Yet Another Open (However Stupid) Question

H[ocus] P[ocus] save me, but it seems I’m a glutton for punishment.  So here I go again, chumming the 12X12 waters with more troll-bait.

If the crux of the AA/12-Step solution is:

A) We were alcoholic & could not manage our own lives

B) That probably no human power could have relieved our alcoholism

C) That [g]od could & would if [h]e were sought

(Alcoholics Anonymous, “How It Works”)

Then why the insistence that new-comers get all the phone-numbers they can?  Doesn’t that sort of suggest that cell phones work better than a direct, ’spiritual’ connection to god?  Or does god only answer calls after 90 days (perhaps even years) worth of meetings?  Or that talking with another AA is preferable to talking with god … at least initially?

Or maybe — and I’m just going off the cuff, here — it’s a tacit acknowledgement that people (and their darned, intractable ego’s/selves) are better at communicating with, sharing ideas & learning from & with other people (and their own darned, intractable ego’s/selves) than they are in getting divine inspiration when it comes to the question of, “To get loaded or not to get loaded?”  Maybe the formula of people helping other people do collectively what felt impossible to do in isolation (or even with the aid of an eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing, beneficent figment of their imaginations [hat tip to Splicer]) is one every AA knows holds up better than Chapter Five’s anachronistic pie-in-the-sky syllogism.

I could have it all wrong, here.  [g]od could’ve created cellular communications in anticipation of the coming alcoholic apocalypse and is channeling the good word through his human hand puppets every time one drunk calls another — to just ‘check in’ or wail about being a half-an-inch away from getting shit-faced.  H[ocus] P[ocus] sure is crafty — planting him/her/it-self in all those human beings yet still somehow manifesting as “no human power”.  (To be fair, H[ocus] P[ocus] does bestow onto him/her/it-self the “probably” out — liability laws perhaps extending all the way to heaven, I guess.)

So, what’s the deal?  Why collect phone numbers when a prayer doesn’t require any signal & doesn’t count against your monthly minutes allowance?

Let the enlightenment begin … .

My Name’s Roger And I Have No Sense of Irony

Opening line from Roger (recently self-outed AA-bot) Ebert’s review of the movie “Zombieland”:

“There’s no getting around it: Zombies are funny.”

You can’t make this stuff up.

ADDENDUM: A zombie apocalypse would be another alternative to AA.  Or zombie AA’s wandering the world searching for ‘alcoholic’ souls to save & brains to eat.  That would kick ass.

An Alternative To A.A.

Not A.A.

Not meetings.

Not sponsors.

Not steps.

Not Big Books.

Not drinking.

Or drinking in moderation.

Or pharmacological and/or psychotherapeutic regimens.

Or any of a million ways to approach life as a responsible, caring, concerned, involved person … that doesn’t involve Alcoholics Anonymous in any form whatsoever.

Not A.A. — It’s at least as effective (if not more so) as A.A.

Let the trolling begin … .

ADDENDUM: Oh yeah, crosstalk encouraged.  Butt-loads of cross-talk.  Lots of ego, too — whether it’s a delusion (Buddha) or an inescapable part of our psyche (Freud) or just the end product of neurons firing (neuroscience), the idea of “crushing it” is just antiquated goobledy-gook.

Get up with your bad self.

The Grapevine Gives Me The Kiss-Off & An Open Question

If you’re anything like me (and H[ocus] P[ocus] save you if you are), you’ll be both shocked & amazed to know that ‘The Grapevine’ (The International Journal of Alcoholics Anonymous) gave me the official “thanks, but no thanks” on my  submission for publication, “12 Rights For AA New-Comers” (12 Rights For New-Comers To AA/12 Step):

Thank you for your e-mail submission to the AA Grapevine.  While I don’t think we’ll be using it, we are grateful for your interest in the magazine and hope you’ll feel free to send us more material in the future.  As you can imagine, we receive hundreds of manuscripts every month and many good manuscripts must be turned down because of space limitations. For more information about the Grapevine, its related items, including subscription information, guidelines for submitting articles, and current Calls for Articles, please see our Website: www.aagrapevine.org.

