Bait and Switch: The (Futile) Pursuit of the American Dream Read online

  This lesson is reinforced with Kevin, who says he is thirty-six and a practitioner of something called “operations management.” Poor Kevin—who offers, as his most positive self-endorsement, that he is “dependable”—now faces rumors of impending layoffs at his firm and is contemplating a leap into his own business. But this won’t be easy, because he has two children and a nonworking wife. Suddenly, as if losing patience, Patrick “freezes” Kevin and turns to us: “The person who is stopping Kevin is who?”

  Everyone, myself excepted, answers in unison: “Kevin!”

  Somehow Kevin’s plight inspires Patrick to launch into an anecdote about his college friend Mitch. Years ago, when they were both young, they had gone to Mitch’s house for Thanks-giving dinner. Patrick sets the scene carefully: Outside it was cold and slushy. Inside, the house was warm, filled with enticing cooking smells. Before dinner, he and Mitch decided to sneak into the kitchen and make turkey sandwiches for themselves. They were gleefully stuffing themselves when Patrick heard a crash behind him. Mitch had fallen to the floor. Patrick thought that this must have been another one of Mitch’s pranks, but Mitch was lying there turning blue. He had had a stroke. As a result he became disfigured and unable to speak for months. But guess what? He is Mitch. Mitch is really Patrick.

  And this shows . . . Well, he went through this terrible struggle in rehab to learn to speak again. Patrick pauses, lost in some personal zone. What it shows is, well—and all he can come up with is “the importance of being understood.”

  Baffled by the anecdote, we are dismissed into the hotel lobby for a break over coffee and juice supplied by the Hampton. I introduce myself to James, the wild-haired guy, explaining that I’ve only been searching for a couple of months.

  “Welcome to the land of the undead,” he says, adding that he’s been looking for a telecommunications job for over a year.

  I ask what he made of the story, and he shrugs, wondering only why Patrick had changed his name from Mitch. My theory, which I do not share, is that somewhere along the line Patrick heard a similar narrative from a motivational speaker: there was this boy who grew up in poverty and was abused all the time and had a learning disability to boot, and guess what? That boy was me.

  Patrick must have liked the device enough to apply it, however sloppily, to himself. But the details need some tweaking. What were they doing carving up the turkey for sandwiches just before dinner? No matter how hungry you are, the carving of the turkey is a ritual activity, performed at the table on an intact bird. And why was the kitchen empty at this crucial moment when the potato mashing and gravy making should be in full swing? I would like to share these questions, but they might seem unkind. James, anyway, has exhausted his interest in the topic and moved on to the juice dispenser, while Cynthia is sharing with me her concern about confidentiality. I agree, it’s hard to let down your guard if you don’t know the people, and at this point I see no reason to trust Patrick himself. Boot camp seems to be structured like group therapy, but the most challenging case in the group may be that of our leader.

  Back from our break, we hear from a thirtysomething woman who “loves” her job as a hospital administrator but can no longer keep up with the hours, given the demands of motherhood, and would rather do something more meaningful and “people oriented” anyway. Patrick has nothing to suggest except that she should keep a journal of “major events, thoughts, and feelings of the day,” and moves on to a large, deflated-looking fellow who speaks poignantly of having been the “goto guy” in his branch of the trade show industry until he lost his business in the wake of 9/11 and turned into “nothing.” Then there’s Chris, a sad-faced telecommunications guy in his late thirties, who is tired of the excessive demands of his job and hearing the drumbeats of layoffs all around him.

  I am surprised at how many of my fellow campers are actually employed, at least at the moment, since I had expected to be surrounded by jobless seekers like myself. But the white-collar workforce seems to consist of two groups: those who can’t find work at all and those who are employed in jobs where they work much more than they want to. In between lies a scary place where you dedicate long hours to a job that you sense is about to eject you, if only because so many colleagues have been laid off already. I’ve read about a form of depression called “survivor syndrome,” which is said to be rampant in layoff-prone firms, and several of these campers would seem to be among the victims. In Chris’s case, no solutions are offered, though he is instructed to “own his experience.”

