You might remember having studied about Harry Harlow back in college.  Harlow was a Harvard psychologist who experimented with young monkeys.  He subjected them to stresses, and showed that monkeys in their cages would have a preference for a terry-cloth surrogate mother monkey instead of a cold, hard, metal one.  The monkeys obviously felt safer and more nourished by the softer of the two mother-replicas.  This was considered a breakthrough discovery.  

[EDITORIAL NOTE FOR SOME WIDER CONTEXT: I don’t know about other species of monkeys, but chimpanzees spend the first five years of their lives basically clinging to their mothers and subsisting on mother’s milk.  The first five years!!!  That kind of creature comfort is VERY important to the developmental life of chimps.  And people too.]

Harlow was severely criticized a generation late, for brutalizing his test subjects, by people who had sympathy for other-than-human mammalian life forms.  He of course had done exactly that — and in so doing irreparably ruined his young monkeys’ lives.  

But rather few people thought in these modern terms at the time.  In fact, Harlow was specifically attempting to show people that young life forms need love and nurturing connection, at a time when a good portion of the American psychological establishment — and especially followers of the Behaviorist theories of John B. Watson (1878-1958) and B.F. Skinner (1904-1990) — did not possess that concept.  

You may also have read about Mr. Watson; he was chairman of the psychology department at Johns Hopkins University.  Skinner’s own illustrious academic history includes having taught at Minnesota University; after that he was chairman of the psychology department at Indiana University; and after that he joined the teaching staff at Harvard.  

Behaviorism believes in stimuli and observable behaviors — essentially, Pavlov’s classical conditioning — but not in anything else.  Certainly not in attempts to understand thoughts, perceptions, needs, and feelings.  Indeed, it makes no allowance for emotions, introspection, the life of the mind or the soul, or anything that cannot be directly observed and measured.  According to the Behaviorists if it cannot be measured it isn’t “real”; only observable behaviors are considered “real”.  Consequently all the things that make life worth living — the life of the spirit, the mind, the soul, the imagination, sympathy, creativity, empathy, beauty, love, and the intuition — are not real and not worth our serious attention.  Neither are feelings of uncertainty, fear, anger, confusion, inspiration, attraction, revulsion, moral repugnance, admiration, respect, playfulness, and gratitude real.  It’s perfectly all right to ignore these entirely.

It’s like the mindset of the society depicted by George Orwell in 1984, the tale of a dystopian futuristic society in which all but the most basic words necessary for communication had been deleted from the language.  Entire categories of human concepts and possibilities disappeared.  The entirety of moral, ethical, emotional, and both meditative and interpersonal human thought were basically eliminated and replaced with basic pragmatic thought. Everything was reduced to the meager and superficial spectrum of: 

  “double-plus good”, 

    “plus good”, 

      “good”, 

        “ungood”, 

          “plus ungood”, and 

              “double-plus ungood”.   Can you imagine theatre, literature, poetry, fiction, biography, etc. using such words?  Or even any intimate, honest, and intelligent conversation?  Any meaningful sense of emotional thought, ethical thought, critical thought, rational thought, or even just plain old human drama will have ceased to exist.

NOTE: George Orwell was British and evidently prescient.  He also wrote Animal Farm (in 1943-44), which is a tale about a very rigid and authoritarian society in which all animals were equal but some were more equal than others.  He was actually writing about the Soviet Union back in those days; he saw it for the brutal dictatorship, cult of personality, and reign of terror that it was . . . at a time when the British intelligentsia held Stalin in high esteem.  Well, Orwell had the clearer vision.  And his timing was good: this book gained popularity because it was published just as the Cold War began and everyone began to dislike and fear the Russians.

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But we were talking about Behaviorism.  In its heyday (and specifically as regarded the rearing of young people) Behaviorism suggested a casual and businesslike relationship between mother and child that was predicated on “technologies of behavior” — precisely the rewarding of desired behaviors and giving negative reinforcement for undesirable ones — exactly as one does with laboratory rats and monkeys — instead of supporting parental attitudes and behaviors of attachment, warmth, love, kindness, moral sense, and affection.  Watson is known for having promoted the idea that picking up a crying baby and attending to its needs was a bad thing to do; the infant “needed” to be conditioned to behave like a reasonable adult.  

