A Changed Man? No Such Animal

By Mark Leyner

The apparent transformation of New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani from ruthless master of metropolitan machtpolitik into compassionate hybrid of Hamlet, the Duke of Windsor and Graham Greene raises a fascinating question. Can a person really, and I mean fundamentally, change?

It's a pet theory of mine that women better accommodate change than men do because of the biological vicissitudes that mark their lives--ovulation, menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, menopause. By contrast, the typical man, usually around adolescence, invents a persona for himself. He establishes a personal brand identity and then struggles to maintain it, with mind-numbing intransigence, amid the fluctuations of the world around him.

As a male, I'm a staunch devotee of stasis. I don't believe in epiphanies, personal growth, mid-life crises or deathbed conversions. Millions of years of Darwinian evolution have led to who I am, in addition to everything my parents did to mold me--the Dave Brubeck albums, the fondue, the deification of Danny Kaye, car-pooling me every Wednesday to chemin de fer lessons. And I would consider it an act of ingratitude and betrayal to become an entirely different person. So I try to deal with setbacks and crises in my life the way I always have--by locking myself in my room, setting small fires and blasting music into my headphones at jackhammer levels.

I do believe in brain damage though. Take Phineas Gage, for example. On the morning of Sept. 13, 1848, Gage, a construction foreman for the Rutland & Burlington Railroad, was preparing a powder charge for blasting rock when it accidentally exploded, sending a 3-ft. 7-in., 13-lb. iron tamping bar straight through his skull. Gage fully recovered and lived for 12 more years, but his personality changed. He became an extravagant, antisocial, foulmouthed, bad-mannered liar. And apparently he'd been a pretty nice guy before the accident.

This I buy. Gage, by dint of significant trauma to his frontal lobes, did actually become a different person. But short of being shish-kebabbed on a tamping iron, I'm skeptical.

Psychiatry, penology and religion are all, to varying degrees, predicated on the belief that people have the capacity for fundamental change, whether through selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors, rehabilitation or redemption. But we as a culture seem to have an equally vested interest in seeing that our public figures remain the same. Bill Gates represents the prerogative of wealth. Mark McGwire, physical power. Stephen Hawking, pure, disembodied genius. We need a stable iconic currency. What if Dick Clark, the poster child for immutability, suddenly began to degenerate like the portrait of Dorian Gray? We'd be appalled. And none of us really wants our President, Bill Clinton, to change even one iota. No one wants to see him toiling monastically on his memoirs or with a wrench in his hand, building low-income housing for Habitat for Humanity. We expect and desire him, once he's thrown off the trammels of the presidency, to become the great Casanova (at least the great Bubbanova) of the Western world (at least the West Coast), noshing on marzipan as he steeps with a bevy of hot-tub hootchies in his Malibu compound.

Now I'm not questioning the sincerity of people like Rudy who approach crisis as an opportunity for personal growth. But this whole notion that adversity, and especially the specter of fatal illness, should turn you into a better, kinder person is not only erroneous, but it also creates burdensome expectations for people who already have enough trouble. I know a lot of men who've had prostate cancer, and they're the same self-involved, officious, spiteful curs they were before they had prostate cancer. And bully for them. Having cancer is bad enough--you don't have to turn yourself into St. Francis of Assisi or Forrest Gump on top of it all.

In the event that you've never had a brush with death or even an intimation of mortality, here's a quick exercise to determine whether such an experience would change you as a person: In the time it takes you to read this sentence (about seven seconds), you are that much closer to your own inevitable death. Really feel like flouting the Grim Reaper? Reread the sentence (hey, it's your funeral). You've squandered almost 15 precious seconds of your life, and there's absolutely nothing you can do to get that time back.

O.K., now that I've afforded you a slight pang of mortality, do you feel any different as a person? More serene? Have you reordered your priorities? Are you more focused or centered?

I didn't think so.