  Now it’s my turn. I had hoped to go a little later in the day, when I would have had more time to study the other campers’ performances and mentally rehearse my own, but here I am, plucked straight out of my reverie and marched to the front of the room. I keep my self-description brief: that I’ve been an event planner and public relations person on a consulting basis and am now seeking the security, continuity, and camaraderie of a corporate job, though, listening to them, I wonder if I’m not heading in the wrong direction, since a lot of them seem as eager to escape the corporate world as I am to enter it.

  This fails to elicit even a nod of acknowledgment from my audience, so I move on swiftly to my “challenges,” listing, first, my age, and, second, my fear that I won’t fit into the corporate culture, because I’m beginning to sense that there is one, and that I may be just too flippant, sarcastic, and impatient for it. I feel, I say, like I’m supposed to force myself into a mold. At this, Patrick interrupts to “freeze” me, an assault that I, automatically and without the slightest forethought, ham up—raising my hands and jerking backward as if immobilized by a laser gun. What’s wrong with Barbara? is the question on the floor, although Patrick doesn’t put it quite so baldly.

  First he blows off the age issue. He himself is fifty-nine (although it should be noted here that, when I see him a month later, he will be fifty-eight). As for the personality issue, Patrick appears incensed that I would suggest that there is a corporate culture we have to conform to. “You can’t remake yourself. You have to find the one place out there that will nurture and value YOU!”

  Breaking out of my frozen condition, I object that there are hundreds of thousands of companies out there, so how do I find my “one place”? His response is to recommend that I create a “support group” to function as my “team.” I am now officially unfrozen and sent back to my seat to write all this wisdom down. Billy speaks up to advise me that T-E-A-M means “Together Everyone Achieves More,” and that F-E-A-R means “False Evidence . . .” but I miss the rest of it. Patrick wraps up my case with the Zen-like pronouncement: “The point is, it’s whatever you make of it.”

  I am both relieved to be out of the spotlight and dismayed at the uselessness of Patrick’s advice. For this I paid $179 and flew all the way to Atlanta? But we are on to James, who, it turns out, is the one real rebel in the room. He describes himself, calmly and confidently, as a “thinker, communicator, writer, instructor.” In short, he’s a “philosopher.” “Plato, Socrates, and Nietzsche are dead, but I’m here.”

  There is a shocked silence in the room until, after a few beats, Patrick recovers himself enough to ask what James’s “challenge” is.

  “To market myself,” he says, and I struggle to imagine these words coming out of Socrates’ mouth.

  “You need to add clarity to your message,” Patrick counsels.

  The others are far harsher: “Where’s the bottom line?” someone asks. “Where’s the value added?” Billy throws in, and someone adds the sniffy judgment “Not too practical!”

  I can’t resist jumping in to defend James: Look, I say, you’re trying to squeeze him into the corporate mold! You’re not letting James be what he is! I would like to say I did this solely out of the desire to defend philosophy over telecommunications, but mostly I’m just vindicating myself: there is a mold! James, although now officially “frozen,” picks up on my support, insisting he will not remake himself to fit into the corporate world. For the first time so
far, the group laughs. “You like to eat?” “You win the lottery?”

  But James’s response to my intervention on his behalf sets off a train of thought that entertains me through Patrick’s ramblings all the way to lunch. If I could win James over, could I organize the whole group to rebel against Patrick and his philosophy? Cynthia could probably be won over, and possibly Chris, who confided to me during the break that he’s “tired of making other people rich,” possibly Patrick included. Billy, however, would be a problem, since he seems to be somehow in league with Patrick or at least a little too invested in the program.

