MAKING A MAKEOVER WORK

Ugly More Motivational Than Beautiful

By Winsip Custer CPW News Services

     Forget about posting your face on a photo of the model you'd like to look like.  It's ugly that motivates.  With new breakthroughs in mind science that show a negative correlation between beauty and motivation,  experts are rethinking the links between imagination and personal development.  Even art exhibits of the holocaust as well as other Nazi atrocities are finding expanded acceptance for artwork that features the grotesque realities of war and barbarism in the belief that negative imagery produces positive peaceful effects.
  
     Heinrich Von Rippendorf of the Museum von Nazi Memories in Augsburg summed it up:  "That beautiful Versailles palace in France was ugly to Germans because of its Draconian enforcements upon the German people following World War I.   Beautiful on the outside and ugly as hell on the inside. All good Germans knew this fact without knowing that Marie Antoinette lived there eating beef tenderloin while her subjects ate cake.  So we built a new Germany and a new model that we felt would be prettier than the previous ugly reality, but that second rate painter turned bomb dropper, Hitler, painted us into an ugly corner, but the prettiest flowers are more likely to grow on top of dog piles," Von Rippendorf reasoned. 

     "Modern Germany is more beautiful than before and we want it to stay that way," he concluded.   "To us the beautiful Palace of Versailles was like a school-girl posting a picture of a beautiful, but bitchy, actress on her bathroom mirror.  That school girl will become better than the actress that she seeks to mimic because she knows the beauty is false and unreliable. All she has to do is stay focused and not go off the deep end as happened to us a couple of times, well,  maybe three or so if you include the reign of Attila the Hun."
  
      "Any wounded warrior can tell you that's true," said Dr. Mogomu Mofbatti, a former African field surgeon during conflicts in Zimbabwe.  "Ugly anything propels you to seek its opposite. You drop a few mortar shells in the center of the city and suddenly the quiet country side is more beautiful than ever and where you'd like to be even with mosquitos and horseflies," said Dr. Mofbatti.

     "Yes, when it was revealed that photos of unnamed slim models posted to refrigerator doors or bathroom mirrors increase self-loathing causing a paralyzing effect on one’s weight loss, we put two and two together,” said Marla Supple Wiggons of the weight-loss support group, Reversal of Flab.  “Then, for Pete’s sake, surround yourself with the opposite.  Post pictures of flabby, bubba toothed bimbos in pink leotards or worn out overalls or only of beautiful women who you know are really ugly to the bone inspite of their looks.”

     Wiggons says that Kristi Alley and Oprah Winfrey still work well regardless of how much weight they claim to have lost in the latest Slim-Fast ads.   "This is basic common sense when you think about it.  It comes from the old saying...  'If you have to be in a beauty contest choose who you stand next to,'" said Wiggons.  "We are all at some subconscious level in a beauty contest all the time and desirous to look incrementally better than the next option.  Stick Angelina Jolie's or even Jennifer Anniston's face on your mirror and  in no time you're having suicidal ideations unless you believe that Jolie has only surface beauty, but beneath it all is deep down ugly," said Wiggons noting that the "bitch factor" in Jolie was higher than in Anniston and therefore more likely to be a positive motivator as in the previous example of the Palace of Versailles.  Wiggons cautioned, however, against allowing others to dish out ugly and evil experiences while telling you "it's not what happens to you, but what you do with what happens to you that counts," as did football coach Jerry Sandusky. 
     "We know instinctively when someone else is giving us a raw deal, but not even a once beloved coach can serve as a positive motivator when he has dealt negatively with others and then tells them it's good for them," said Wiggons.  "That always puts the victimizer in a one-up and condescending position over us and that's not liberating, but enslaving.  Liberation comes from looking at a photo of a shucked oyster and saying 'see, I'm alot better than that,'" said Wiggons who added that a shucked oyster has a brighter future than Sandusky.  "At least oysters make pearls, not license plates," said Wiggons.

