarcely a question we really want answered that science does answer. Even scientists themselves, as they delve deeper and deeper into the mysteries of the universe, are coming up with even profounder mysteries instead of neat, rational explanations. There may be a world of hidden worlds out there inhabited by strange spirits, where the rules of science don’t apply.

So when the goblins and witches and those strange green tortoise things arrive on All Hallows Eve, bearing their ritual plastic bags and chanting their cabalistic incantations of “Trick or Treat”, it’s wise to give generously. You can never be absolutely sure just who, or what, they might be.

Copyright: David Bouchier

It must have been thirty years ago that I first read Alan Watts’ book, The Way of Zen. This was long before Zen became fashionable, and long before Robert Pirsig made a national bestseller out of the unlikely topic Zen and the Art of Motor Cycle Maintenance, which is a clever book, in spite of the title.

Zen means “Meditation.” It’s a Chinese form of Buddhism, more than a thousand years old. Zen interested me because I was alarmed by the onward rush of time. There’s no way of slowing down time, except by extreme measures like going to a museum, or a university seminar, where time really does stand still.

In those days time was my enemy. I was always living for the future. Everything would happen in the future: success, love, happiness: they were all just around the corner. Yet the future arrived so fast that I had no time to arrange any of those things, so they had to be pushed into the future yet again. Meanwhile, everyone around me seemed to be living in the past.

What I learned or thought I learned from Zen was the lesson: LIVE NOW. To quote Alan Watts; “The past and future are real illusions, they exist only in the present, which is what there is, and all that there is.”

It seemed to me a great stroke of wisdom, profound in its obvious truth. The past is gone. The future is unknowable. Where can we live, where can we be happy, except in the present moment?

If you want to experience Zen, consider your cat. Every cat is a Zen Master, living at peace in an eternal present, concealing profound wisdom behind a mask of complete stupidity. Many times I have sat and swapped Zen insights with our orange cat Bertram. He always gets the best of the exchange because, like a true Zen Master, he just doesn’t care.

When The New Age, the Age of Aquarius was announced, at the end of the 1960s, Zen became quite popular. New Agers seized on Zen as a promising alternative to traditional religions, because it looked strangely modern, even post-modern. Zen seemed to offer the best of both worlds, spirituality without the spirit, like alcohol-free beer.

I was swept along by this, and took to reading more Zen philosophy. And Zen was the perfect philosophy for that time, the 70s and even more the 80s, where nobody wanted to look too closely at the past or the future. Zen teaches that there is no dualism, everything is one. In the 80s profit and loss, debit and credit, politics and show business, surf and turf all merged into a great amorphous oneness.

The aim of Zen is Oneness, a mental state called Satori, which is to live entirely in the present moment, beyond thought or intellect, in the state called “No Mind.” The Buddha said: “The no-mind not-thinks no-thoughts about nothing.” In other words, Satori is just like watching television, and television is electronic Zen.

It was this epiphany about Zen and television that made me think twice about the whole business. One should always be willing to revise one’s personal philosophy. The world would be a better place if people were more willing to change. If Napoleon, say, or Hitler, or Genghis Khan had paused somewhere along the line and said: “Wait a minute, terribly sorry, made a bit of a mistake there…” much unpleasantness could have been avoided.

In particular I began to rethink this notion of living in the present, which I had been trying to do for years. Just try it for half an hour – live continuously in the present without letting your mind wander forward or back. I can almost guarantee that, unless you happen to be hang gliding at the time, you will find the present a terrible bore. It lacks the clarity of the past and the anxious expectation of the future.

The present is dull, the future is full of doubt. I’m going to join the rest of the human race and live in the past.

Copyright: David Bouchier
From: The Accidental Immigrant 1992

I knew the economy was on the move when my neighbor Dan hung out his shingle as a “Domestic Equipment Integration Consultant.” He used to be a highly-paid engineer, assembling jet aircraft. Now he helps people to assemble those consumer items, like barbecue grills and bicycles, which annoyingly come in about a hundred pieces with a sheet of inscrutable instructions. “You have to move down with the times,” he says cheerfully, banging the last bolt into a brutal looking exercise machine.

