Interesting to consider that the Christian Right may begin to use its powers for good–by lobbying President Bush not just for wicked ends like prayer in the schools, but for causes that someone on the port side of the boat can get behind. The New York Times reports today about an exhibit at a Christian rock festival down in Texas designed to put pressure on the Powers That Be to make more demands on North Korea when it comes to human rights. Of course, there are some sorta questionable motives behind such efforts and provocations; one wonders if Texas Christians would be as riled if it were Buddhists or Jews or even Catholics that were suffering under the yoke of oppression under Kim Il Sung. (We doubt whether it’s just evangelical protestant Christians, though they do insist on singling themselves out in so many ways.) And are we the only ones who think conservative Christians seem to take a little too much visceral pleasure in images of genocide, suicide, and homicide–a sort of parallel to the perennial best-selling images of late-term abortion? (Check that last link–not for the squeamish, but read the URLs before and after the jumps.) Anyway, it may be a rare opportunity for left and right to agree on a cause for social justice–though the moment passes, probably, as soon as the discussion reaches the usual fork in the road to diplomacy–blockade or invasion? Carrot or stick?
Splitting the difference is getting to be such a rare art that we hardly recognize it anymore. Following on Jack Shafer’s riff about overplayed media coverage on methamphetamine, John Tiernay today takes a related but slightly more humane tack in the opinion pages of the Times. Rather than argue the Malthusian line that there is no real epidemic until there are countable toe-tags, Tiernay makes the perfectly reasonable argument that hyping the case also tends to artificially inflate the plan. The Drug War, he says, has become a terrible addiction in itself among law makers and enforcers. Of course, this is dangerous, libertarian territory, sidling up to an open flirtation with a policy of legalizing all these drugs that, after all, pale in comparison as public health meance to tobacco, and the whitest whale of all, alcohol. We can all agree that humans seem to require the basic right to medicate, intoxicate, and stupefy as life dictates. But the moment you attempt the moral math to try to impugn some drugs and redeem others, let’s say Kat is bad, but caffeine is fine–you’ve entered an impossible biomedical ring-toss.
Interesting, too, then to consider this interesting piece about the thriving afterlife of Jerry Garcia, who robbed the world of his fifty-three-year-old-self largely by regular and repeated use of the needle. We happened this morning to be reading Elsa Wald’s highly informative profile of Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid in this week’s New Yorker (great issue, by the way–wish all double issues were this relentlessly hard to put down), and learned that Reid’s father was a lifelong alcoholic, who after he gave up the bottle, shortly thereafter took a shotgun to his own head. Reid says,”We always joke that Dad sobered up and killed himself.” It is an open question as to which way would have been the better, less painful route to self-destruction.
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