ANTITUSSIVE

The next subject of my utter contempt is the fair-weather friend, or is it fiend, and his victim. If I must make a hate list of criminals officially categorized as "non-heinous", I would confer the top prize to this fiend, and award the second-place trophy to his user-friendly victim.

Yes, there exists a veritable dynamics in this predator-prey relationship. The complexity can get pretty complicated it deserves a separate course in psychology. The symbiotic relationship can occur between and among friends or couples, anything with an opportunistic species of bacteria on one end and a willing fool on the other.

Friendly users and user-friendly folks, how to distinguish them? Let's deal with the users first.

***

A fairly good sign of a potential user is the level of phoniness he or she exhibits in his or her tendency to bootlick.

Of course there’s a thin line between being polite and being phony, but you would know a phony when you see or hear one. All you have to do is observe carefully and trust your instinct. Does his or her mouth spew blatant falsehoods just to make you feel nice? Does the person act like he or she is your number one fan even in cases where you totally suck? Tickled pink by the corniest joke ever delivered on earth, i.e., the one emanating from your mouth? Believe me, chances are he or she is either too naïve or just being plain obsequious.

In short, is he or she a pleaser, more of a yes-man than a genuine rah-rah guy? Is he or she too accommodating for comfort? Trust me, you’re in the same room with a bottom-kisser. No wonder you could hardly breathe: There's a toady blowing a lot of hot air!

Filipinos have a nice term for these creatures: “sipsip” (leech). Now true leeches do suck blood for survival; it’s in the annelid worm's nature. But when human beings do the sucking, they are plain vampires.

By contrast, non-users are true to themselves. They lay their cards on the table at the outset. They are not ruled by the game of putting one's foot forward, always out to impress lest the first impression fails to be everlasting indeed.

If they need to avoid offending anyone, non-users choose kindness as the better part of the truth, but they never overdo it. It's one thing to be diplomatic, tactful, discretionary and restrained, and quite another to be groveling and invariably pathetic. I would like to say that being a user is more of being an animal than being human, but that would be unfair to animals, to steal a quote. It is stooping too low, one wonders why bootlickers don’t get back pains. It is an unimaginative form of lying because it is pretty obvious both to the distant observer and the one being fawned upon.

***

Now the latter - the willing victim - needs a special kind of verbal harassment as well. The problem with this type of person is, he or she knows all along and knows all too well that kowtowing comes with some strings attached. But he or she falls for the trick anyway.

A willing prey is guilty of what shrinks call co-dependency. You can trust him to lend you all his savings. You can treat him like a doormat; you already have his permission even before you ask. This species wants to feel needed, feel martyred, because there's a gaping hole in his psyche that needs to be filled or else he'd collapse like a dead star. But such a foolish type of martyrdom deserves the jail, or to be a cannon fodder, more than it deserves canonization.

As helpless and pitiful as they are at first blush, false martyrs, too, deserve utter contempt for the things they refuse to accept about themselves: That they have the right to be loved and accepted for who they are, and not according to how people around them would like them or need them, or tell them how they are useful. That just for being born human, they automatically have the right to self-worth, and everyone must give them that much.

Unfortunately, these victims of the object-oriented wrongly pin their hopes of happiness, fulfillment and self-worth on someone just as weak, and for the wrong reason. And because their twisted logic happens to be fulfilled by the infectious virus of the opportunistic, they fall ill from the infection of being thusly validated. "I need to be needed," they say, so we can only say in dismay, "Congratulations, dear, you have finally met your match!"

This way, user-magnets are also guilty of addiction, their drug being self-delusion, plus the lies being peddled by the person to whom they've become attached, the significant other fulfilling that void. As in all addictions, people revolving within this self-centered pair's orbit get adversely affected, even get used, in the process. In literary circles, this laughable pairing may also qualify as some sort of poetic justice for the rest of us. Indeed, there is something Shakespearean about the rest of us being able to exclaim, "Truly they deserve each other!"

***

There’s probably a Doc Martens-kisser in all of us, so conventional wisdom, I imagine, would let this crime get off the hook so easily. Between the accused and the co-accused, it's the same law of the jungle operating here: Be nice to people if they are nice to you; who knows, they might be of some use to you at some future date?

That's precisely what's so infuriating about users and the used: They reduce people into useful objects. They make a travesty of loving relationships, turning these into a pathetic state of "transaction," as another writer beautifully said.

***

It's a sad, sad world when it is a world populated by the user and the used. People befriend people because of selfish agenda. There is a kind of "selfish selflessness" in it, as an American poet-laureate sagely puts it. Relationships, even entire organizations, can be infected by this particularly appalling dynamic. A seemingly balanced state of affairs, however, suddenly tips after a friendship turns sour, after somebody wakes up and realizes that, hey, it's all about a "transactionalized" thing, nothing more.

It never occurs to a lot of people that human instinct may be predatory some of the time, but being decent, at least to oneself, is the better part of being human.

Someone said "Never lend a friend money, books, or CDs if you don't want a friendship to end." Whoever said that, he is surely as selfish as he is sagacious. What's a friend for, anyway, if he's not someone you can lean on in time of need? On the other hand, what's a friend for if all he sees in you is an ever-ready cash without the need for a PIN number, a sounding board that echoes only the things you want to hear, and a cheering squad of one nincompoop - all rolled into one?

Look around you and, with a little dose of sensitivity, it wouldn't take an animatronics expert to see the people guilty of such an illicit affair. I Need You, You Need Me is their national anthem, How Am I Supposed to Live Without You? their favorite theme song. For indeed, if one of the two dies out on the other, it would mean instant death. Goodbye, co-dependency. Hello, black hole!

***

How then do we deal with the user and the used more properly? Well, I guess, the best thing we can do is leave them at their game. The last time I checked, the world's constitutions have yet to legislate true friendship, true love, and devotion. Besides, like they always say, it's impossible to make the blind see or wake up someone who's awake, unless you're some kind of messiah.

All kinds of phonies thrive in dishonesty and lies; therefore, only their exposure to the truth would kill them. Thank goodness fawning people and their willing victims have a way of outing themselves without us lifting a finger. They have a certain capacity to self-destruct in due time. We are preternaturally pissed off for the longest time, but we are saved from the messy job of convicting them in a fair trial.

7.5.2004

# posted by Resty Odon @ 11:09 AM