Eminentoes/The Love Doctor
Ferguson, Andrew
EMINENTOES ........ J I I ........ I 9 a...
...At the close of his lectures, he proves his love by vouchsafing the multitude the chance to queue up for a hug from the man himself...
...I used to hug my classmates who said I was 'queer,'" he laments...
...classes of the United Kingdom that the United States and Great Britain together do constitute "the AngloSaxon powers": The last three words continue in particular to exercise their baneful fascination...
...And a "popular TV interviewer" made a similar entreaty on another occasion...
...Spectacle," by Patrick Cosgrave, TAS, September 1984...
...Those who prophesy sometimes have their prophecies fulfilled in ways they could not have foreseen...
...Instead of Chateaubriand--to extend the metaphor about as far as it will go-they eat french fries...
...The message is the man...
...although here, as elsewhere, his judgment may be impaired by his rather tenuous grasp on life as it is normally lived...
...And, not incidentally, he has made piles of dough--although he insists that the money hasn't changed his 'SLACK Inc./Holt, Rinehart and Winston, $13.95...
...Not surprisingly, the prof's votaries take exception to this...
...That stretches it considerably...
...Even today British commentators and politicians are reluctant to regard themselves as Europeans...
...Every child not big enough to fight back was dragged into the Buscaglia garage, where they sat, slack-jawed, watching Leo perform impromptu, juvenile versions of the juvenile lectures that have THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985 in traffic fatalities every year...
...the subtle art, rather, is "relating," which Dr...
...Leo is popular because he talks about common sense EUROPEAN...
...If we carry nothing home in our baskets, there is ample gain in dilated lungs and stimulated blood...
...From the time of Henry David Thoreau, through the days of Dale Carnegie and Aimee Semple McPherson, up to the present age of Carl Rogers and Dr...
...Part of the doctor's charm lies in his ambiguity...
...The United States is substantially self-sufficient, constituting on its own a continental economy and exporting less than ten percent of its GDP...
...Margaret Mead has hypothesized that 4 percent of our human potential is discovered," he DOCUMENT Soviet Union's invading North America in 1985 is only a little less absurd than the idea of North Vietnam's doing so in 1968...
...Buscaglia's greatest innovation, and his ticket to pop,psych stardom, has been the hug...
...His affaire de coeur is with simply everybody--most especially the grinning hordes who flock to his lectures and the readers who eagerly plunk down fifteen clams for every new book...
...this decline made all the more probable Churchill's implicit prophecy that the achievements of 1940 could never be repeated...
...In strict objectivity, nobody can deny that the United States and the United Kingdom are both "powers" and by a heroic synecdoche they might just be regarded as Anglo-Saxon...
...There is still a surprisingly tenacious belief among the opinion-forming *"The E.E.C...
...The General took in 1963 a pleasing revenge when he prevented the junior of the AngloSaxons from joining the club he had formed in the European Community: The British were, he claimed, too closely tied to the United States to regard themselves or be regarded by others as Europeans...
...As West Germany, as Italy, as the rest of Western Europe, the United Kingdom is dependent on the generous protection of the United States...
...Wayne ("Your Erroneous Zones") Dyer, some Americans have gladly mistaken felicity of style for profundity and a furrowed brow or a winning smile for wisdom...
...Tulio struggled as a waiter in various Los Angeles restaurants, and home life was plagued by poverty...
...I don't want my viewers to think I'm queer...
...Buscaglia himself manages to do only on a grand scale...
...by Brendan Donnelly satisfactory course of British development since 1945, lies in the events of the Second World War and, more especially, British perceptions of those events at the time and since...
...His subjects are the big ones: Love, Caring, Sharing...
...two of his books were on the New York Times Bestseller List simultaneously last year, and his latest, Loving Each Other,' is at the moment happily ensconced there at number two...
...This goes a long way toward explaining the prof's longevity, why he has survived and prospered while the other detritus of the sixties has withered and faded away...
...Language, after all, is full of bear-traps for the unwary, and Dr...
...These conflow to produce the "subtle art of moving together with others," and he's not talking about the rhumba...
...The estimable Judith Martin, for example, was dense enough to refuse a hug when she met the doctor at a public symposium...
...Great Britain, on the other hand, is crucially dependent on its trade with the rest of the world and its domestic market is too small to permit those economies of scale essential for the indigenous development of, for instance, the all-important "new technologies...