Skinner himself was heavily influenced by Watson, and held attitudes in opposition to those of humanistic psychology during his entire career.  Putting it in a nutshell, Skinner thought of behavior as a function of environmental histories of one’s having had reinforcing consequences (you know, what we’d call programming, conditioning, and reinforcing) and nothing more.  His thinking denied that people possessed freedom and dignity and, like Watson, he instead promoted “behavioral engineering” through which people were — and needed to be — controlled through the systematic allocation of external rewards.  Basically, Skinner didn’t see that people were any different from rats or trained seals.  No, I’m not kidding.  

EDITORIAL NOTE: Can you imagine someone being “trained” to be a cook whose food is worth seeking out?  Or to be an artist whose stuff is worth buying?  Or to think mathematically, like any of the mathematicians who come to mind?  Or to be a writer whose stuff is worth reading?  Or to be a good mother or father?  Or to be a good teacher?  Or to be a good athlete?  Or to have a good sense of humor?  I mean, you can train people to be Republicans, or good consumers of goods,  soldiers, C.E.O.s, etc. . . . but none of these are exactly creative occupations.  They’re managers of sorts, who problem-solve on the level of the things that they have been assigned to manage.  “Operant conditioning” does not recognize the world or imagination, nor the world of authentic feelings.

Both Watson and Skinner were influenced by the “operant conditioning” work of Ivan Pavlov — the man who got dogs to salivate upon hearing the sound of a bell.  More than Pavlov, however, Watson and Skinner influenced a great deal of the psychological thinking of the mid-twentieth century, and particularly as it applied to the rearing of children.  These men did incalculable harm to millions of people . . . many of whom, incidentally, are now running our institutions and our country.

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While Skinner lived out his life as a tenured professor at Harvard, Watson capped his career by taking his expertise at classical conditioning away from the pursuit of trying to control children’s development via a “scientifically approved” system of rewards and punishments, and into the world of manipulating adult behaviors — through advertising.  Watson went to work for the J. Walter Thompson advertising agency, where he eventually became wealthy from persuading (i.e., classically conditioning) consumers to buy Pond’s cold cream, Maxwell House coffee, and other such products.  

As far as marketing coffee is concerned, Watson is credited with having invented the coffee break: our reason for buying and drinking lots of coffee.  Right: you drink as much coffee as you do, and Starbucks is as successful as it is, because of John Watson.  But his legacy — as well Skinner’s — also includes being responsible for untold numbers of mothers of that generation buying into being impersonal toward their infants, under the pernicious fantasy that abandoning their children emotionally is good for them; or, at least, that a child’s feelings about being abandoned are irrelevant to anything and should be dismissed.  As I said, these men did incalculable harm to millions of people.  I hope they’re in a place where they need 2,500-power sunblock.

I’m not making any of this up.  If you think I might be, please read up on Watson, Skinner, and Behaviorism – if only on Wikipedia.  But getting back to Harry Harlow, this is a lot of what he was trying to offset, disprove, and counteract in his work.  Parenthetically, from what I’ve read, both Watson and Skinner had shitty childhoods that featured quite a bit of abandonment.  Neither one of them ever examined their own emotional roots, but instead simply ran with how they themselves had been conditioned . . . aided by the boost that they received from being respected and prominent academicians — and, in Watson’s case, a successful businessman.  Talk about reward and reinforcement!!!  It brings to mind former vice-president Dick Cheney’s habit of ONLY listening to Fox news and forbidding liberal journalists from joining his entourages.  I mean, who needs to listen to both sides of a question, right?  

Finally, Harlow wasn’t exactly a paragon of sensitivity either; from what I’ve read, he was a gruff, abusive, and extraordinarily unpleasant person to be around.  Go figure.  It seems to me that, given the dominant modes of thought about parenting that were universally acted out in those generations, no one was brought up feeling appreciated as though they were valuable by themselves (I know that my own parents weren’t brought up like that . . . and because of that neither was I).  For anyone interested in an account of society’s parenting styles of those generations — and of how Skinner, Watson, and Harlow were undoubtedly parented — sit down and read For Your Own Good,  The Drama of the Gifted Child,  and/or Thou Shalt Not Be Aware  by psychoanalyst Alice Miller.

