She brought her 18 month old daughter to dinner, and in mid-conversation, and apropos of nothing, the toddler piped up:
"I LOVE YOU, MOMMY!"Warm-hearted good reaction all around, of course (soaked up eagerly by the toddler). No one was as brightened as the mother, who beamed. She loves me! My daughter loves me!
Cursed, as I am, with unremitting curiosity, I forensically examined the crime scene, recognizing that the daughter, far too young to have any notion of what she was saying, had been trained to speak this line. I wouldn't have been surprised if mom had been shoving cookies into her for uttering the magic phrase. This was as heart-warming as listening to a trained parakeet.
"Bwwaaaack! I LOVE you, Mommy! Bwwaaaaaack!"
On further reflection, though, I relented slightly. All children are trained to act according to their parent's preference. It's not always this flagrant, but it's a normal process.
But the problem was to see Mom so shamelessly sopping up her own contrivance. "She loves me! Listen to her! She LOVES me!"
I couldn't get the parrot out of my mind, greedily munching its reward cracker.
"Enrico Portico is a great jazz musician!" blare the newspapers. The phrase spills off the tongues of local jazz fans, and even from people who care little for jazz but recognize the presence of an esteemed figure - this jazz great - in their midst.
The problem is that I've known and performed with Enrico for nearly 40 years - he's a friend of mine - and he's no great jazz musician.
He's better than he used to be, because, concurrent with a vast and ambitious public relations initiative, he has invested grinding effort into moving his fingers really fast and doing the things which superficially signify JAZZ. Really, it was an accomplishment for him to even emulate competence.
But "great jazz musician"? Not even close. He's manufactured this, starting from the finish line - my greatness shall be proclaimed - and then deliberately acquiring and assembling the various component modules. Then it was a matter of posing, persisting, elbowing, credit-hoarding, marketing, resumé-stuffing, and loads and loads of showing off in every conceivable way at every opportunity.
By the time the smoke had cleared, he'd invested tens or perhaps hundreds of thousands of dollars from his wealthy father's estate to build an image, with help from his wife, who likes nice things and who'd driven the publicity campaign with a monomaniacal fury which normally gets people institutionalized. Twenty years later, the deal was sealed, and Enrico Portico is a great jazz musician.
All of this is actually fine and well. As with training children, it's a normal way of things. This is how many musical careers are made, though rarely so flagrantly. The music world is a hustle, and Enrico hustled hard, lavishing money, intelligence, and the efforts of his relentlessly scheming wife into the desired result.
The only problem is that Enrico so shamelessly sops up his own contrivance. "I am a great jazz musician!" he exudes, even while buttering toast. Like Evita Peron atop her balcony, he thrills to the chants of the crowd - methodically bought and paid for with Daddy's gold.
"Bwwaaaack! I LOVE you, Mommy!"
Most people who get sick stoically endure the chemo or the surgery or the rehab. They get through it, maybe telling a few people but generally not wanting to unduly worry anyone. Then they either improve or they die. No big deal either way. I mean, it's a big deal to them, of course, but most of us are clear-eyed enough to recognize that the world goes on.
Lloyd Freyburg chose a different path. He announced loudly and repeatedly, through every channel available to him, that he was SICK and he was SCARED and he had to get TREATMENT and he thought (and, really, who could argue?) it might be nice to have a major upswelling of LOVE LOVE LOVE from the universe celebrating him, his life, and avowing that the world would not gladly go on without him.
None of this would make him less sick or less scared or spare him treatment. But he recognized that he had certain leverage, which he parlayed with Blagojevichian panache ("I’ve got a fucking gold mine here!"). Cancer was his golden ticket.
Out of some mixture of genuine concern, a desire to flamboyantly display good-heartedness on social media, and the memey momentum of People Helping People (so long as it involves no greater effort than social media reposts), EVENTS were scheduled ("WE LOVE YOU, LLOYD!"), concerts dedicated, and the media even did a few interviews. My god, it was huge. It was like attending your own funeral!
If Lloyd's wife had done all this, it would have been one thing. If the message were "Hey everyone, Mathilda here, I wasn't planning to announce this, but my darling Lloyd is prone on a gurney, struggling for his life, and it would be nice if you all would sign this big card, which I could bring to the hospital to cheer him up!", that would have been great. But this was Lloyd himself orchestrating it.
"Bwwaaaack! I LOVE you, Mommy!"
Anyway, now Lloyd's on the mend. And, frankly, Lloyd didn't need the ego boost (isn't it odd how the modest are so seldom given ego boosts?). But he played it well, I can't deny it. Me, I had a heart attack once, spent a few days in the hospital, listened VERY carefully to my doctor, did extremely diligent rehab, and have been fine. I never milked it for attention or applause. I missed my chance!
As with my tablemates in the first story, and the jazz fans in the second, no one seems to have spotted the manipulation. Because it taps into clichés. There's nothing beneath the empty pattern, but we are not a deep species. We don't look under surfaces. Outpourings of love feel lovely even when orchestrated via frantic machination.
Anyway, now Lloyd's on the mend. And, frankly, Lloyd didn't need the ego boost (isn't it odd how the modest are so seldom given ego boosts?). But he played it well, I can't deny it. Me, I had a heart attack once, spent a few days in the hospital, listened VERY carefully to my doctor, did extremely diligent rehab, and have been fine. I never milked it for attention or applause. I missed my chance!
As with my tablemates in the first story, and the jazz fans in the second, no one seems to have spotted the manipulation. Because it taps into clichés. There's nothing beneath the empty pattern, but we are not a deep species. We don't look under surfaces. Outpourings of love feel lovely even when orchestrated via frantic machination.
Come to think of it, what kind of asshole finds fault with a child loving her mommy, or a crowd emotionally supporting a cancer patient, or thunderous acclaim for a musical great? These very familiar line drawings obviously compel applause, not derision!
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