“You Can Heal Your Life” was organized by Hay House, the book publisher and event tour producer, which is named for its founder, the California-based self-help sage, Louise Hay. The 83-year-old Hay, who claims to have cured her own cancer some 20 years ago, looked resplendent in a floral-patterned blouse at the New York seminar. And not a day over 82.

Hay House is a financial powerhouse. Although Suze Orman and guru Deepak Chopra may be the only Hay House figures that are household names, in 2008 the company grossed over $100 million in sales of its books, CDs and event tickets.This is but a fraction of the larger self-help industrial complex: Forbes has reported that in 2008, “Americans spent $11 billion on self-improvement books, CDs, seminars, coaching and stressmanagement programs.”

In recent years, Orman has gained a reputation for dispensing “common sense” and sound financial advice. She boasts a longtime affiliation with Hay House, however, and her personal finance kits and CDs are published under its imprint. Her affiliation with Hay House indicates a more tawdry reality since Hay House is a hotbed of hokum and enough pseudoscience to make even the author of The Secret blush.

With the aid of a PowerPoint presentation and lots and lots of hair gel, Gregg Braden bellowed to capture the attention of his groggyeyed public. He opened with a recitation about the end of a “New World Age” and Mayan calendar predictions that in 2012, “something big is going to happen.”

“Global extremes,” Braden screeched, “are coming to a head.” In order to bolster his case, Braden referred repeatedly to his former career as a geologist or, more generally, to his role as a scientist. “Science shows that the world’s energy field is going to realign on December 21, 2012,” Braden repeated.

As Braden tells it, you and I have the ability to positively affect what that “something big” will be. Braden’s claim goes well beyond the comfortable Ghandian dictum of “being the change you want to see in the world.” No: Braden claimed that, “We can change world events through the electromagnetic field.” And how can we change the world’s electromagnetic field? By thinking. Really hard. By thinking hard enough, Braden claimed, we can literally change the course of world events.Taking this argument to its reductio ad absurdum, Braden counseled the audience to “think positively” about “upcoming IAEA negotiations with Iran” in order that the Mullahs may disarm. (At that point, your humble correspondent started thinking really hard about Gregg Braden losing his voice.)

Braden’s message of control over the external world was evidently a hit. He received a boisterous standing ovation, and hundreds lined up to purchase his latest tome, Fractal Time, which argues that “everything from war and peace between nations to the patterns of human relationships mirror the returning cycles of our past.”

At “You Can Heal Your Life,” Braden’s appearance was only the beginning of the flimflam routine. The seminar, after all, was an all-day event: It featured a lineup of four speakers and one lamentable postprandial calisthenics exercise.The $45 to $125 ticket price gave one the opportunity to see speakers Braden, David Hamilton, Cheryl Richardson and Orman. The crowd was so heavily female—at least 80 percent—that Braden asked for a round of applause to be given to the few men in attendance. (This reporter froze in terror as 1,800 women turned toward him and clapped mightily.)

Braden’s message to his audience had been simple: that individuals have control over what is plainly uncontrollable.This proved to be the theme of the day.

Scotsman David Hamilton, whose topic was the “power of mind to influence the body,” told us that “visualizing destroying [one’s] tumors” is an effective means of curing cancer. Furthermore, Hamilton claimed, “thinking about, or imagining yourself exercising,” can be

just as effective a weight-loss technique as actually using an elliptical trainer.

Cheryl
Richardson promised women an escape from domestic drudgery. Enough with
“doing dishes and laundry,” if only they would “live an energy-driven
life,” harness their “soul’s energy,” “piss off one person per day” and
“refuse to take constructive criticism,” their situation would improve.

It
was the ostensibly sensible Orman’s appearance that was the most
striking. Eschewing her TV and print media persona as a no-nonsense,
straight to the point “money lady,” Orman told the crowd to greet each
day with a declaration of “I am great!” and “I am powerful!”Why?
Because, Orman said, “power attracts money.”

This
was more than a little strange considering that Orman is typically seen
on TV with her blond football-helmet hair, tan cheeks and cheery white
grin preaching the gospel of austerity and that CDs, mutual funds and
term life insurance attract money—not self-proclaimed declarations of
ones’ purported “power.” Orman’s was a remarkably charismatic presence,
and she conducted herself like a rock star. She (lamentably) entered
the room accompanied by Bon Jovi’s “It’s My Life.” She then greeted the
crowd with a lusty, “Hello, New York!” Once she launched into a rant
about the importance of performatives—that is, when she claimed that
“words create or destroy” and that the problem is “thinking that you
don’t have power”—I almost wanted to believe it was really that simple.
Despite the fact that Orman was billed as a “finance expert,” she spent
more than half of her allotted time dispensing platitudes about the
importance of “feeling powerful” and avoiding the trap of thinking of
yourself as a victim. “You are not victims!” she hollered.

