Dr. Phil and Me, by Dennis O’Neil
After two 30 minute office visits and a little homework, we listened to the therapist tell us, matter-of-factly and unequivocally, that our relationship was somewhere south of hopeless, we had nothing for each other, the sooner we went back to being merely colleagues, the better for all concerned. I wasn’t surprised, and I don’t think she was either. But I guess I didn’t expect the final pronouncement to come so quickly and definitively.
The therapist was the late Dr. Albert Ellis, developer of Rational Emotive Behavior Therapy, and boy! he didn’t believe in mincing words, nor, I’d say, in ignoring he obvious. I remembered him and this pretty inconsequential bit of autobiography when I was paging through a Book of the Month Club mailing the other day and found that BOMC was offering Real Life, by the gent who bylines himself Dr. Phil McGraw.
Soon after I stopped spending my weekdays in a Manhattan office building and became a lazy slug who could, and sometimes did, watch television at three in the afternoon, I sampled Dr. Phil’s daily offering on Channel 2 and was mildly impressed. Like Ellis, he seemed to be interested in solutions, said what he meant. And although “common sense” is overrated – common sense tells us that the world is flat – it does have its uses and Dr. Phil seemed to be using it well. The approaches of both McGraw, as exhibited in those early broadcasts, and Ellis remind me of Morita therapy, a Japanese treatment championed in this country by David Reynolds. Morita therapy says – my interpretation – that, look, we could talk for years and maybe never find out what damaged you, or when, and if we did, we might not be able to do a repair job. But we can deal with the ways the damage is making your life unmanageable, so let’s do that.
For a while now, I’ve been thinking that maybe Jonathan Lethem is the best writer of his generation. What prevents me from just coming out with it… Dammit, Lethem is the king! – is that I haven’t read many other writers of Lethem’s (and my son’s) generation. Maybe the Elvis Presley of prosemeisters is lurking out there someplace, with a birthday that puts him somewhere between 40 and 50, and I just haven’t heard of him. So let me be content with stating the obvious, that Lethem does his job well.
Way back in the late 80s, or maybe early 90s, an inker working on one of DC’s superhero comics rendered a female form rather more like the Lord made female forms than the mores of the time allowed. The editor dealt with the problem by putting a color hold – a purple one, I think – over what some would have deemed offensive nudity. Sex always wins. The lady’s charms shone clearly though the purple haze and a fuss ensued.
So here we were, writer/editor Jack C. Harris and myself, caught in a warp of eternity. Had we committed some hideous transgression to be doomed to this Purgatory? Well, no. What we’d done is agree to be guests on a radio call-in program about 30 years ago. Subject, of course: comic books.
I never talked to either Jack Kirby or Stan Lee about politics, so I don’t really have any idea where they stood on the subject. My guess would be that following their political spoor wouldn’t take you very far west and that they didn’t have much sympathy for the hippie-rebels of the 60s (and here allow me to blush and hide my face). After all, they and their parents (and my parents) fought for a place in the American mainstream because, finally, acceptance meant an increased chance of survival and for those outside the tribe, who suffered the Great Depression, not surviving seemed to be a real possibility. Then here came the snotty kids with their tie-dye and their girly haircuts and their wiseass slogans saying that a place in the tribe was not worth struggling for – in fact, the tribe itself was stinking of corruption.
You saw the story, posted here on our own beloved website a couple of days ago: comic book movies have earned over a billion United States dollars this summer, despite an iffy economy that may or may not have something to do with those loveable funsters who frolick near the Potomac.
The comic book veteran was smiling as he leaned forward to read the lettering on the button fastened to my lapel: Let’s Legalize Pot. His mood changed instantly, to one of anger. He snatched the pin off my jacket, flung it into a wastebasket, and stalked from the room.