  Among the other irritating features of the boot camp, I’m getting tired of Patrick’s self-advertisements, as when he confides that he has “the same skill set as Dr. Phil,” the TV guru, and lacks only a backer like Oprah. The boot camp, I’m beginning to see, serves up recruits for his personal coaching sessions, just as the sessions have generated at least four of the campers. Those who have already been through his personal coaching, like Ken, a pleasant-looking forty-something who remains silent throughout the day, are praised lavishly for their “progress” compared to some earlier condition, and the rest of us are not too subtly encouraged to undergo the individual coaching ourselves. It’s unclear why the graduates of Patrick’s personal coaching are here at all, unless just to pad out the session for the rest of us, making Patrick seem to be more in demand than he is. As for his philosophy, it’s straightforward victim blaming: your problem is you, which is of course the only thing Patrick, with his ad hoc blend of pop-psych insights, is prepared to take on anyway.

  At the lunch break I find myself a fairly popular girl; Cynthia wants to eat with me, so do Billy and James; Kevin and Richard tag along. After a scuffle, my choice of a nearby diner prevails over Chik-Fil-A, giving us about forty minutes to chat over burgers and salady substances. James reveals that he’s just refinanced his house. Billy explains that he’s transitioning from aviation to career coaching and will soon be starting up a networking group of his own. When I mention my possible relocation to Atlanta, he looks at me forcefully and says, “Tea,” in a tone that suggests I should surrender my glass of the iced beverage to him at once. But no, this is another acronym—Thought, Emotion, Action—which he explains is a military notion. Meanwhile, Kevin is busy making logistical-sounding calls on his cell phone. “Working on Saturday?” “No,” he tells me, “Cub Scouts.”

  In the car on the way back to the Hampton, I tell James that I was surprised he brought up Nietzsche, who seemed, well, a little out of place here. “Patrick’s philosophy is so upbeat and positive, but Nietzsche’s outlook was”—I struggle to come up with a word that might locate the author of Thus Spake Zarathustra in the same conceptual universe as Patrick Knowles—“you know, kind of tragic.”

  “Well, he was really smart anyway” is James’s rejoinder.

  I can only agree, and urge James to continue on his chosen path, no matter what the philistines say.

  After lunch, it’s Cynthia’s turn. She describes herself as “living on the edge . . . seeing life as an adventure,” but there’s more defensiveness than bravado in this, as if she’s anticipating a rebuke. The problem is she’s burned out on real estate; the market has collapsed, and she can’t break even. She’s putting longer and longer hours into the company but finding herself losing ground financially every month. “What should I do with my life?” is the question that brought her here. “What do I want to do when I grow up?” She has some dim notion of the direction she would like to take: “I’m a people person—passionately—and I want to help people.”

  All this sounds pretty unexceptional to me—an unrewarding job, a desire for more socially useful employment—but Patrick leaps in with a psychiatric diagnosis: Cynthia is suffering from “lowgrade depression” and “feelings of loss that aren’t career related at all.” To my alarm, she starts to cry, confessing with tears rolling down her cheeks that her father just died and that a long-term relationship broke off only a few months ago.

  In a softened tone, Patrick admits that he knew about these life crises from a prior one-on-one session with Cynthia but professes to have “forgotten” them and based his diagnosis entirely on her current demeanor. He sits down directly across from her with one hand on her knee and the other lower down on her crossed leg, which looks to me like borderline harassment. The cure for Cynthia is further one-on-one coaching with him, which he urges her to undertake immediately. As for the rest of us, he advises: “Extrapolate to your own experiences. She’s you; you’re her.” All, in other words, in need of further coaching.

  So he set her up. Maybe she had cried during her private session with him, where he had learned what buttons to press, because there’s nothing like tears to give group therapy a veneer of intensity and hard-won “growth.” If I am indeed her, then I am entitled to the resentment this little drama has inspired in me. I blame myself too, though, because she must have wanted to have lunch with me alone, and by letting all the guys troop along, I may have brushed off a bid for sisterly support.

  After Cynthia, the afternoon sours for me. The air has grown stuffy with postprandial exhalations and deodorant breakthroughs. My back hurts from sitting so long—whatever happened to the “kinesthetic” part of this experience? One after another, the remaining campers are processed and dismissed. Allan, who was downsized after twenty years at an investment firm, is told, “It’s not about getting a job”—an observation so important that Patrick repeats it. “It’s not about getting a job. It’s about knowing yourself . . . The issue is Allan knowing who Allan is.”