     Wiggons, who says she is rare female that stays on top of traditionally male interests like football and other sports and who keeps her testosterone levels high by eating 24 Brazil nuts per day, claims that avoiding the posting of glamour shots of your wannabe model as a motivational device does not work for everyone, however.   Arrested development can continue primarily for some unknown factor.  Some are beyond hope and remain so by their learned or genetic ability to totally deny reality and because of what Wiggons calls "pigeon props".  
     According to Wiggons, "pigeon props" are props that keep people tied to the monuments of their past stupidity.   "Penn State claims it was no 'pigeon prop' for a system of institutionalized abuse, but I dare to differ.  Some narcissists thrive on a false self-esteem gained by limiting one’s field of comparison and allowing oneself to be compared unfavorably to another.  In the end, this is not in your self interest.  Limiting fair and open comparison is counter productive. It would be better to have photos of many, many different people of all colors, shapes and sizes that only photos of your idealized dreamboat.  In the 50’s, for example, I dated a sawed off little point guard for the University of Tennessee basketball team who strutted around like a proud bantam rooster flashing his team ring and acting all cocky and superior to everyone else.  What gave him the impression he was superior?   No black basketball players had yet been admitted to the University of Tennessee’s basketball team and so he lived in a protective bubble of imagined reality.  This ugly little dude was held in place by other ugly little dudes all propped up by less than a few degrees of separation in height, weight, hair color, eye color so that they had institutionalized their arrested development.  Nothing real about that.  You could conceivably weigh 500 pounds, but surround yourself with photos of other 500 pound women and you are actually more likely to stay just as you are.  Skinnier women's photos and you'll balloon up like a NASA weather balloon.  The same size and shape as you and you get parity.....no change.  If you're a hefty girl hanging photos of Gwen Palthrow or Taylor Swift on the wall you are guaranteed of getting even heftier,” said Wiggons who pointed out that limiting a field of comparison is always negative when it has a racism factor.
     "But isn't avoiding photos of beautiful models as a motivator limiting your field of  comparison?" I ask Wiggons.  "The human mind is able to make very careful distinctions between various motivators.  It knows when you are providing yourself loving or loathing as a self-motivator," she said.
     "Well, here, let's consider Johnny Manziel the 2012 Heisman Trophy winner whose team actually beat the 2013 national champs, Alabama, during the regular season.  This kid was rejected by the highest paid coach in college football at the University of Texas and took a position at Texas A&M playing in a school that traces, as you have pointed out, its history to Edward B. Cushing, a pro-Confederate Southerner with family ties to the New England Cushings.  "Unlike that twit of a Tennessee basketball player I dated who played on a segregated team and thought he was God's gift to the world, Manziel competed in an integrated  program and society and  won the Heisman in his first year.  He admitted that he grew up pretending he was Heisman winner Doug Flutie, another short guy, but in the back of his mind was his grandfather's 1983 world championship for cockfighting.  Illegal in the U.S., this blood sport which was not that much different from Michael Vick's Pit Bull dog fights provided Manziel a wonderful negative image for a young boy.  He had to be thinking 'I've got to be better than PawPaw's gutted roosters'," said Wiggons.  "I am sure that Michael Vick was motivated by some similar imagery," said Wiggons surmising  that cross-specie comparisons are always fair and open comparisions as with oysters.
 
     Wiggons believes that her program is further supported by the historic Hawthorne Study.  This landmark motivational study showed that workers in a factory were motivated by the simple addition of supervisors adjusting the lights in their workspace.  "For Manziel and Vick the spotlight was literally on them every time they took the field, but when you put a pretty face and body on the wall as your 'target' you take the spotlight off of you and put it on them.  How can that work for you?" asked Wiggons.  "Put Rosanne Barr's picture up there and it's like you just stepped out of a cave and into the sunlight."

     "People are motivated by reverse psychology and negative, not positive, exaggeration.   If you are a worker as skinny as Steve Jobs or Bill Gates within a Gates or Jobs  business culture you'll likely stay like them.  Now, if Gates sought to immolate a blubbery J.P. Morgan and his gargantuan nose instead of Warren Buffett, you'd get a six-foot-four-inch toothpick-like Bill Gates and since he's your model and he's getting thinner because of his weight loss you'd balloon up like a gunny sack of door knobs.  This truth has been verified.   A slightly pudgy-bellied Steve Jobs was aspiring to become J.P. Morgan and Jobs was filling the back of his medicine cabinet door with photos of Morgan and wham-0!  A skinny Steve Jobs and this was long before his terminal diagnosis," said Wiggons reiterating that we generally get the opposite of what we consciously strive for. 
     "You've got to trick yourself into becoming what you want to be.  Like that time I dated handsome Joe Romanno who wanted to make it with me  on prom night.  I was so frigid and inexperienced and innocent.  So what did I do all day?  I imagined I was Mother Theresa.  Worked great, though Joe dumped me for a skinnier and more buxom Sally Frederickson," said Wiggons noting that Frederickson then dumped Romanno for the Tennessee basketball player she had learned to loathe, had five kids and ballooned out like the Pillsbury Doughboy, while Frederickson's husband stayed skinny, but developed skin cancer from spending too much time at a tanning salon.

