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January 12, 2009
An Explanation
Yesterday’s entry made the point that both America’s witless drug war and its illegal marijuana market have been wildly successful; the former because it has been global drug policy for over forty years, the latter, for its steady growth over the same interval. The larger point: that each “success” is dependent on the other, is both undeniable and never acknowledged. That circumstance, I suggested, may indicate a flaw in the vaunted cognitive machinery between our ears. How could the same brain that has propelled us to the moon and back and is now searching the universe for “intelligent” life be so prone to cognitive dissonance?I also referred to Al Gore’s now famous “inconvenient” truth and promised to explain why. Oddly enough, that allows me to bring up the Baby Boom into which Gore, Bill Clinton and George W. Bush were all born: Bush and Clinton during the Summer of ‘46, and Gore in March ‘48. All three eventually received Ivy League educations at a time when many of their contemporaries were being drafted into dangerous and unpopular military service. Of the three, Gore was the only one to enlist and actually spend time “in country;” neither Bush nor Clinton ever went overseas in uniform.
Another common circumstance all three would have faced as Ivy League Boomers was whether to try pot; given the increasing depth of Google’s reach into the past, it’s now possible to do armchair research on such questions. While (as usual) the evidence isn’t conclusive, it’s very likely that Al Gore became a typical head for several years, Dubya tried pot, but opted for booze until he sobered up on Laura’s religion, and Bill Clinton, famously didn’t inhale.
That none could have aspired to the Presidency after openly confessing to the same behavior a very high percentage of their Ivy League contemporaries engaged in is a form of hypocrisy our society accepts without question; just as a majority still pays lip service to the notion we are all god’s children.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at January 12, 2009 05:49 PM