  Jason, who feels he has very little to show for his forty-two years and is now facing the near-certainty of a layoff, is scolded, as I was, for even mentioning the age issue: “It’s all internal—whether you’re sixty-two or forty-two or twenty-two . . . It’s never about the external world. It’s always between you and you.” Thus we are sealed into our own version of Plato’s cave—wrestling blindly with what Patrick construes as our failings, deprived of even the slightest glimpse of the waning afternoon light outside.

  At the afternoon break, Cynthia rushes off, with only a rueful glance in exchange for my belated commiserations. In the lobby where we stand around a coffee machine, there’s a TV tuned to CNN’s coverage of some celebrity CEO’s trial, and I laughingly suggest to Billy that there ought to be plenty of demand for PR people, given all the corporate scandals.

  “I blame it all on the last administration,” he says gravely.

  “On Clinton?”

  “Yes, his behavior.”

  “With Monica?” I’m confused. “How is that on a scale of these multimillion-dollar thefts?”

  “Clinton was responsible for twenty-seven deaths.”

  “Huh?” I quickly search my internal database of right-wing conspiracy theories. “You mean like Vince Foster?”

  “And other people he knew. Check it out.”

  “And Bush isn’t responsible for any deaths?”

  “That’s war.”

  I start in on the war before biting my tongue in midscntence. Why I am arguing with him? I have no hard-and-fast rules to govern my behavior here, other than to keep a low profile and get as much job-related information as possible. But political discussions are clearly beyond the pale, even if I am itching for a fight.

  In his wrap-up, Patrick writes the word MAGIC on the board, with the letters running downward. This too is an acronym: Making decisions, greater Accountability, Growth, reduce your Isolation, deal with issues of Change. He puts yet another version of the EP/PSWB formula on the board, repeating that PSWB is based on “authenticity” and “congruency.” I finally venture to ask what congruency means in this context, and am told that it “means to do it in a consistent fashion.” OK, whatever. The man who lost his trade show business after 9/11 turns up his hands in a gesture of acceptance and offers his own summary: “We have met the enemy, and he is us.”

  We break up with vague promises to stay in touch;
Patrick himself will be calling each of us in the coming week “as a means of accountability,” though to whom remains undefined. I step out of the Hampton lobby to discover that the sky has cleared and that the sun is already low behind the Holiday Inn, a couple of blocks away, where my suitcase is stashed. A wind has come up, a little too cold for my fashionably thin new winter coat, but welcome nonetheless. Yes, Patrick, of course, we make our own lives, but we make them out of something. The wind bites my face; the pavement pushes back against my feet. There is an external world after all, and if you can’t feel yourself pressing up against the resistance, how do you know that you’re moving at all?

  ONE OF MY subsidiary missions, in the weeks that follow, is to try to get a better grip on Patrick’s strangely ghostly worldview. If the belief is widespread, in the corporate culture, that there’s no external world of any consequence, that we are responsible for everything that happens to us, then I should know this and perhaps be prepared to expound it myself. There’s certainly a heavy dose of Mary Baker Eddy in it, and the mind-over-matter philosophy embodied in her Christian Science. Nor should we omit Norman Vincent Peale and his mid-twentieth-century opus The Power of Positive Thinking. Mostly, though, what Patrick’s weltanschauung puts me in mind of is EST, the pop-psych fad that bubbled out of the hot tubs of Esalen in the seventies and into the executive suites, with the message that you and you alone are responsible for your fate. It’s a long-standing American idea, in other words, that circumstances count for nothing compared to the power of the individual will.

  I order one of the books Patrick recommended to us, which is seductively titled The Ultimate Secret to Getting Absolutely Everything You Want, although focused almost entirely on the getting of money. When he wrote the first edition of the book in the early eighties, the author, Mike Hernacki, tells us, $1 million was an appropriate goal. Now, however, “you really can’t call yourself rich . . . unless you have at least three million bucks.” So that’s where the bar is set; now how to get over it? We have to start by acknowledging something that “may be difficult, even painful to look at”: