Ask Dr. Panic?ro;”or die happy.

Financially Fearless by 40: Practical Advice for the Smart, Successful, and Financially Clueless By Jason Anthony Plume, 219 pages, $14.00 Most of us can pinpoint the exact moment we first began to lose touch with our parents. It was that terrible flash of paranoid recognition in which we realized that our mothers or fathers had read a book somewhere about how to communicate with us. Some terrible pamphlet with a title like "Groove On: Speaking to Your Child in His Language" has made its way into their possession; you've caught them using the term "bong hit," and there's this weird vegetative look in their eyes, like the pod-copies in Invasion of the Body Snatchers.

In that moment, they're lost to you forever. Because when parents try to talk down to you, their children, they've admitted that they don't understand the dynamic that's been obvious to you all along. They're the ones whose lives are filled with stress and misery and fear and decay. It's your father, not you, who's gone bald, and has furry tits, a wife he despises, and a 40-year-old mistress with anger lines. He should be getting a lecture from you on how to live, not giving you one.

Which brings me to Financially Fearless by 40: Practical Advice for the Smart, Successful, and Financially Clueless, a new how-to personal financial planning book by one Jason Anthony. Anthony, in his day job, is a film executive, a senior vice president of creative affairs at Laura Ziskin Productions. In that capacity he helped bring into the world such cultural treasures as Pretty Woman. Now, in his spare time, he has given us financially clueless thirtysomethings a book that teaches us to conquer our fear of money and reach 40 in possession of a fat bank account and a glowing character endorsement from the credit industry. Less than five pages into the book, you will want to tear his fucking head off.

Mere incompetence is hardly the only explanation for the dire financial straits of a lot of people my age. Nor are fear of money, laziness, and a poor attitude necessarily the primary culprits. No, a lot of people my age avoid thinking about money as much as possible for the simple reason that they sincerely believe that that's exactly what's wrong with this country?that people think about money too much, that the national obsession with money and things and that great nest egg in the sky has corrupted our values and made life vapid, soulless, and run up and down with fears.

We suspect profound inequities in the system and see in the distribution of wealth a hilarious parody of meritocracy. We notice that Tony Robbins has $100 million. And we're hesitant to confer legitimacy on a predatory credit industry that screws you for life for a mistake in your twenties, that would block your car or health insurance on the basis of a fifteen-year-old credit-card balance, that would make their approval a prerequisite for getting a lease, having a telephone, getting a job?shit, for living at all. We want to kill these people, not work with them.

This is the wrong way to think, according to Anthony. Time and again, he stresses the emotional importance of money, of being "in touch" with our feelings about money (in his attempts to reach out to the civilian reader, Anthony wavers between the Denis Leary and Leo Buscaglia poles of "hip" colloquial language). In one crucial passage, he talks about the difference between successful and failed marriages:

"I see differences emerging between mutually satisfying marriages and troubled ones. Those in content relationships treat money as an integral part of the marriage and use it to foster intimacy, trust, and growth. Those suffering constant strife, however, adopt the opposite stance."

At another point, Anthony elaborates: It's not that people in bad marriages are broke, it's that they have a bad attitude toward money. Note the sense of humor:

"Clearly, lack of money isn't the real culprit. (Otherwise, a lot more people from Bangladesh to Brazil would be calling 1-800-DIVORCE.)"

Har, har. The Anthony funny bone, incidentally, is on painful display throughout the book. Amusing Anthony rhetorical devices include the cultural reference ("Destructive financial habits and patterns don't magically disappear like a Marc Jacobs sweater in Winona's fitting room"), Will Rogers-like folksiness ("God has other things on his mind than thinking about ways to wreck your mutual fund"), and yet more cultural references ("Sure, we can now concede that St. Elmo's Fire wasn't the pinnacle of 80's cinema we once thought"). All of this has the same effect that those talks our parents gave us once had: It warns us that someone without much people sense is trying to talk us into accepting the shitty values of his shitty world.

Much of the Anthony book turns out to be about investing and playing the market, although he does take time out for a chapter about children entitled, "Your $249,180 bundle of joy." In between, he mixes in a lot of ring-around-the-collar horror stories of thirtysomething financial failures, as well as the occasional effort at finger wagging, as when he exhorts us to "let go of the excuses and take responsibility."

What he fails to understand?what all people like him fail to understand?is that the key to reaching people like us isn't referencing Brat Pack movies or making digs at Winona Ryder. It's in realizing that we're tired of being told to take responsibility, and that in fact we want people like him to take responsibility: responsibility for keeping jobs in the country, for controlling the unchecked flow of money, for reducing the commercialism in our lives. If the answer is being more like them, we don't want to know the question.