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More later.

I’d been writing about Martin Luther.  Not Martin Luther King; he was one of the good guys.  I mean the Martin Luther who founded Protestantism and became the father of modern-day Evangelicalism – which is the doctrine of salvation by grace through Faith.  Luther is much revered today . . . but he really wasn’t a very nice person.  And he wasn’t in it to help people, as Mr. King was; he was in it to see that people toed the line and Obeyed The Rules of God and the Church.  The line to be toed was the defense of the absolute authority of the Bible, and against those whom Luther considered enemies of Christ. He was firm about that, to the point of denying people who thought differently the right to live.  Luther was a bright example of the Authoritarian Personality . . . but that’s a topic for a separate conversation.

At one point, Martin Luther had had a transformative experience.  And, according to him, that transformation was like being reborn.  Wow.

I had a similar sort of experience last August after I collapsed with episodes of cardiac syncope.  I was taken to the hospital, and came back home five days later with a pacemaker device installed under my left clavicle.  I came home to a wonderful feeling of peace.  I might have died but I hadn’t.  My worldly worries fell away.  It was as though all the mental noise I’d been surrounded by to such an extent that I had stopped hearing it ceased . . . and I was lost in blissful silence.  I saw the Promised Land.  I felt a wonderful sense of Liberation and Calm.  I lost my desire to eat compulsively.  The only responsibility I really felt was to inhale and exhale.  I even wrote about all that in one of my early newsletters.  I guess it was like feeling reborn.  I say “I guess” because I have no other similar experience of my own to compare this one with.

The thing is . . . my old life came back after a while.  Unsurprisingly, getting back to my work all of a sudden, with its responsibilities and appointments and deadlines . . . You know: the concerns.  The worries. The bills. The people and things depending on me.  ALL of these things had fallen away during my “re-birth”.  But none of that had gone permanently away.  And all my old habits came back.  

Well, the body and the brain want to revert to homeostasis; they always want to go back to the way things were.

I don’t know if it works any differently for anyone else who’s had a born-again experience.  Martin Luther started out as a radical and reformer, but ended up as a reactionary and authoritarian.  In other words, he started out as “reasonable” but turned into someone who in the second phase of his life was known for being combative, opinionated, intransigent, and inflexible.  He had his epiphany right between those phases . . . or so he said.  As far as human beings go, having a major insight and turning point is generally accompanied by feelings of liberation and going easy on one’s self and others.  

Martin Luther did not exhibit those symptoms for very long.  He did NOT remain a tolerant, softer, easier-going man who had a wider appreciation of the complexities of life.  He did NOT love his neighbor; in fact, if Luther’s neighbor disagreed with him, he was all for eradicating him.  Like you-know-who also does.

Speaking of “change”, I have a friend who is a very smart and argumentative Conservative.  He can vigorously defend some intellectual positions that make me cringe.  Years ago, he used to be a passionately argumentative Liberal, and even a Radical.  He told me that he experienced a crisis shortly after he, as a young man, got married: he was now in a position of having to take care of a wife and partner, but certainly not in a position to do so economically.  Arguing in support of Marxism will do that, it seems.  My friend emerged from this crisis — like a caterpillar emerging from a cocoon in the shape of a moth — as a Conservative . . . with greatly expanded economic possibilities.  And he took advantage of them.  Unsurprisingly, he was just as passionate and argumentative as ever.  

It was an interesting insight for me when I first understood that he had been an intellectual gunslinger and . . . he continued to be an intellectual gunslinger.  That didn’t change at all.  He was just wearing a different uniform and gunslinging for a different team.  Well, external changes seem to be easier than internal ones, and his desire to win remained unchanged.