     Wiggons believes that modern Gnostic movements, movements that stress some secret knowledge that releases in people the power to achieve success and generally shared at a price, are misguided.   "They most often call this the Law of Attraction.  Meaning that we attract to ourselves the things we wish to become or have.  The problem with this is, of course, that it's riddled with flawed logic and is untenable in the real world where most people live.  The mythical King Midas wished that everything he touched turned to gold.  So the story goes that his beloved flesh and blood daughter turned into cold, hard gold, too.  I recently saw a documentary called The Secret.  An assortment of lame brains all claimed that this Law of Attraction was known by all great people:  Plato, Aristotle, Lincoln, Einstein.   Well, if that's true we have to wonder why Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation and Civil War victory attracted an assassin's bullet instead of love and appreciation for standing on a universal principle.   Likewise, why was Albert Einstein stripped of his national security clearance like Dr.  J. Robert Oppenheimer when  they decided not to build the hydrogen bomb and instead wanted to use nuclear energy for peaceful purposes?  If I imagine I'm a hefty pile of horse manure I will attract flies, but if I imagine that I am fillet Mignon or Beluga caviar, I may attract some wealthy and perhaps cultured diva, but also  her ugly overstuffed sugar daddy and a swarm of flies to boot.  This "Law of Attraction" is not so simple.  Run a huge electro-magnet over a scrap yard and I promise you'll get a load of scrap metal, but no gold at all.  See what I mean," said Wiggons.

     Taking this latest discovery to a new level, Reverend Darian Greyman of the Greater Things Church of Long Beach, California has held up all Mainline, non-denominational and mega-church myth makers as a sample of the failure of Christians to think creatively.  

“Most are selling the Gnostic crap, " said Greyman, "so what do you expect?  They all grew up in a little box of limited vision.  I had a Jewish friend, who was always talking about faithful Christians who had reached out to her grandfather and grandmother in Germany and helped hide them from the Nazis.  She called them ‘Righteous Christians’….Bonhoeffer, Niemoller and others.  Then she’d quote Eli Wiesel or Abraham Heschel and get all warm and cuddly feeling about her Christian friends who dragged their damn feet in the 1930's and 40's in helping while Hitler was warming up the ovens.  I told her “hell, don’t do that!  Hold up the really bad examples of those Christians who had looked the other way as the trains rolled through town, or better yet, the really stinky Jewish leaders like Baron Rothschild whose money successfully saved the majority of his family from the gas chambers and ovens, except for his estranged ex-wife,” said Greyman.
    
      Greyman's book, American Hessians For Hitler, traces the Westward migration of German Hessians fighting for Great Britain against the American colonists following the Revolutionary War.   After the revolution, not wanting to return to Europe with its long history of bloody conflicts, they could hide their identity on the frontier until the rise of the German American Bund and accompanying "Business Plot" of the 1930's that included Henry Ford, Harvey Firestone, Prescott Bush, John Burroughs, Charles Lindberg and others.  The Hessians, either German Lutheran or Roman Catholics found solace in following the Masonry of Roman Catholic, Albert Pike,  the founder of the Scottish Rite in the U.S. which was itself inagurated in the decade after the American Revolution  by the Prussian Royal family.  Pike was the leading attorney for the K.K.K.," notes Greyman who also said that in one Texas German town a museum built in memory of World II Admiral Chester Nimitz had been co-opted as a museum for the son of Prescott Bush, George Herbert Walker Bush, who lost in his raid on Chi Chi Jima the Yale classmate who favored early entry of the U.S.'s  resistance to Adolf Hitler.

     Greyman believes that his views are firmly rooted in Scripture and his church takes its name from John 14:1….”Greater things shall you do than I have done.”

    “That’s from John’s Gospel,” said Greyman.  “Not from James, so you can’t say that there’s some danger in a misguided ‘works righteousness’ philosophy at play.  Surrounding oneself with life’s realities is hardly that.  If I were into looking good I’d join the local Cathedral, kiss the Bishops’ ring and work out at Gold’s Gym.   I’d become a Mormon and marry a babe like Mrs. Romney,” said Greyman who believes that redirecting one’s focus is the best way to attain the unattainable.  Greyman who married a woman 20 years his junior, but with a weight problem, said "it was no problem to me which elevated me in the eyes of many.  I tell them 'thank you' and give them a copy of the poem Jack Sprat," said Rev. Greyman.

