Last night, I was noticing Michael Savage‘s observations about things, match my own, most closely when he says stuff that “everybody knows” is crazy.
Last night it was pot. Now, if I go only by what I’ve been hearing, just the opinions people have about things that they want to put out there whether they can explain ’em or not — we have to legalize this stuff pronto. It is not, not, not, not, not, repeat not, a “gateway drug.” It’s cheap, it’s good for you, it makes wonderful rope and sweaters, and besides if we legalize it we can tax it; that’ll “pay off the deficit overnight,” they tell me. Besides, “contrary to popular belief,” smoking pot increases your powers of observation and concentration. You’d want your brain surgeon to smoke pot.
Well for a melodious, cheerful dinner conversation, you really shouldn’t get Dr. Michael Alan Weiner going about marijuana. This is the point where, I’m going to presume, the guests start to regret allowing the conversation to drift in that general direction, for one quickly gathers the impression the good doctor can barely contain himself. Not only is pot a gateway drug, he says, but it’s a deadly one, one that destroys the consumer’s ability to think. Yes, this is what I’d been noticing. Pay off the deficit overnight, for example. They don’t mean this year’s budget deficit, at the state or federal level; they’re talking about the trillions and trillions owed by our federal government, more properly called the public debt. A little bit of third-grade math is devastating to that argument, especially when you start applying it to interest. Let’s see…ten trillion dollars “overnight” is eight hundred thirty-three billion dollars an hour, which comes to just shy of fourteen billion dollars a minute in tax receipts on legalized, taxable marijuana.
Er, uh, yeah, says the stoner. I was speaking, y’know, whatchamacallzit, metaphorically. Yeah. Yeah sure you were, pothead. You were talking out your butt. You weren’t speaking any way except cheerleading. You were trolling for recruits.
Now I don’t really have a dog in this hunt about legalizing marijuana one way or another, but I really can’t stand looking at an issue too closely when it’s part of something much bigger, which is why we haven’t been talking about pot too much in these pages. It’s not just about smoking pot. There’s a whole culture built around this, and that’s what Savage was going after last night. Here’s his argument: Because of the year we’re in, the potheads are coming into power right now. Seems, to me, this has been going on since about ’93, when Clinton was sworn in. But it’s been getting worse. One way or another the stoners are running the show. We have this window of ages we like to see in our leaders; the ones who make the actual decisions; the baby boomers who latched on, generationally, to the pothead culture, are there right now. So pretty much every office that counts for something — in the private sector as well as in government — is filled by a pothead.
Savage’s condemnation of the plant is even harsher than mine. As I understand it, he seems to believe in once-a-pothead-always-a-pothead…as if, once you inhale in your early twenties, in your late fifties youre still making bonehead decisions. Not sure if I’d go that far. But there certainly is a lag time, and a pronounced tendency to reject humility. I mean sincere, substantial humility. The tendency I see is to say “That must be an okay thing to do, for I just did it.” And it does seem persistent across time: That other guy did something, that’s awful, terrible, horrible, bad. I did something, even something that is against the law…well hey man, it’s all relative.
Savage went on to offer two examples of potheads running the show: Shutting down Guantanamo, or at least ceasing & desisting from the “torture” conducted within, and sending San Francisco’s police department to some kind of sensitivity training. I wish he went on much further than that, and maybe he did but my commute came to an end. I know I could add to a list like that all day long.
But I’m much more into definitions than examples, here. I’m junior to the baby boomers by some twelve to twenty years or so, which means I’ve been struggling awkwardly in their impressive wake all my life and will be continuing to do so until the day I drop dead. I consider myself well-qualified to speak on this. And Savage is right — the smoke-holers are running the show. Stoners hire other stoners. Because it’s them against the world, man. So this is becoming an important issue, one that’s affecting us all even in ways we don’t understand immediately when it isn’t pointed out.
It has a lot to do with something called “love”; that’s why you have to immediately stop torturing terrorists, and that of course means you have to stop doing anything that anybody, anywhere, no matter how recklessly, might label “torture.” Pretty much just feed ’em three times a day, fluff up their pillows, find out what else they want from you, go get it, and wait for them to talk. Police shouldn’t hurt criminals, and probably shouldn’t even arrest them for anything either. Countries shouldn’t go to war, no matter the reason. Make-love-not-war.
Conversely with that, whatever the potheads mean by “love,” it doesn’t have much to do with compatibility, because they seem to be insisting that whatever confrontation might possibly happen, does happen. A woman who is madly in love with her man, and none other, is deeply offensive to them. That could be because the feminist movement came to maturity at the same time as the pothead movement. If you really want to piss off a pothead, make a suggestion, in theory or in practice, that a woman who really loves her man will go get him a cold beer out of the fridge. (I’m entirely unsure how they’re going to react if she runs into the bedroom and gets him a jay.) But everything is like that; they don’t want people, in general, getting along with other people. Not across class lines, anyway. The real contradiction here, is that this is precisely what they say they’re working tirelessly to bring about, but I’ve noticed for years now when it’s right in front of their faces they don’t see it that way, and in fact recoil from it. Everyone has to be fighting something — man. Immigrants are constantly “oppressed” by bigoted “xenophobes” who in fact are insisting on nothing more than that the law be followed. Blacks are always oppressed by whites, women are always oppressed by men, citizens are always oppressed by the police and children are always oppressed by their parents. Everyone should constantly be throwing off shackles, storming some fortress or rampart, overthrowing someone, showing ’em what’s-what.