Consultancy is the breaking wave of the future. Anyone can set up as a consultant on just about anything, apart from the great monopolies of medicine and law. You can buy the skills of an ex-architect or an ex-computer programmer, an ex-banker, or even an ex-executive for a tiny fraction of what they would have cost when they had real jobs.

There are now about four million of these downwardly-mobile professionals in the United States – “Dumpies,” I call them, victims of middle-class unemployment. Like my neighbor Dan, and many of his friends, they’re earning a fraction of their old incomes, sinking when they expected be flying. Naturally enough, they’re a bit short of self-esteem. “Doing some consultancy work” sounds better than “unemployed.” Consultants can have business cards, and perhaps even notepaper and a little brass plaque. They can get together and rent a group office, so they have somewhere to go and watch TV in the daytime.

You may say it’s really no joke, an awful waste of talent. But look at it this way. Unemployment is moment of opportunity, a chance to break out of the concrete-and-glass strait jacket, and do something interesting with your life at last. Karl Marx was all set for a quiet academic life as a professor at the University of Bonn when he was thrown out in 1841, after which he had a long and satisfying career as chief consultant to the International Communist Conspiracy.

A consultant, by definition is a superior kind of person, who has special knowledge that other people want. Sherlock Holmes was not just a detective, but a “consulting detective,” which enormously increased the prestige of that dubious profession. In the British health care system, the Consultant is the highest form of medical life. He even drops the “Doctor” from his name and reverts to plain “Mr.” as a sign that he is beyond the need for titles. In Britain, if the doctor gives up on you, the chances are you will be fine. If the Consultant says you’re dead, you’re dead. His dignity requires it.

Consultants are healers. Their mission is to fix all the things in our lives and businesses that don’t work, or that we don’t understand. There are consultants on garden design, beauty, interior decoration, educational choice, what to do about your cat’s bad habits, resume writing, child discipline (a bit of a lost cause, that one), office management, financial planning, and just about every frustrating problem of everyday life. Within a few blocks of my house, I could find you a Bird Seed Mix Consultant, a What-To-Do-With-Italian-Men Consultant, and a half a dozen Lawn Care Consultants. We all know at least one thing that other people might want to know. My wife is the only person in the world who can explain the plots of the “Mystery” series on public television, so she could have a great success as a Plot Clarification Consultant.

A consultant will tell you what you could figure out yourself in five minutes. But consulting brings reassurance and relief from responsibility. When your hard disk has gone a bit floppy, or when it turns out that your idea for a great American novel about a crazed sea captain chasing a white whale has been done already, it’s better to hear the bad news from someone else. I recently saw a young woman coming out of an office labeled “Hair Consultancy.” Now, I’m sure she got excellent, satisfying advice in there. But anyone could have told her what she obviously needed to know: that it is a mistake to wash your hair in industrial-strength detergent, and then to stand beside a helicopter landing pad for an hour or two without wearing a hat. That will be $400, payable to Hair Consultants International.

This will be the information superhighway of the future, never mind computers and algorithms. Millions and millions of consultants will provide an inexhaustible fund of knowledge to everyone, for every possible purpose. At the end of the line is an ideal, pollution free, income-free post-industrial society where nobody produces anything, and we are all consultants.

There’s only one catch. When nobody has a real job, and everyone is a consultant (to misquote the Roman poet Juvenal), who will consult the consultants themselves? I can see a niche for myself here, as a sort of clearing house for consultation, a Consulting Consultancy Consultant, directing the flow of questions and answers like the conductor of a great orchestra. It can scarcely fail, as long as everyone remembers to consult me first.

Copyright: David Bouchier

There have been some very strange news stories this year about a psychological condition called Munchhausen’s Syndrome by Proxy. According to the reports, Munchhausen’s Syndrome by Proxy causes the sufferers – who are usually mothers or nurses or care-givers – to fabricate serious illnesses and seek medical treatment, not for themselves but for someone else, usually a child.