     “Jesus said, ‘It’s harder for a rich man to get into heaven than for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle,’ so I thought…..better find a smaller camel or a bigger needle,’ and that’s exactly what we have here on the campus of The Greater Things Church of Long Beach,” said Greyman.

     “We built a 150 foot high sewing needle pointing skyward and every Sunday some member of the church rides a real camel through it,” said Greyman.  "Corky the camel," he continued.   "The kids love Corky."  The 50,000 member congregation had to limit Sunday camel rides at its sprawling country campus.   One time per year per member is all they get after the congregation's phenomenal growth gave Corky arthritis in his hips and knees.

     When asked what this proved Greyman said, “Next week we are going to vote on it being a new sacrament in the church along with communion and baptism and we're adding two new camels.   I have heard rumors that Warren Buffet is considering visiting sometime soon just for the camel ride, which we will have to deny him on the basis of it being a sacrament for members only, which we hope will influence him to join us.  Is this the Law of Attraction at work or creative visioning?  I don't know and I really don't care.  Buffet seems like a nice enough guy, but I can think of few hundred thousand other people I rather sit next to at a cover-dish supper," said Rev. Greyman.

     When asked how he came to include a camel ride through a giant needle,  Greyman explained that after the addition of the weekly camel ride called “Passing Through The Eye” contributions of individual members has climbed from about 3% of annual income to a whopping 49.9% of annual income when combined with their taxes which Greyman says they are allowed to compute in their church giving.     'We all agree to bring our tax returns to church on Dedication Sunday.  We all trust each other and would take each other at our word, but why do that given our unshakable faith in the time-honored Calvinistic doctrine called 'Total Depravity'?" said Rev. Greyman.

   “On average we were in the 25-30% tax range so our folks are still giving nearly 20-25% more.  That’s unheard of in the lazy, lethargic suck-egg congregations of the average American community where churches realistically hoover at 7% below their legalistically held 10% tithing standard which they systematically hypocratize week after week and especially at year-end as their prior commitments run into competition from 'Black Friday' and Christmas.  Basically our folks live on half of what they make and if the blubbery-bounding-blobs of mass I see sitting on their behinds in Congress and the U.S. Senate or in the pulpits of America’s churches and synagogues  did the same, we’d have no problems at all, but unfortunately we have surrounded ourselves with unimaginative assholes,” said Greyman, “religiously speaking, I mean."

    Greyman believes that it all went back to the example of the widow's mite in Scripture.  "Who can compete with that?" asked Greyman.

      "You know, the widow who gave away all she had.   We look at her, and this gets to the essence of 'reverse visionsioning' and the Law of Attraction as some call it, as a bad example and one Jesus sneaked in there so that we could later figure out what to do with her.   So we hang her memory up there on the refrigerator, too.   An artist in the congregation made her into an obese overweight Jewish woman so full of her own self-loathing that she just said 'to hell with it, here, take it all!'  And for anyone Jewish that is a very, very low level of self-esteem.  How can you help someone else if you've given away all you've had?   Crap!," said Greyman,  "50% is enough unless your only child just signed your extubation order while your lying in the ICU!”

     Greyman says that his theology has been primarily influenced by P.T. Forsythe who said “Unless there is within us, that which is above us, we will soon yield to that which is about us.”
 
     "I understand that it's Forsythe's influence on President Obama that made him laminate Mississippi Governor Haley Barbour's photo to the underside of his Oval Office bathroom toilet," said Greyman.

     Forsythe believed, according to Greyman, that we have to have our eyes totally open to that which is about us so that that which is within us can aspire to that which is above us.  “It's a very simple concept, really,” said Greyman who said “for this reason I avoid retreats at Benedictine monasteries."
     Greyman counsels his members to make as much money as they can from sustainable, non-polluting and ethical ways, but to judge their progress toward a Christ-like life  by their ability to live off of half or less.  "For that reason, too, I encourage frugality in procreation.  Reproducing yourself as in cell division is also Biblical.  Produce too much of a bad thing, or as science has taught us....even of a good thing.... and there comes a tragic flood to reduce us to only two of something, again.  Best to just avoid the damn flood in the first place!"