It’s
a nice message, and one that that people (and in particular women, it
appears) deeply crave: a sensation of control, of agency. While Braden
pedaled the fairy-tale notion that we can positively affect frightening
geopolitical realities, Hamilton claimed that people can cure deadly
diseases with just enough mental effort. And Richardson told putupon
women that they can escape their unhappiness by—of all
things—essentially being more self-centered.The fact that many who
attended the seminar obviously knew each other from previous events
left me wondering about the efficacy of Hay House’s purported healing
powers.

That’s why
Orman’s affiliation with Hay House actually makes perfect sense. The
recession, after all, has been a profoundly traumatic event for
Americans. This isn’t the way things are supposed to be! Homes aren’t
supposed to lose value, 401(k)s aren’t supposed to shrink.

In
the face of this profound and inexplicable dislocation, Orman offers
her audience the illusion of control. Indeed, even if her CNBC show is
not as explicitly preposterous as her appearance at “You Can Heal Your
Life,” it’s still predicated on the same lie. Contrary to what Orman
typically spouts, it seems we are—financially at least—victims.The
recession is a result of forces we had little do with and, indeed, are
hard-pressed to understand.

Orman
understands how to work the recession to her advantage. Along with
bankruptcy lawyers and Wal-Mart executives, the recession has probably
been best to her. Indeed, the personal finance guru has become,
according to a profile earlier this year in The New York Times magazine,
something of a “trusted national advisor” in these troubled times. Her
books are mega bestsellers, she’s a frequent presence on TV gabfests
like Larry King Live and the ratings for her own Saturday night
CNBC show are now higher than those of the Wall Street cheerleaders who
crowd the rest of the cable network’s schedule. Orman is the epitome of
sound, right-thinking Midwestern common sense, according to the Times
and others. She’s just what the spendthrift commoners need. Our
cultural gatekeepers, one suspects, have not spent much time at Hay
House events.

Orman’s CNBC show makes for compelling
viewing. She has a natural charisma, a quick wit and an easy rapport
with the financially troubled souls who call her for advice. She often
bestows the appellation of “girlfriend” on her female callers. When
people at “You Can Heal You Life” asked her questions, she retained the
habit (referring to the male callers as “boyfriend” is a bit more
linguistically awkward for the out lesbian, but just as seemingly
genuine). Furthermore, unlike Judge Judy or Dr. Phil—two figures who
cloak themselves and their respective programs in righteousness but
actually publicly exploit and humiliate the downtrodden—Orman appears
genuinely to care about her callers and readers. “You Can Heal Your
Life” was just one of the many public appearances Orman makes in any
given year. She dispenses financial advice (and, presumably, Hay House
nostrums) in packed halls and convention centers across the world. BusinessWeek has
reported that she is the top motivational speaker in the country, and
in the past few years, she has appeared at dozens of events across the
United States and beyond. (She even appeared in Xujiahu, China, last
year, leading many to wonder how one would say, “You should roll your
standard IRA into a Roth IRA as soon as possible,” in Mandarin.) The
public speaking circuit, it seems, is a veritable gravy train for Orman
and her Hay House ilk. And so it goes.The Hay House website lists
scores of upcoming events: seminars in Chicago, Philadelphia, Orlando
and New York, again.

All of this, of course, leaves me wondering about
the efficacy of the Hay House method. One would think that, at a
certain point, one would no longer need to heal one’s life. But many of
the women at “You Can Heal Your Life” have attended Hay House seminars
for years. Maybe that’s to be expected. At the end of Cheryl
Richardson’s speech, which was ostensibly devoted to describing how to
“heal your life,” she shouted, “See you next time!”

I’m an East Coast refugee myself, having just finished up four years of college here in Portland. I’ve been indoctrinated into its style and, more importantly, its most popular coffee roaster and chain of cafés, Stumptown. Since owner and self-styled coffee guru Duane Sorenson opened his first Portland roastery in 1999, he has overseen a massive expansion throughout the hipper zips of the Pacific Northwest. Positioning his business as a kind of anti-corporate coffee purveyor—one concerned with the environment, trade practices and preserving local character—Sorenson now counts five Portland Stumptown cafés and two Seattle locations in his portfolio. Alas, he is now set to take New York City: Sorenson’s Brooklyn roastery should be open soon as well as his first local café, which is located in the rockstar-ready Ace Hotel, located on West 29th Street between Broadway and Fifth Avenue.

