Comedy Is Not Pretty And Truth Is Stranger Than Fiction

SATIRE

 So we were smoking this joint of Jamaican over in that corner and [NYT columnist David Brooks] got the bright idea to blow the smoke into the register. “That’ll make everyone up there one of us!” he said. And sure enough when we went up to class the whole floor stank and the vice-principal was hustling up and down the hallway, wrinkling his nose like a bloodhound trying to figure out where the smell was coming from, and then he went into the boys’ room and dragged out one of the only two black boys at Radnor High, yelling at him for smoking pot in school.

I remember the guilty look on Dave’s face when he saw Mr. Santangelo with the kid by the collar. Later on, he told me that he was tempted to confess, but he also happened to know that that boy did smoke pot, that he was a full-on stoner, so if he got in a little trouble, it might be good for him.  When I read today that Dave thinks that “not smoking, or only smoking sporadically gave you a better shot at becoming a little more integrated and interesting,” while “smoking all the time seemed likely to cumulatively fragment a person’s deep center,” I thought about that boy and wondered if getting kicked out of school had helped him hold together his deep center, and if his going to juvy was the kind of subtle discouragement that Dave thinks governments should engage in when it comes to the “lesser pleasures.” I suppose he thought he was doing the kid a favor by letting him take the rap.

THE JOKE

  In “Weed — Been There. Done That” [David] Brooks makes a case for a “moral ecology” that curbs individual freedom for the collective betterment of potheads that would be better served devoting their energies to higher aspirations like running track. If you think I’m minimizing his argument to be glib, I dare you to read it. That is his argument.

...The ACLU released a report, based on federal arrest data and self-reported crime reports, that,...found that over half of all drug arrests in 2010 were for marijuana possession,...that whites use marijuana more than blacks, yet blacks are over 3.5 times more likely to be arrested for marijuana use.

…The ACLU makes a passing mention of federal student aid and drug convictions in its report. African Americans, particularly African American men, are more likely to be arrested for recreational drug use and consequently barred from receiving financial aid to pay for college AFTER paying their debt to society.

We can thank Bill Clinton for that.

…Brooks’ rumination on his stoner days is kind of funny. It’s certainly elitist. But it is also an example of the two Americas we’ve fomented through legislative, cultural, and organizational boundaries that disrupt every single path for opportunity available for those not born to wealth and privilege.

No one need make a black code anymore. They need only embed moral ecologies in laws that have nothing to do with morality and wait for systemic disadvantages in neighborhoods, schools, and racist policing to do the rest.