Rudy Giuliani: a.k.a., America's Mayor

WHY DOES MY head begin to ache as though a cueball is caroming from ear to ear when I open up my Sunday paper and see a full-page ad hustling the GET MOTIVATED crowd? For starters, there's Rudy Giuliani waving to me from the top of the page, immodestly identified as "America's Mayor". As history will show, he's got personal baggage weighing down both shoulders and never can escape his illogical way of running a presidential campaign by hanging out in Florida while everybody else was campaigning. How creative can an ad writer be?

America's Mayor will be in the cavalry that will appear in Akron on May 12 to motivate the audience on a wide range of feel-good topics that, among other things, will tell me how to get "focused". I've often wondered about what that means, particularly when the mere act of living requires one to act on several tasks at a time while the phone is ringing.

America's Mayor will be in good company. Zig Ziglar will be back to tell us "how to stay motivated" after we've been motivated. Another motivational veteran, Dr. Robert Schuller, will be there to tell us that "tough times never last but tough people do", which, of course, sounds better than it really is. And for sports fans, Eric Mangini, the Browns Coach, will be a seminar celebrity. Now that he has lost last year's first and second-string quarterbacks, his comments on toughing-it-out may be the most interesting of all.

The fee for attending the all day rush of speakers costs no more than $4.95. They will also throw in something called a Success Library, free, a $495 value, it says here. There are more incentives: $10,000 in prizes and a Disney World vacation. And who can deny the priceless benefits of meeting America's Mayor?

I don't know how they can lavish all of this profound oratory on the crowd for only $4.95. But cynic that I am about these positive-thinking extravaganzas, I'm not motivated to find out. No matter. I'm sure I'll hear about this soon enough.