...The United States is a global superpower, geographically and militarily invulnerable to even its most powerful potential adversary...
...both countries play central roles in the NATO alliance and are linked by important cultural, historical, and economic ties...
...A REPLY TO PATRICK COSGRAVE* During the Second World War General de Gaulle suffered at the hands of the "Anglo-Saxons" many slights, real and imagined...
...Hug, or the Love Doctor...
...Moreover, "hugs make you feel psychologically more secure and together...
...life...
...I'm still tingling...
...He's just reminding them of universal truths they might have forgotten...
...they have a long lunch-hour, as it were, but the cook is an oaf...
...The effect is so seductive that after a couple of hours a careless reader may find himself nodding knowingly at statements like, "Love and self are one and the discovery of either is the realization of both...
...his one concession to prosperity, he told Newsweek, was a "chocolatebrown Mercedes...
...A poignant example of this phenomenon is Churchill's prophecy that 1940 would be regarded as the "finest hour" of the British Empire...
...Buscaglia knows too well to get bogged down in the minutiae of definition or of concreteness, or even of the minimum requirements for making sense...
...To them the General's obsessive suspicion of "the Anglo-Saxon powers" appears not merely appropriate, but even flattering...
...It is curious that Leo never mentions his religious training, if indeed he had any--curious if only because he shares with his readers every other aspect of life in the Buscaglia household, from sleeping arrangements to bathroom habits...
...For one thing, a hug "changes your chemistry toward positive things...
...Brendan Donnelly works for the British Conservative party in the European Parliament...
...I cry all the time"), it is not surprising that in some unenlightened sectors he has met with resistance...
...But Leo forged ahead...
...Many in Britain who are still today hostile to British membership in the Community affect a retrospective admiration for General de Gaulle, who supposedly understood us better than we understood ourselves...
...It's often so much nicer to just look at somebody and vibrate...
...The U.S...
...THE LOVE DOCTOR The American appetite for cheap thought is well known and apparently insatiable...
...He gives you a shot of adrenalin," cooed one lass who waited an hour and a half for a Dr...
...Still, among the bright-eyed and open-minded, the trade in Hug hugs has been brisk...
...His oeuvre forms a thick, murky Mississippi of moonshine, sweeping the reader along a high tide of jargon, banalities, and halftruths...
...They seem to like it that way...
...That 95 percent the prof has claimed for his own, outside the area of intellection, undistracted by the demands of truth or falsity, sense or nonsense, right or wrong...
...But religious or not, some unusual force possessed the Buscaglias, for the family was a regular carnival of relating, to hear Leo tell it--as he does again and again...
...He has never been married and has no children, for he is too busy spreading his message of loving relationships to bother with one...
...While affluence gives us unprecedented time for intellectual pursuits, the intellect produces little for some to think about...
...Before long the neighborhood kids fell victim...
...For illusion it is...
...The answer to that question, as to many others concerning the unsays, adding portentously: "What of the other 95 percent...
...In the annals of American charlatanry this is nothing new...
...Instead, Dr...
...You are a now" is a proposition that may be characterized in a number of ways, but not as common sense...
...It is his "tendency," he says, to "open arms to others when we meet...
...His series of televised lectures-in which he prances about before a rapturous audience, mopping his rubbery face with a damp handkerchief and shaking the rafters with his stentorian good will--is hauled out of storage every time a PBS station has a fund drive...
...I hugged her anyway...
...Rhetoric invoking the spirit of Dunkirk is still heard on this side of the Atlantic, and the most unlikely among his successors have sought to mimic Churchillian attitudes and phrases...
...But the differences between the American situation and the British are unembarrassingly obvious...
...Hug wrap-around...
...the idea of the things that people already know," says Buscaglia's administrative assistant, Steve Short...
...In the early seventies he took his show on the road...
...His singular ebullience and zest for life manifested itself at an early age...
...Words are often as much the masters as servants of thought...
...James Russell Lowell, in dismissing the notion that Emerson's audiences gained intellectual sustenance from the old windbag's lectures, wrote that "there is keen excitement, though there be no ponderable acquisition...
...Among this durable group, apparently, is Dr...
...Just come close to me and you're more than likely to get hugged, certainly touched...