There are no consequences for anything. That’s probably the biggest, most important item, right there. No decision is ever made out of a sense of “if-this-then-that”; there are no domino effects, there is no cause-and-effect. Decisions are made, instead, on value-systems and overly-simplistic “should”s. If you think we’ll be unable to prevent an attack after we stop “torturing” terrorists, well, you’re just wrong. This argument won’t be taken anywhere, logically, mind you. It’ll simply be ended. It’ll be answered with mocking, “The Experts Say,” some quotes from The Daily Show, maybe a recycled line from Nice Guy Eddie in Reservoir Dogs…and that’s about it. If you bring up some solid evidence of your own, such as mentioning Kalid Sheikh Mohammed or Abdul Hakim Murad, well, you’re just a mean unreasonable poopy-head. Trust me on this. I’ve been there.
So it really ends up being a child’s fantasy land, when you get down to it. I don’t mean a small child’s fantasy; I’m talking a teenager, of the slothy kind, the kind that doesn’t roll out of bed or do the dishes or cut the grass without a whole lot of nagging. Every little thing that would require some foresight or manual labor brings forth a torrent of excuses. There are lots of positive thoughts about how we all need to love each other and get along with each other — right up until positive thoughts about other people determine something decisive must be done, something that requires effort. Then we don’t need to think such positive thoughts about each other anymore. Like, for example, very wealthy people are just as much entitled to keep their money as the rest of us, and it’s probably beneficial to allow them to do so, because the rest of us are in a symbiotic relationship with them…that would be a positive, compassionate thought, one that is compatible with the continuing harmonious working of an evolved, civilized society. But you’ll never see the potheads support that one, because that’s just a bit too much civilization and “love” for them to choke down at all at once. Far better to drone onward about being oppressed, man, by that evil corporate America, man.
Every little call to take garbage out, is met with some plea for moral relativism, cry for revolution, or both of those. I mean literal garbage, such as everyday household chores, as well as figurative garbage, like making sure Big Bad Bart catches that midnight train outta here and doncha dare come back. Hippies hate cowboys, I’m sure you’ve figured out by now, and they pull no punches that the thing they hate the most about cowboys, is the white hat, the black hat and the moral clarity. They hate the way this leads to realizations, fifteen minutes before closing-credits, that a real confrontation has to take place…for consequences loom over the “town,” if it does not. The stoner hippie isn’t down with that. He philosophizes his way out of every little thing that needs doing, and all without putting down the doobie or moving his ass off that well-worn mattress.
Hippies and those oh-so-hated cowboys are close cousins, in a way. They’re both all about confrontation. But the cowboy uses bullets instead of rhetoric and the hippy doesn’t like that. The dirtiest secret of all lies within that special hatred for bullets. It isn’t the property damage, or the death, or the carnage, or the danger to the bystanders the hippy hates when hot lead is flying around the saloon. It is the finality of the solution. No more negotiations; they never began. An elegant Obama/Cronkite lilt to the voice doesn’t count for shit. Settlements to disputes are not proposed, only implemented. Nothing is up for appeal.
In other words, decisions actually get made. Situations get changed. That is what cannot be tolerated on Planet Pothead. Ain’t that a kicker? The culture began for the express purpose of upsetting the status quo on a grand, cosmic scale; once it got some momentum built up, it became all about preserving status quos, even within microscopic, practically insignificant settings. Every situational change is a verbal agreement, which is just meaningless jibber-jabber, since every agreement has a loophole.
So I think Savage has a point here, and it’s a little bit of a frightening one when you think about it. Potheads are making the decisions now, and that means all decisions are cosmetic in nature, accountability never figures into it, consequences aren’t to be reckoned with. Do we have a society that can withstand that for long? Are our most influential and powerful positions-of-trust grappling with decisions on a daily-basis, decisions that can be made well, or at least harmlessly, by people who don’t believe actions have consequences? People that are only there to enforce contrarian social codes, love without accompanying feelings of symbiosis, and surreal & tie-died systems of quasi-moral babbling?
Can our culture stand for very long, when there is no human passion worth satisfying except lusting for the perverse, and the next case-of-the-munchies? With every single office that really matters, turned into a “work-free-drug-place”?
There’s the big question.
I guess we’ll be finding out the answer pretty soon, now.
I do not cite this mind-numbing snoozefest as a movie to start some kind of list. Believe me, if I did so, I would never have time to fill it out properly. I cite Emmett, because I choose to cite the archetype. Emmett is it. A close second after Emmett is that roly-poly guy in “
…when people talk about it, the conversation always turns to the food.
And man, I’m just 
When kids learn all about Phase Two before they learn about Phase One, the problem that comes up is that they don’t learn how to recognize this boundary. To the lazy, weak mind, this doesn’t seem to be what’s happening — it’s what the kid wears, after all. Shouldn’t my precious darling be able to wear what she likes? But in the mind of a kid, especially a kid at the center of a controversy like this one, boundaries don’t figure into it. They can’t. Nobody’s really backed the brat into the corner in which she’s forced to learn about them.