One hears of people who have been in prison and “finding Christ” or something equivalent.  They return to society with a newfound need to be helpful — and not to escalate their previous motivations, fury, intransigence, irresponsibility, and lawlessness.  Of course, such transformations are accomplished slowly, over time. Perhaps years.  Martin Luther’s experience was sudden, and seems to have had a short half-life. After the honeymoon was over, he doubled down.  Fiercely.  And he was both incapable of admitting error and unwilling to apologize for it.  That’s a lot like, well, you-know-who.  Both Luther and Trump seem driven by something that eats them from the inside . . . but that they are in denial about.  And probably without the capacity to be self-aware.   It’s sort of like someone who has leprosy but has no idea that he has it.

I’m wondering about how long a half-life others’ experience of anything “liberating” has lasted.  Did they really become different people because of their re-birth?  Have you ever had such an experience”?  Did it stick?  Was it permanent?  

I don’t know; it might have to do with how “rebirth” is defined.  I know of several men who have had very intense combat experiences who, after they left the military, vowed to live a life that was devoid of ANY further violence or killing; they’d seen and done enough of that.  You might think that qualifies as being “reborn” . . . although while it does leave one with a different attitude and focus it does not alleviate them of any of the problems, burdens, or worries about daily life.  They get on with life, without any spiritual or religious afterglow.  If they have been lucky enough to find God, it’s only after having been unlucky enough to need to do so.  And in none of the cases I know about was the transformation accomplished in a moment.  It took a year or two.

Does finding Christ (or having any other kind of rebirth) put one on a path that is free of burdens?  I ask not to cast aspersions, but because I really don’t know.  If any of you out there have any information about the being reborn thing, I’d like to hear about it.  All I can tell you is that I had what amounts to a heavenly vacation — but, for me, the experience of caroming off a single life event (my cardiac problems) as a changed man did not last automatically.  I’ve had to work hard to reclaim and reimagine it.  After a while I needed to go back to work and pick up my shovel and get my hands dirty and start sweating again, if I can put it like that.  That sort of messes with bliss.

Of course, I’m a Taurus, so maybe being reborn just won’t stick.  

But I do know one thing: if you want to change something, it takes practice and repetition.  One has to practice, and to have a practice.  Unless we’re talking trauma, a one-shot intense experience is like newspaper headlines: possibly exciting, but old news by the next day.

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COMIC RELIEF: here’s a joke that might tickle you:

         THE LAW OF DIMINISHING RETURNS:

  1. The sport of choice for the urban poor is BASKETBALL. 

  2. The sport of choice for maintenance level employees is BOWLING.

  3. The sport of choice for front-line workers is FOOTBALL.

  4. The sport of choice for supervisors is BASEBALL.

  5. The sport of choice for middle management is TENNIS.

And . . .

  6. The sport of choice for corporate executives and officers is   GOLF.   

The amazing fact is that the higher you go in the corporate structure, the smaller your balls become.

There must be a boatload of people in Washington playing marbles.

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More later.

WE’VE been talking about luthiers’ marketing slogans.  They are – like slogans in general — perhaps partly truthful and often entirely superficial, but also cute while benefitting from a good tweak.  In my previous sending I quoted from the Glossary of Advertising Terms and Their Exact Meanings, and commented that most of the examples in it apply to guitar making.

Well, we need only to open any guitar or music publication these days to see what sloganeering strategies are being used by guitar makers to pull customers through their workshop doors to their sales counters . . . and also perhaps see in what ways these can be improved.

        Here are some real-life examples.

TOM RIBBECKE

Take, for instance, luthier Tom Ribbecke’s slogan “The Tradition Continues”.  When broken down into its constituent components and examined critically it gets points for being (1) concise, (2) pithy.  Also, by way of invoking the power of positive associations, it (3) lays claim to the cachet of Being Part of Something Bigger Than Itself — if only something as quotidian as tradition . . . which, as everyone knows, is simply an upscale way of saying the same old thing everybody and their cousin in the biz have been doing in much the same old way all along.  

Well, that’s a downside for sure.  The focal power of this slogan is blunted by Tom’s stated participation in the rather whimsical continuation of this amorphous tradition.  This is as vague and hard to pin down as the location of a fleeing felon, or a Specific Point on a Line.  Surely you remember that from high school geometry. 

