Words&Dirt

“Bennett had headed up the National Endowment for the Humanities and then the Department of Education under Reagan.  He had run both agencies as a proud moral scold.  Which isn’t to say he was a prude.  Bennett was an obese man, a chain-smoker, and, the country would learn years later, he had a pretty serious jones for video poker.  But those weren’t culture war issues.  Bennett was also a fierce drug warrior and a favorite of Christian Coalition types.  After leaving office, he’d basically appoint himself the country’s guardian of virtue.

Bennett’s main contribution to the drug war was to infuse it with morality.  ‘The simple fact is that drug use is wrong,’ he wrote in a 1990 essay for Reader’s Digest.  ‘And in the end, the moral argument is the most compelling argument.’  That was the lingering irony of Bennett’s reign in the Office of National Drug Control Policy (ONDCP).  The man who often struggled to control his own indulgences was ready to unleash a full federal arsenal of force on people whose indulgences he personally found immoral.  Of course, Bennett’s indulgences were legal.  But when pressed on the morality question––Why is marijuana immoral, but alcohol and nicotine aren’t?––the best he and his surrogates could do was point to the fact that pot was illegal.  When confronted with the legalization question, Bennett would return to the argument that pot was immoral.  The transparently circular bit of argumentation––it’s immoral because it’s illegal, and it’s illegal because it’s immoral––would have been amusing if not for the fact that it had some very real consequences, up to and including ruining and ending lives.”

––Rise of the Warrior Cop: The Militarization of America’s Police Forces, by Radley Balko, pg. 164

“Indeed.  But what is sane?  Especially here in ‘our own country’––in this doomstruck era of Nixon.  We are all wired into a survival trip now.  No more of the speed that fueled the Sixties.  Uppers are going out of style.  This was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary’s trip.  He crashed around America selling ‘consciousness expansion’ without ever giving a thought to the grim meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all the people who took him seriously.  After West Point and the Priesthood, LSD must have seemed entirely logical to him…but there is not much satisfaction in knowing that he blew it very badly for himself, because he took too many others down with him.

Not that they didn’t deserve it: No doubt they all Got What Was Coming To Them.  All those pathetically eager acid freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three bucks a hit.  But their loss and failure is ours, too.  What Leary took down with him was the central illusion of a whole life-style that he helped to create…a generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers, who never understood the essential old-mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture: the desperate assumption that somebody––or at least some force––is tending that Light at the end of the tunnel.

This is the same cruel and paradoxically benevolent bullshit that has kept the Catholic Church going for so many centuries.  It is also the military ethic…a blind faith in some higher and wiser ‘authority.’ The Pope, The General, The Prime Minister…all the way up to ‘God.'”

––Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: A Savage Journey to the Heart of the American Dream, by Hunter S. Thompson, pg. 178-9