Best wishes,

The Editors 
The AA Grapevine magazine

If you’re wondering what the smell coming off the ’shock & amazement’ expressed earlier is, that’s sarcasm.  I really was under no illusion that The Grapevine had any interest in publishing anything that might actually empower individual AA members.  Still, a man’s gotta do … etcetera, etcetera.

I am curious as to why “The Editors” used the singular ‘I’ followed by the royal ‘we’ in offering up ‘their’ rejection of the material.  There go my dreams of conquering the publishing world starting with a by-line from The Grapevine.

In other news …

I went last night to hear author Eric Maisel speak on his new book, “The Atheist’s Way: Living Well Without The Gods”.  The talk was sponsored by the local Center For Inquiry chapter and — while a little too top-heavy on the snarkiness toward theism & religion in general for my personal tastes — it was still two hours well spent.  You can listen to Maisel talk about his work here: www.pointofinquiry.org.

My ears perked up when Maisel talked about the linguistics of ‘belief’ and how as early as the 19th century academics had identified that it wasn’t the content of the language that was important so much as its ability to be memorable & easily repeated.  After all, what does, “God is good” really say about the probability of the existence of [g]od or an objective understanding of ‘goodness’?  It’s just a good catch-phrase — kind of like, “Utilize, don’t analyze.”  Language and its malleability within the 12-Step experience has long been a hobbyhorse of mine.

One very interesting part of Maisel’s presentation was his suggestion that atheists (existentialists, secular-humanists, non-believers, [fill-in-the-blank]ers) purposefully re-cast mystical language when they are confronted with it.  Specifically, he challenged his audience to ask of someone who claims to have had a ’spiritual experience’, “What made that experience meaningful for you?”

The substitution is subtle but does, I think, greatly shift the terms of the discussion.

So I offer an open question to steppers, non-steppers, and all those somewhere in between: Is meaningful experience a fair substitution for spiritual experience?  If so, why, and if not, why not?

All input is welcome.

ADDENDUM: All input may indeed be welcome but irrational input will be ridiculed relentlessly for exactly what it is.  Now back to our regularly scheduled trolling … .

ADDENDUM II: Thanks so much for all the effluvia, kids.  It really was terribly invigorating reading all the commentary on this post … that never actually addressed anything in the post (yes, Cuda, I’m thinking of you).  But playtime’s over.  Go troll YouTube or ‘help’ people out in Colorado (again, Cuda, it’s all about you).  This post is officially closed for business.

This Is Pretty Hilarious …

if a bit snarky.

Ask Ms. Bad Advice

Finally, a higher power for the rest of us!

“Resistance Is Futile” … Or Not (Part II)

Interesting listening for those of you inclined to examine alcohol & substance abuse:

pointofinquiry

Renowned cognitive science researcher Dr. Keith Stanovich talks about his book “The Robot’s Rebellion” and things like ‘Universal Darwinism’, genes, memes,first & second level rationality (e.g., the “examined life” in terms of working with addiction), and other fun, fun, fun egg-headed stuff.

Steppers will almost certainly repond with the canned circular rhetoric straight out of the Bill W. playbook (much like that esteemed academic Roger Ebert).  Still, those of us who haven’t yet given up on rationality — or have recently made a conscious decision to turn our will and lives back over to it in lieu of 12X12’s invisible uber-dad — will find lots of thought provoking ideas in this hour of talk.

Key quote from Dr. Stanovich on the subject of ‘parasitic memes’: “A good idea would be to avoid memes that resist evaluation.”

Sound familiar to anyone?

Undrunk

Hey, it’s Labor Day! It’s time for the serious news to remind us all about the serious subject of drunk driving and alcoholism, with puff pieces on AA.

“Safe Haven”

I have been making reference in the comments to an opinion piece in the August issue of Grapevine, which is titled: “Safe Haven, Keeping the rooms free of predation: Whose responsibility is it?” and I think it’s about time I actually put it up here. It’s not available online, and it’s rather long, so I’ll transcribe some of it.