The question is: how to improve this?  It’s far better, we think, to tighten this up by taking a Decisive and Authoritative Tone so no one will think Tom is Fooling Around.  A macho echo of the unforgettable and deeply noble statement of personal responsibility once made by one of our Great Presidents would suggest recasting Tom’s slogan into: “The Tradition Stops Here”.  This has got Vintage written all over it!  It has the advantage of locating Tom’s work more firmly in time and unmistakably fixing its contribution to that tradition, while simultaneously suggesting to the consumer that this is all there is, get ‘em while they’re red hot and available, ‘cause This Is It And There Ain’t No More.  Wow!  This really goes for the maximum jugular.

HENRY GUITARS

Another great guitar advertising slogan is Henry Guitars’ “The Sound of Quality Craftsmanship”.  At first sight this is an A-O.K. sentiment.  But a second look reveals its limitations: this is really frighteningly vague and confusing as to referent.  

After all, what sounds of quality craftsmanship, exactly, will this guitar be replicating?  A saw cutting through expensive rosewood?  The groaning sounds of bending and clamping the laminated elements of a designer chair?  A polishing wheel screechily bringing the final luster to a cut glass decanter?  Or a ball-peen hammer skillfully crafting the tone-sections of a steel drum?  Maybe the evocative sounds of someone making a beautiful clay vase?  Or, perhaps, the sound of a wood sculptor using a chainsaw to carve a replica of Michaelangelo’s “David” out of a tree stump?  You see, “The Sound of Quality Craftsmanship” just won’t do.  

We feel this luthier would do better to make a marketing statement that is (a) sufficiently general to bypass the specific criticisms which the existing slogan’s logic invites, but which (b) also is simultaneously Bull’s-Eye Right-On, No-Nonsense, and Claims Decisive Excellence, and which most importantly (c) does not lose the All-Important Nexus With SOUND, which is at the slogan’s heart.  This caveat leads immediately to an improved formulation of the original statement: “Henry Guitars: Much Better Than They Sound!”  There!  Can you see how much more satisfactory this is?  Only the most obtuse reader would fail to be impressed.

HARRY FLEISHMAN

On the ground-floor front, slogan-wise, it is widely known that luthier Harry Fleishman is seeking to expand his new line of classic dovetail-topped guitars and is at this very moment scratching his head over which one-sentence sentiment most effectively will project Buy Me into the minds of his customer base—a tricky problem for all of us, actually.  We would suggest referring to the previous list of slogan-making principles to come up with something classic (no pun intended).  For instance, if Mr. Fleishman would combine the elements of (1) pithiness, (2) humor, (3) claim of excellence and (4) contrast—which are by themselves always an appealing mix—and add to these the kicker of (5) great personal humility, he might just come up with a winner of a slogan such as: “Fleishman: Great Guitars … from a Substandard Guy”.  We call it to his attention.

DAVE MAIZE

Northwest luthier Dave Maize is our point man on political correctness in lutherie and his slogan announces the use of sustainable yield domestic woods.  While this is laudable, we feel that such a thrust would benefit from a bit more oomph than his bald statement that only by implication distances itself from the killing of endangered woods.  We suggest a reformulation of Mr. Maize’s abortive arboreal conscientiousness into something more decisive, like: “I don’t kill exotic trees like other luthiers do.  My instruments are made from woods harvested from trees felled solely by disease, age, natural disaster, beavers, or P.G.&E. malfeasance.  My trademark Petrified Wood Travel Guitars are stronger than Samsonite luggage and have the ultimate in aged sound.  Oh, and no trees are endangered or killed in the making of them!”.  Putting this much information on a business card wouldn’t leave room for Mr. Maize’s name, address, or other information about how to reach him, but we feel strongly that this message would be so compelling that customers would be moved to track him down and find him even if he were in the Federal Luthier’s Protection Program.

ERVIN SOMOGYI

As we underlined previously, we have read with heady bewilderment the plethora of lutherie slogans in the latest issues of all the trade magazines and tried to imagine the average reader’s experience of wading through all the claims made so as to choose their next dream guitar.  It cannot be done.  There are too many luthiers Clamoring Excellence by one standard or another: best value, best sound, best craftsmanship, and most waterproof.  It’s way too confusing.  We also commented on Ervin Somogyi’s brilliantly efficient cutting-to-the-chase-while-also-cutting-out-the-competition slogan of claiming to produce the best guitars anywhere, anytime, and certainly of all the ones mentioned in this or that magazine.  

