Fans, Freedom, and Frustration

Over on her blog, Kelley Eskridge has a video of a "Bono Moment" in which you see two distinct types of fans interacting with U2's lead singer. Check it out and come back here. Okay, the guy in the t-shirt obviously is carrying on a conversation. he may be being a fan, but he hasn't lost his mind. The female is being...a groupie, I guess. Though the groupies I've met in my time have been a bit more specific about what they wanted and had a better plan on how to get it. In any event, the questions Kelley raises are interesting and relate on so many levels to so many different things. The fan reaction---mindless adulation bordering on deification---looks to me, has always looked to me, like exactly the same kind of nonsense people put into religion. Mindless, utterly uncritical adoration of an image and the set of emotions with which that image is connected in the mind of the adulant. You can see the same thing in politics. To a lesser degree with less public personalities---writers, painters, photographers (I never knew anyone who elevated a photographer to the level of sex god, but I have known people who got off on sleeping with painters, and of course there's a kind of Nabokovian/Bellow/DeLillo-esque subculture of writer groupies...) and other creative types---but actors and musicians seem to get all the dedicated obsessives. I've never had this happen to me. I'm not sure if I'm grateful or resentful---having somebody want to associate themselves with you in a mindless swoon because your work has made them, I don't know, climax maybe is on a certain level appealing. But it's appealing the same way porn is---something most people, if they're at all sane and grounded, kind of grow out of and get over. I know I would not find it very attractive now. When I was twenty-five? You betcha. Bring 'em on. But if I'd had that then I think I'm fairly sure I would have wearied of it very quickly. I long ago realized that sex, to me, involved the other person---emphasis on Person---and the best sex I ever had included the good conversations before and, especially, after. (There is a point, of course, where you realize that sex is a conversation, of a very particular sort, and takes on a whole new dimension, which one-night-stands, no matter how good they might be, just can't provide.) But the real problem with all this is that art is more than just any one thing and the artist is not the art. The two are inextricably linked. Here is a video discussing the question of artist-in-relation-to-muse which I find illuminating. The notion that the talent "arrives" and you act as conduit through which creativity happens is not, as the speaker suggests, a new one, and it's not one I'm particularly in sympathy with---it all happens in my brain, it's definitely mine---but I certainly find her analysis of the psychology of following through intriguing and true. Once the muse is finished with you on a given project, you do not continue to exist as though in the grip of the work. There is a person there that pre-figures the work and who will be there after it's done that has all the needs and wants and sensibilities of a normal human being. To be treated as some kind of transcendence generating machine by people is in some ways disenfranchising. For a writer, if the well from which inspiration and material are drawn is the honesty of human interaction, then the gushing idiot fan robs the writer, for a few minutes at least, of exactly that. But it also sets the artist up to become a prisoner. A prisoner of other people's expectations. Those expectations always play a part in anyone's life, but certain aspects---the most artificial ones---get exaggerated in the instance of fan adoration. Watch Bono shift from one stance to another when he finally acknowledges the female. No, he doesn't stop being Bono, but it's almost as if he says "Oh, it's time to do this sort of thing now" as he first recognizes her presence and then automatically poses for the camera, with this not-quite-disingenuous smirk. Because he also recognizes that, however silly this person is being, what she's feeling right then is her's and to claim it is artificial is wrong. Maybe an artificial set of expectations led her to this point, but now that she's In The Moment, the emotions are real. If he'd ignored her or told her something snarky in an attempt to snap her out of it, all that would have resulted would have been an ugly moment, a bit of cruelty, and a lot of confusion on the fan's part. [more . . . ]

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Police officers have epiphany: time to legalize and regulate street drugs

In the Washington Post, two police officers make the case that it's time to legalize and regulate street drugs. Why? To quit squandering tax dollars, to quit filling prisons with people who don't belong there and to protect neighborhoods and police officers.

Only after years of witnessing the ineffectiveness of drug policies -- and the disproportionate impact the drug war has on young black men -- have we and other police officers begun to question the system . . . Drug manufacturing and distribution is too dangerous to remain in the hands of unregulated criminals. Drug distribution needs to be the combined responsibility of doctors, the government, and a legal and regulated free market. This simple step would quickly eliminate the greatest threat of violence: street-corner drug dealing.

Here's the "money" quote:

Harvard economist Jeffrey Miron estimates that ending the drug war would save $44 billion annually, with taxes bringing in an additional $33 billion.

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Our insane drug war, revisited

Mother Jones has hammered our drug war with undeniable facts . . . well, undeniable unless you are a government official in charge of the "drug war." In fact, as authors Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery advise us, the entire history of the U.S. "war on drugs" is actually a governmental war on truth.

[T]he drug war has never been about facts—about, dare we say, soberly weighing which policies might alleviate suffering, save taxpayers money, rob the cartels of revenue. Instead, we've been stuck in a cycle of prohibition, failure, and counterfactual claims of success. (To wit: Since 1998, the ONDCP has spent $1.4 billion on youth anti-pot ads. It also spent $43 million to study their effectiveness. When the study found that kids who've seen the ads are more likely to smoke pot, the ONDCP buried the evidence, choosing to spend hundreds of millions more on the counterproductive ads.) What would a fact-based drug policy look like? It would put considerably more money into treatment, the method proven to best reduce use. It would likely leave in place the prohibition on "hard" drugs, but make enforcement fair . . . And it would likely decriminalize but tightly regulate marijuana, which study after study shows is less dangerous or addictive than cigarettes or alcohol, has undeniable medicinal properties, and isn't a gateway drug to anything harder than Doritos.