This is quite extraordinary behavior. Most of us have enough trouble fabricating our own illnesses, without inventing symptoms on behalf of others. But what really struck me was the name of the syndrome: Munchhausen’s Syndrome by Proxy. Baron Munchhausen was one on my childhood heroes. He was the very model of a man of action. I couldn’t imagine him doing anything by proxy.

In case you missed out on this literary treat, here’s the story. Baron Karl Friedrich Hieronymus Von Munchhausen, to give him his full name and title, was born in Germany in 1720. He was a soldier of fortune and, later in his life, became famous as a teller of tales about his adventures all over Europe, and indeed all over the solar system. Some people thought these stories were a bit exaggerated. But that’s the privilege of adventurers. In 1785, Von Munchhausen’s stories were gathered together and published, and maybe exaggerated a bit more in the process. But that’s the privilege of publishers.

The upshot was that, over the next two hundred years, Baron Von Munchhausen’s name became synonymous with the telling of tall stories, or picaresque romances or, to put it another way, lies. Personally, I believed all the stories when I was a child, and I still do. I believe in almost anything, even the existence of Munchhausen’s Syndrome by Proxy. After all, if somebody tortures a child with unnecessary medical treatments in order to get attention for himself, it’s pretty obvious that he imagines himself to be an eighteenth century German soldier by proxy.

Where would we be without such clever metaphors of the human condition? Every individual can find a counterpart in history or literature – or their friends can find it for them. So the world is full of little Napoleons and Sarah Bernhardts. My wife says I have Peter Kropotkin syndrome by proxy. Since Peter Kropotkin was a mad Russian anarchist, who argued with everybody about everything, I have no idea what she means by this. I prefer to think of myself as Candide, the eternal innocent. We all know people who fancy themselves as Hitler or King Lear or Mae West or Virginia Woolf. These syndromes are harmless. They are normal. They are probably even necessary. Where would we get our role models if not from the literary and historical past? From television? From Washington? No, this wouldn’t do, not for a civilized society.

But this “by proxy” business is worrying. How can we know when some historical or literary character is invading our lives by proxy? In other words, when we become the players in somebody else’s second-hand fantasy?

Mothers who dress up their little girls in ribbons and frills are obviously suffering from Madame Bovary syndrome, by proxy – but the little girls don’t know it yet. Fat un-athletic men who drag their reluctant sons to sports events are living out their old Wayne Gretsky dream, by proxy. I was visiting a New York talent agency the other day, and one whole room was full of small children waiting with their parents to audition for TV and movie parts – victims of Shirley Temple Syndrome, by Proxy.

Thank goodness we have professionals to explain us to ourselves. If we didn’t have these neat psychiatric labels for dumb behavior, we might actually have to take responsibility for it. Worse, we might have to go back to older, shorter and nastier labels, like “selfish” or “stupid,” thus doing irreparable harm to the self-esteem of dysfunctional people everywhere. Luckily we know that, however awful their behaviour, they are only suffering from some literary hallucination, by proxy. It must be a great consolation to the victims, and even more to the victims of the victims.

I can tell you one of Baron Von Munchhausen’s real life stories that exactly illustrates my point. The baron was hunting bears one day, and tried to kill a bear with his best spear. But the spear missed, and flew all the way to the moon. (This is all completely true). The baron was not daunted, but planted a fast-growing Turkish bean tree that quickly grew up to the moon. Then he climbed the bean tree to retrieve his spear. But while he was up there on the moon, the hot sun shriveled his beanstalk and left him stranded. So he made a rope out of some locally-available moon-material, and began to climb back down to earth. But he rope was too short, so he cut off the higher part, which was tied to the horn of the moon, and attached it to the lower part – and so, length by length, lowered himself back to earth.

The point is that nothing defeated the baron, just as nothing defeats the psychiatric profession, and for the same reason. They tell such wonderful stories, you just have to believe them.

Copyright: David Bouchier