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February 14, 2011
Clueless America, as seen through the eyes of TIME
TIME magazine has been reporting and commenting on the world as seen through an American prism since it was founded in 1923 by a youthful pair of Yale Bonesmen. Despite a declining circulation (a malaise afflicting most hard-copy publications) it maintains a prominent web presence which also has an extremely useful archive that allows a patient researcher to read all the text the magazine ever published; minus original ads and illustrations. As such, it’s an invaluable resource for examining ambient American thought as it was expressed at weekly intervals throughout most of the last 100 years. By sheer happenstance, The New Yorker, another New York City based periodical, catering to a somewhat different audience, but similarly rooted in the Ivy League, began publishing in 1925. Their back issues were first made available on digital media in 2004 and are also now available to subscribers.Once I was aware of a heretofore unrecognized generation gap in the way the tems “drugs” and “drug use” are perceived by most Americans, understanding those difference became important for obvious reasons. Over that same interval, I’d also become progressively disabused of the notion that simply learning and explaining the “truth” about such incendiary issues would be enough to start undoing the enormous damage being caused by the drug war on a daily basis. Just as I came to understand that the policy was even dumber and more destructive than I could have guessed, so have I learned that those for whom it has become a way of life share those characteristics to a similar degree. Thus undoing all the drug war's damage seems as forlorn a hope as undoing the human misery produced by other repressive policies of long standing: the Inquisition, American chattel slavery, and the Holocaust, to name but a few. What they also have in common is the idea that status is a crime; it’s thus OK to carry out savage punishments, up to the point of murder, against other humans based on what they appear to be.
Amazingly, that notion remains as viable in some parts of the today’s world as in the Thirties; just substitute “black”, “gay,” or “druggie” for “heretic,” infidel, or “slave” and you will get the idea: labels can excuse treatment that would otherwise be a crime. When enforced by a police bureaucracy under color of authority such policies become especially heinous.
A good place to look at how naive we were just as both the Viet Nam war and the drug culture were about to sweep over us is to read TIME’s opinion on the state of the nation’s youth just as the class of 1968 was getting ready to graduate.
I’d say TIME's editors were about as clueless then as Hosni Mubarak was last Thursday.
Doctor Tom
Posted by tjeffo at February 14, 2011 07:26 PM