Portland has already bought into the brand: It’s hard to walk (or, ahem, bike) a block in the trendier districts of this city without coming across a café with a banner across the front that reads we proudly serve stumptown coffee. It’s already begun in NYC. One can find the famed beans at over a dozen coffee shops in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens, including The John Dory, Momofuku Milk Bar, Frankies Spuntino and Marlow & Sons. We’ve even seen a Stumptown tiramisu served for dessert at a trendy Cobble Hill restaurant.

Stumptown shouldn’t be mistaken for the bohemian paradise that its owner and his legions of promoters and sycophants would have you believe. Like Starbucks, the company it professes to abhor, Stumptown provides a ready-made, generic bohemianism, one where people know exactly what to expect. Stumptown’s current strategy is essentially a retread of Starbucks’ corporate model from more than a decade ago.

Think about it: A Pacific Northwest coffee company presents itself as a caffeinated proselytizer to the masses, awakening people to coffee that is purportedly delicious, ethical and hip. Of course, in the past few years, what with its ubiquity in airports and suburban strip-malls (complete with drive-thrus!) Starbucks has lost its edge. Enter Stumptown.

But not everyone is convinced. East Village stalwart Ninth Street Espresso has remained on the vanguard of coffee culture in NYC (other than the original location off Avenue C, they have a shop on Tompkins Square and in the Chelsea Market) and used to serve Stumptown. “We were the feather in the cap for [Sorenson] when he got in New York,” says owner Ken Nye. “We were his first prominent client.” The relationship went sour a little less than a year after their initial partnership. Nye is prudent when discussing the reasons for no longer hocking Sorenson’s beans, but he did say that they stopped serving it because “we want to be more hands-on and more involved in selecting coffees and blends.”

Ninth Street’s imprimatur was important to NYC’s coffee connoisseurs, since Sorenson’s coffee brand is selling something far more costly, transcendent—and insidious—than mere cups of joe: Stumptown sells inclusion and identification with a culturally elite segment of society. (Term it, perhaps, the counter-cultural elite.) Add to that the fact that it’s doing this by promoting an allegedly virtuous form of consumption known as fair trade.  

Let me back up for a bit and explain a little about the milieu from which Stumptown arose. If you’ve learned most of what you know about Portland from reading the New York Times, you may be surprised to learn that—despite the fact that the town is some 80 percent Caucasian—it’s also extremely culturally divided. The majority of the city is made up of solidly working- or middle-class folks who live in tidy three-bedroom homes, work 9 to 5, drive cars or small pickup trucks. Many even wear non-ironic cowboy hats. (Hey, this is the West.)

But then there’s that small ring through the inner southeastern quadrant that covers maybe 15 percent of the city. This is the part of Portland that the Times can’t shut up about. While most of Portland may be characterized by mustachioed men blasting Toby Keith (he’s a country singer, New Yorkers) out of their SUVs, within Inner Southeast, one is more likely to see cyclists wearing T-shirts that bray one less suv. In Inner Southeast, the flags are Tibetan, the cowboy hats are decidedly ironic and the coffee is definitely, without question, Stumptown. Perhaps no product has come to embody the Inner Southeast Portland attitude—and its complementary elitism—than these precious coffee beans.

Walk into the original Stumptown café on Division Street in Southeast Portland, and you may think you’re witnessing a TV-show parody. The cement floor. The chalkboard boasting the handwritten list of items available. The soft tones of Portland-based wuss rock seeping through the speakers. On a recent spring afternoon, the clientele was positively pitch-perfect as well: A row of skinny young men with thick, ironic glasses and tight jeans sat listening to their iPods and typing into their Macbooks, while three dreadlocked white girls sipped cappuccinos. A few tortured artists clad in all black smoked outside. It was a nearly convincing slice of intellectually elite bohemian life—although it did bear an eerie aura of familiarity. Only then did I realize the obvious: all five Portland Stumptown locations are identical. Even the handwritten blackboard menu is in exactly the same handwriting in each café!

I’m not so naive; I understand the attitude is simply a marketing strategy. To visit Stumptown—like Starbucks—is not to take risks. You don’t need to attempt something different, something edgy, something alive. It is merely a soul-deadening, corporate version of what “hip” should look like to those in Southeast Portland. When even the allegedly “handwritten” sign turns out to be mass-produced, any hope of authenticity, of vitality, is lost.

Perhaps Stumptown’s shrewdest move, however, is to market consumption of its products as a form of virtue. Like the marketing arm of any remotely intelligent corporation aiming at the wallets of lefty twenty and thirty-somethings, Stumptown knows the buzzwords to hit: “sustainable,” “local” and “fair trade” being three of the most important. When I spoke with a manager at a well-known Portland coffee shop affiliated with Stumptown (who spoke to me under condition of anonymity), he informed me that, as of last month, the supposedly “local” and “sustainable” Stumptown was still flying its beans to its New York roastery via Portland.