...Not even Churchill could have foreseen how rapid would be the political, military, and economic decline of the British Empire after its exertions in the Second World War...
...And since he is a man wholly inhospitable to self-censorship ("If you feel like crying, you cry...
...More ironically, Churchill could not have predicted the debilitating extent to which the events and circumstances of the Second World War have come to be regarded by the British themselves since 1945 as the high watermark of their history, providing a criterion and frame of reference against which all postwar policy needed to be judged...
...Whoever Tulio and Rosa were, there is the old saying that by their fruits you shall know them, and the mind struggles to imagine a child of man fruitier than Leo Buscaglia...
...He is, at bottom, a wonderfully effective entertainer...
...Sometimes by opening our mouths we make dreadful errors," he says, without a trace of irony...
...I'm a man," he pleaded, halting his guest in mid-lunge...
...all too often the United Kingdom has found itself isolated and rebuffed within the European Community...
...are, happily for both parties, close allies and share a common democratic form of government...
...Buscaglia himself: discursive, solipsistic, and indefatigably cheerful...
...It is a lush eternal Springtime where the doctor disports, and as he pipes his merry tune his minions follow happily--to a meadow where the mist is always rising, where for the moment (until the lecture is over, until the book is set down) they can be removed from the workaday...
...I hug everybody," he warns...
...Phil Donahue, Leo says, was "most receptive to a human hug...
...As he wanders in those other Elysian Fields, he no doubt regards history as having proved him right...
...Buscaglia, with his verbal voodoo, conjures up an atmosphere redolent of profound meaning--not sense, but the suggestion of sense...
...Reading Dr...
...His particular brand of piffle is enlivened by his endlessly vibrating personality--a personality, moreover, that millions find attractive and inspirational, however inexplicably...
...After hearing one of these hug encomiums, Leo's brother asked him, "Who are all these people you keep talking about...
...Since then his books have sold in the millions...
...Britain has now been a member of the European Community for more than ten years and the General has been dead for more than ten...
...But its meaning, really, is quite beside the point, for the point is Dr...
...Walden hasn't been out of print for a hundred years...
...Leo Buscaglia, also known to his followers as Dr...
...some have shown remarkable staying power...
...But anyone accustomed to describe the two countries as "the Anglo-Saxon powers" must soon fall prey to the illusion that there is a substantial equivalence or even identity of interests and aspirations between the United States and the United Kingdom...
...his proby Andrew Ferguson nouncements may mean anything you wish...
...Nominally a professor of education at the University of Southern California, Dr...
...The United Kingdom is a middle-ranking power confronted on its doorstep with a hostile and ruthless superpower which in recent years has shown an ever increasing taste for military adventurism and today possesses as never before the means to gratify that appetite...
...Buscaglia's books, as I was ordered to do, is probably easier to take than one of his hugs, but it nevertheless requires considerable fortitude and diligence...
...The gross domestic product of the United States is some six times greater than that of the United Kingdom and its population four times as great...
...Not all American charlatans are flyby-night operators...
...He is a teacher, not an adding machine...
...Curiously, few thoughtful Britons are at their ease even today with the self-evident proposition that Britain's postwar decline was a necessary and irreversible consequence of her wartime THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR APRIL 1985...
...not even the most ardent apologist of the British independent nuclear deterrent could face with equanimity the future were the United States to withdraw its nuclear protection from the United Kingdom...
...Andrew Ferguson & an editor&l assistant at The American Spectator...
...I hope to suggest in what follows that the use of that term in that sense implies and reflects a whole mistaken approach to Great Britain's role and interests in the world, an approach which has overshadowed and continues to overshadow our relations with our neighbors and peers in continental Europe...
...Then, as now, there were some who wouldn't understand...
...L~eo Buscaglia began vibrating in East Los Angeles, in 1924, the youngest child of Tulio and Rosa, who had recently arrived in the New World...
...Dr...
...and the U.K...
...Buscaglia is possessed of a spirit so robust no classroom could contain him...
...Why has the prof fastened onto the hug as the symbol of successful relating...
...How can an intelligent man believe that they do...
...If you find yourself scratching your head at these elucidations, welcome aboard...
...The British and American governments do not have even remotely similar starting points for the establishment of policy...
Vol. 18 • April 1985 • No. 4