If you want to see a bunch of demoralized people wasting time, park yourself at your local drug court and watch a judge slapping faux sentences on marijuana users and small-time peddlers. Everyone involved knows that the system is a joke--a money sucking time-wasting absurd joke that ruins lives, because every so often someone gets ripped from his or her family, thrown into prison for years. The crime (just to remind you) is that these users wanted to feel pleasure. And sometimes its more absurd: the criminal wanted to escape stress or anxiety and he didn't have a fancy health insurance policy that would allow a doctor to hand him legal pills that do the same thing. And maybe he didn't want to legally rot out his liver with alcohol, which is the other way of getting a similar high. As I've made clear many times, I am not promoting drug use of any kind. I just had serious surgery and I could have loaded up on narcotics that were made available to me, but I didn't because I don't want that or need that. I'm a lucky person in that regard. I am not interested in altering my mind through chemicals. I am trying to convince my daughters that they should strive for clean drug-free living. But I am aware that many people want or need relief from stressful lives (or from their own misfiring brains) or maybe they want the option to simply chill out. I certainly don't want to stand in their way any more than I would tell a patient to not take those pills prescribed by her doctor. It's time to stop spending billions of tax dollars on a drug war that doesn't stop drug use and only ramps up violence, destabilizes governments and steals critical services from taxpayers. The drug war is highly immoral, but we won't be able to fix the situation until we have the courage to have an honest conversation. Related posts:

The most harmful thing about marijuana is jail (reporting on the opinion of a conservative judge).

The Economist's argument to stop the war on drugs. (includes the mind-scrambling statistic that the U.S. spend $40 B each year trying to stop the use of illegal drugs).

Johann Hari's argument that It's time to stop the drug war. (more shocking statistics)

It isn't dangerous to use marijuana. (Really, no more dangerous than Doritos)

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The wide and deep dysfunction of inequality

Is social inequality merely something to be ashamed of, or does it bring ruin upon a society? I just finished reading a book review of The Spirit Level: Why More Equal Societies Almost Always Do Better (2009). This book by Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett was reviewed in the April 30, 2009 edition of Nature (available online only to subscribers). The reviewer was Michael Sargent, a developmental biologist. The Wilkinson/Pickett book explores the social consequences of income inequality.

Using statistics from reputable independent sources, they compare indices of health and social development in 23 of the world's richest nations and in the individual US states. Their striking conclusion is that the societies that do best for their citizens are those with the narrowest income differentials-such as Japan and the Nordic countries and the US state of New Hampshire. The most unequal-the United States as a whole, the United Kingdom and Portugal do worst. Many measures of the quality of life, including life expectancy, are correlated with the degree of economic equality in each country.

Here's the elephant in the political room: there is nothing in the Republican platform to address this damage being inflicted upon society. Quite the opposite: the Republican platform has continually stoke a wild unregulated capitalistic engine that disproportionately rewards some at the expense of others. What kind of damage is caused by this widespread disparity? You name it:

Problems such as mental illness, obesity, cardiovascular disease, unwillingness to engage with education, misuse of illegal and prescription drugs, teenage pregnancy, lack of social mobility and neglect of child welfare increase with greater inequality. Violence, from murder to the bullying of children in school follows the same pattern. These trends are tied up with the issues of trust: the authors chart a profound decline in trust and United States from the 1960s to the present, which matches rising inequality during the long Republican ascendancy.

The authors go so far as to suggest a local hardwired biological mechanism: neuroendocrinological stress. The perception that others are reveling in the good life at one's expense undermines self-esteem and releases the hormone cortisol which causes stress, accompanied by high blood pressure and high blood sugar levels. The cortisol overwhelms hormones, such as oxytocin, that are critical for trust-building. The damaging effect of long-term cortisol has been well-studied and established in other animals. In some experiments, monkeys that were chronically shoved to the bottom of a wide social hierarchy "are more inclined to self medicate with cocaine, if given the opportunity." This article give me yet more evidence that we would be often better off to relinquish much of our judgmentalism and to reconceptualize morality as an aspect of ecology.

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Socialism is Good for your Health

A new study from the Cato Institute finds that Portugal's policy on drug decriminalization is paying health dividends. Portugal decriminalized possession of all drugs on July 1, 2001, including heroin and cocaine. Trafficking in drugs is still a criminal offense. The study clearly indicates rehab is a major component of the success of the decriminalization policy, and that such rehab needs to be available to all. Successful rehab is thus only possible when health is a public service. Without a public health program, most users (who are poor) would be unable to afford rehab (which tends to be relatively expensive), thus removing any possibility of improved public health outcomes - users will remain as users with increasing incidence of STD & death. Unfortunately, the US would rather spend untold sums on the War on Drugs, and on the incarceration of users. Apparently it is still un-American (to some) to invest those sums in public health.

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