It begins:

How safe is your AA meeting? Have you ever personally not felt safe? Have you ever had someone give you a hug and walked away with an uncomfortable feeling?

I ask these questions because I view with concern the sexual predation that I’ve seen in AA meetings. I have seen it happen in all gender relationships, but my personal experience is as a woman being preyed upon by men.

I know what many of you are thinking, “Well, that’s an outside issue,” but I disagree. How can it be an outside issue if it affects my safety in the rooms of Alcoholics Anonymous?

Michelle Huneven writes on anonymity for the L.A. Times.

Huneven has a new novel out, called Blame. As she describes:

The book tells the story of a young history professor who wakes up from an alcoholic blackout in jail to the news that she ran over and killed two people. She goes to prison, gets sober, rebuilds her life.Breaking the ice on AA’s anonymity.

Here is her opinion piece, titled “Breaking the Ice on AA’s Anonymity,” with the subtitle: “There are several good reasons the organization wants its members to avoid the spotlight.”

What do you think?

 

Keep Coming Back! The Dr. Vatz Installment

Councilman Moxley

I was poking around on the Baltimore Sun website the other day, and found a “Keep Coming Back” type story about Baltimore County Councilman Stephen G. Samuel Moxley. This is the second time in 4 years that the man has caused an accident while driving drunk: Go read the story. You’ll notice that at the end of the article, the reporter quotes Moxley as saying, “I’ve got a problem.”  “I am powerless over alcohol.”

After reading this article, I found this response from a reader:

As is usually the case, I totally disagree with Richard E. Vatz . In his piece in The Sun of September 4 (Readers respond) he says that Baltimore County Councilman Stephen G. Samuel Moxley’s statement that he is “powerless over alcohol” is a self-serving claim that he has no moral or legal responsibility for his drunken driving. To the contrary, it is the First of the 12 Steps of Alcoholics Anonymous, which says “We admitted we were powerless over alcohol, that our lives had become unmanageable.”

This admission is not only the first, but the most difficult, and the most essential step to start on a road to recovery.

It is not a cop-out, or an avoidance of responsibility, but rather an admission of a need for help in a fight against alcohol addiction.

Well, of course, if AA says so…

I couldn’t find the letter she was referencing, from Dr. Richard E. Vatz, so I started googling around to see if I could come up with it. Since our readers tend to be much more informed than I am, you probably recognize the name. But I didn’t;  and ended up discovering that Dr. Vatz writes extensively on the subject of psychological rhetoric, and his CV lists several articles on the disease model. I emailed him to ask him where I could find the letter this commenter was referencing, and he told me that it had appeared in the print edition of the paper, and sent along a copy of it, with permission to reprint. So here’s what he wrote:

To the Editor:
 
     The Sun is making the same error that most media make in cases such as this: the inference that saying one is an “alcoholic and needs help” is an “admission” rather than a self-serving declaration.

     An admission is an honest, shameful confession; a self-serving declaration is a claim made to benefit someone, such as to avoid a greater punishment.  Mr. Moxley’s public assertion that he “is powerless over alcohol” is a claim that he had no moral or legal responsibility for his drunken driving, which for the second time threatened life and limb of innocent citizens.
 
     Baltimore District Judge H. Gary Bass swallowed the admission hook line and sinker and ordered Moxley to do community service, see a psychologist and attend an alcohol treatment program. 
  
     Moxley’s rhetorical “admission” saved him from jail and probably losing his seat.

     Some “admission.”

Richard E. Vatz, Towson 
The writer is a professor of political rhetoric at Towson University

Dr. Vatz also, generously, sent me a couple of his articles, which I have yet to read. I don’t want to comment on what I understand so far about his ideas, because I don’t want to misrepresent or simplify him. But I am extremely interested in this subject as it pertains to the 12-Step industry, and the kind of bullshit that is taken for granted as conventional wisdom in this arena.

ftg