We spoke with Matt Lounsbury, director of operations for Stumptown in Portland, and he confirmed that the Red Hook roastery—which will be home base for distribution and training in New York—is set to open “any day now.” In the meantime, for those whom “carbon footprint” is not simply a punch line may also be disconcerted to learn that that beans flown from Africa are crossing North America twice.

But it’s the “fair trade” label that may be the most problematic. Fair trade is used with near-religious fervor in Stumptown literature. The recent hagiography in New York magazine, which referred to Sorenson as “the Messiah,” noted that, “all would-be vendors [of Stumptown coffee] attend mandatory barista training as well as a three-hour class that includes a PowerPoint presentation and a video about El Injerto, one of the Guatamalan coffee farms Stumptown works with.” Moreover, its website and official literature make frequent reference to its “direct trade” program, a grade above fair trade that ensures importers pay good wages to farmers. The message: To buy from Stumptown is to practice a benevolent form of capitalism.

Tragically, fair trade coffee practices distort the laws of supply and demand, thereby leaving a country like, say, Guatemala, with far more coffee growers than it needs. A story published in the Christian Science Monitor last year noted that fair trade buyers such as Stumptown, “artificially lure [farmers] away from perusing better-paying jobs that would enrich the diversity of a developing country’s economy.” Thanks to fair trade buying practices, poor rural countries see “more land destruction [and] more dependency on a single cash crop. It’s a subsidy that undercuts the very sustainability fair traders want to promote.” That is to say, fair trade practices like Stumptown’s pervert the natural functioning of agricultural markets in poor countries. Fair trade causes untold harm by giving incentives for growing coffee beans for Western consumption at the expense of growing, say, a local staple food. Stumptown’s over-caffeinated sense of self-righteousness is particularly insidious in this case: Rwanda needs food, not to export coffee to the United States.

Let’s not forget the questionable—if not outright noxious—notion that consuming can ever be a truly noble activity. Indeed, it is particularly damaging that would-be activists here in Portland believe that they can satisfy their craving for improving the world by simply satisfying their craving for a latte. A more bankrupt—and in the case of Stumptown, a more wrong-headedly self-righteous—form of “activism” would be hard to imagine. By cloaking his breakneck expansion plans in the language of altruism, Sorenson takes advantage of the genuinely well-meaning people who feel that they are making a positive difference by patronizing his establishments.

OK, OK, that all may be true, but you love coffee. And Stumptown is supposedly the best, right?

According to New York, “coffee can be objectively measured, to a point.” Indeed, we are informed that there exists a “flavor profile,” which rates coffees on a hundred-point scale of quality. (Evidently, an organization called the Cup of Excellence is the arbiter of these things.) Funny thing about that article, though: It doesn’t actually reveal where Stumptown’s blends fall on that scale. A little digging doesn’t tell us much, either. One of the company’s quality control officers recently informed me that the results are used, “for the most part, internally.” I can’t help but suspect that this lack of forthrightness merely confirms what my tongue has been telling me for years: the coffee just ain’t that tasty.

Take Stumptown’s signature blend and top-selling coffee, the Hair Bender. While Stumptown’s literature likes to boast about its transparency and openness in its cultivation and roasting—to the point of identifying the obscure Rwandan villages in which certain beans are harvested—the customer has no idea what exactly is in the Hair Bender. Like Big Mac sauce, Hair Bender is a secretive mix.

Avoiding details about “quality” or “origin,” Stumptown’s literature simply tells us that Hair Bender features “coffee components from the three major growing regions of Latin America, East Africa and the Pacific Rim.” Thanks! Now, that’ll be just $12 a pound!

The coffee’s cachet can obviously work its magic. Roots Café opened in December in Park Slope, serving Stumptown since its genesis. Owner Jamey Hamm says that they wouldn’t have been such a success without these magic beans.

“Basically I did zero advertising for my place, and people just follow Stumptown just ‘cuz,” explains Hamm. “The coffee itself does its own advertising. It’s pretty phenomenal.”

That’s the sort of success every entrepreneur dreams of but few achieve, so it makes sense that, despite the counter-cultural elite marketing mind games, Hamm goes on to praise the brand: “They are really super cool. Duane swings by and hangs out all the time.”

But we’ve seen how this plays out before, and we can either wait to see if Stumptown will transform coffee consumption once Sorenson’s messianic message takes root, or we can let the bean brawl begin. In a hilarious bit of historical deafness and pomposity, the Stumptown website claims that its 1999 opening “started a coffee revolution.” If that is the case, I implore New Yorkers, then, to commence a
coffee restoration.

Additional reporting by Sarah Stern