Well, Somogyi has improved on that in his current campaign – by enlisting the influence of someone with Official Power and Authority to speak for him!  (That way, he’s not going to be selfishly lying about his own products.)  Accordingly, Somogyi now attaches the following official statement to all his posts:  

SURGEON GENERAL’S WARNING: It has been determined that the sound of Somogyi guitars is so intoxicating that users are warned against playing them while driving or operating heavy machinery.

We think that this will also put in their place the envious wags who, for instance, amend the slogan “NOTHING sounds better than a Somogyi guitar” by bitterly adding the bon mot of: “Much better, in fact”. 

RAINSONG GUITARS

Finally, the previous mention of waterproof brings us to Rainsong Guitars, which are facing tremendous marketing challenges.  The fact that they are made entirely of synthetic and water-repellent materials forms the thrust of much of their advertising, in which water-resistance has been prominently and repeatedly mentioned.  

The manufacturers have clearly decided that their guitars’ relation to WATER is key.  As such, we must recognize that this hasn’t been developed to its full potential.  According to selling rules #5 (hyperbole), #8 (think big), #9 (moral rectitude), and #13 (think even bigger) of the Businessman’s Marketing Guidelines, the advertisers should immediately drop mention of water on the level of mere rain.  Rain is way too humble and ordinary, while this calls for Something Huge and Epic.  Much better to invoke Really Big Important Bodies of Water, and Equally Big Geopolitical Realities Associated With Big Important Bodies of Water — such as the Panama Canal. We modestly suggest: “A Man, A Plan, a Canal, A Guitar . . . Rainsong!!! — and, oh, by the way, we don’t kill trees like those other luthiers do”.  And see those sales lines jump off the charts.

Space and time limitations force us to stop here on this important topic, but you get the idea.  This message has been brought to you courtesy of A.F.C.I. (The American Federation of the Conceptually Impaired) — where friends don’t let friends make guitars. 

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EDITORIAL NOTE: this humorous and totally un-serious article was written several years ago, with the permission of everyone mentioned.  Well, pretty much.  Somogyi objected at first; but we sent Guido and Vinnie, our . . . uh . . . motivational facilitators, to have a talk with him and he quickly changed his mind — and then also generously offered to defray their considerable traveling expenses out of pocket.

I’ve been taking a class in marketing and have learned a lot.  Marketing for handmade guitars such as the ones I make has not been well studied.  The luthier’s slogan is the luthier’s initial statement about his work to the yet unseen customer that creates the all-important first impression; and the crucial importance of The Right Slogan is often overlooked.  Slogans are effective insofar as they are concise, immediate, and serve to encapsulate a complex message into an easy to assimilate sound-byte sized phrase or sentence.  It is the way of the new millennium, and everybody knows this.

The raison d’etre of the slogan is to get the client’s attention and invoke a receptive mental state in him.  An effective slogan is formed by strict adherence to principles of marketing long known to professionals in important fields such as advertising and politics.  These are: pithiness, contrast, understatement, humor, hyperbole, mellifluous glibness, humility, claim to excellence, authority of tone, and flat-out lying. There’s also Putting Down The Competition … but we’re honest people and we don’t do that. We leave that to the politicians.

We have received a Glossary of Advertising Terms and Their Exact Meanings from the Sum, Wan, & Orother Advertising Corporation of Compton, California.  It is a primer for education about some basic building blocks to successful sloganeering.  Amazingly, all their examples apply to lutherie. Here is a sampling:

Improved: some of the most obvious faults eliminated

New Improved: we also changed the box

All-purpose: does a mediocre job in several ways

Jumbo: too big to fit in the airplane’s overhead compartment

Compact: understanding or agreement (such as our no refund policy)

Disposable:  can be used only once

Durable: can be used twice

Delicate: breaks easily

Fine:  imposition of a monetary penalty

Subtle: inaudible or invisible

Compensated nuts and saddles: these have been paid for