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In Hallucinations: Behavior, Experience, and Theory (1975), senior US government researchers Louis Jolyon West and Ronald K. Siegel explain how drug prohibition can be used for selective social control:
The role of drugs in the exercise of political control is also coming under increasing discussion. Control can be through prohibition or supply. The total or even partial prohibition of drugs gives the government considerable leverage for other types of control. An example would be the selective application of drug laws… against selected components of the population such as members of certain minority groups or political organizations
Academic Noam Chomsky argues that Drug laws are currently, and have historically, been used by the state to oppress sections of society it opposes:
Very commonly substances are criminalized because they're associated with what's called the dangerous classes, poor people, or working people. So for example in England in the 19th century, there was a period when gin was criminalized and whiskey wasn't, because gin is what poor people drink.
Tuesday, August 05, 2014
Social Control
Wendell Berry
It's extremely important, it seems to me, that those nowhere places should be inhabited by people who will speak for them.
I always loved to listen to the old people, and I heard a lot of talk. At least until the 1980s, I was working in the fields a lot with people whose language had not been the least bit touched by the media. They spoke a beautiful language, direct and strongly referential, as far as possible from 'pure poetry.' I grew up around people who would entertain themselves by talking. There'd be a crew at work and something remarkable would happen, and they would start telling about it as soon as it was over. Three or four would each tell a different version of it, and they'd be trying to get the language right.
I've known writers — I think it's true also of other artists — who thought that you had to put your art before everything. But if you have a marriage and a family and a farm, you're just going to find that you can't always put your art first, and moreover that you shouldn't. There are a number of things more important than your art. It's wrong to favor it over your family, or over your place, or over your animals.
I never felt like I had to write in order to be happy. It has given me great freedom as a writer.
- Wendell Berry
Monday, August 04, 2014
Spiritually Speaking
The Dalai Lama
Be kind whenever possible. It is always possible.
Where ignorance is our master, there is no possibility of real peace.
If you have a particular faith or religion, that is good. But you can survive without it.
The ultimate authority must always rest with the individual's own reason and critical analysis.
Joan of Arc
Act, and God will act.
I would rather die than do something which I know to be a sin, or to be against God's will.
If I am not, may God put me there; and if I am, may God so keep me.
One life is all we have and we live it as we believe in living it. But to sacrifice what you are and to live without belief, that is a fate more terrible than dying.
C.S. Lewis
I believe in Christianity as I believe that the sun has risen: not only because I see it, but because by it I see everything else.
God cannot give us a happiness and peace apart from Himself, because it is not there. There is no such thing.
Christianity, if false, is of no importance, and if true, of infinite importance. The only thing it cannot be is moderately important.
I gave in, and admitted that God was God.
Anne Frank
The best remedy for those who are afraid, lonely or unhappy is to go outside, somewhere where they can be quiet, alone with the heavens, nature and God. Because only then does one feel that all is as it should be.
Who would ever think that so much went on in the soul of a young girl?
How wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment before starting to improve the world.
I don't think of all the misery but of the beauty that still remains.
Mary Daly
The word ‘sin’ is derived from the Indo-European root ‘es-,’ meaning ‘to be.’ When I discovered this etymology, I intuitively understood that for a woman trapped in patriarchy, which is the religion of the entire planet, ‘to be’ in the fullest sense is ' to sin.'
. . . Yet, it is essential to realize that without the loyalty of women the church and its churchmen would shrivel and die.
It is the creative potential itself in human beings that is the image of God.
Why indeed must 'God' be a noun? Why not a verb - the most active and dynamic of all.
Maya Angelou
While I know myself as a creation of God, I am also obligated to realize and remember
God puts rainbows in the clouds so that each of us - in the dreariest and most dreaded moments - can see a possibility of hope.
Sunday, August 03, 2014
Six Bells
Mother rang the bells three times for supper and told us six times means EMERGENCY jump out the window. When I was 15 I heard the bells but nobody else heard them. I jumped out the window and kept running.
Hayden Carruth
From Writer's Almanac:
Today is the birthday of poet Hayden Carruth, born in Waterbury, Connecticut (1921). He attended college in Chapel Hill before serving two years in the Army Air Forces during World War II, and later he went to graduate school on the GI Bill, fell in love with jazz, learned the clarinet, and began to write poetry. He worked as an editor in Chicago, but in 1953, he suffered a nervous breakdown and spent the next year and a half in treatment for alcoholism and anxiety. He underwent electroshock therapy and left by his own account "in worse shape than I went in."
Carruth then decided to move to the rural communities of Vermont and New York State. He began to farm, worked as a mechanic, hired himself out as a field hand, and wrote nightly, sometimes not finishing with farm work until after midnight. He freelanced occasionally, but his income after several years was a scant $600, and at one point he had to steal corn meant for livestock to survive. He kept up this hardscrabble lifestyle for decades, and his poetry reflected those on the margins who live by their hands: field workers, farmers, jazz musicians, mental patients, war protesters, lonely fathers. The writer Wendell Berry credits Carruth's poetry for showing him that there was beauty to be found in places others considered "nowhere" as he weighed his own return to rural life.
In 1996, at the age of 75, his collection Scrambled Eggs and Whiskey won the National Book Award. Carruth died in 2008 after complications from a stroke.
Marvin Bell
Much of our lives involves the word 'no.' In school we are mostly told, 'Don't do it this way. Do it that way.' But art is the big yes. In art, you get a chance to make something where there was nothing.
- Marvin Bell
Saturday, August 02, 2014
James Baldwin's Birthday
from Writer's Almanac:
Today is the birthday of the American novelist, essayist, and activist James Baldwin, author of Go Tell It on the Mountain. Baldwin was born in Harlem, New York, in 1924, the oldest of nine children in a family that was dominated by his strict, religious stepfather, a Pentecostal minister with whom James had a difficult relationship and who brought his son into the ministry when he was just 14. Those were the early days of the Harlem Renaissance, but still, as Baldwin recalled in a 1984 interview with the Paris Review, "Given the conditions in this country to be a black writer was impossible. ... My father didn't think it was possible — he thought I'd get killed, get murdered. He said I was contesting the white man's definitions, which was quite right." So the ministry it was, at least for three years, by which point Baldwin felt his faith had gone.
When his stepfather died in 1943, James left home, a period he writes about in the titular essay of Notes of a Native Son. He then immersed himself in the international, artistic atmosphere of Greenwich Village, making his living as a dishwasher, busboy, factory worker or waiter, working multiple jobs at once and writing in the moments around them.
An important moment for Baldwin came when he and his friend, the modernist painter Beauford Delaney, were standing on a street corner in the Village, waiting for the light to change. Baldwin recounts in The Paris Review that Beauford "pointed down and said, 'Look.' I looked and all I saw was water. And he said, 'Look again,' which I did, and I saw oil on the water and the city reflected in that puddle." In that moment, Baldwin felt he'd been taught how to see, and how to trust what he saw, felt that from that moment on he could see the world differently than he had before.
When he was 24 and beginning to recognize his own homosexuality, Baldwin expatriated himself to him France with $40 and not knowing a single word of French. He hoped to find himself in a larger context, somewhere he could see himself as more than "merely a Negro; or, merely a Negro writer," a move that would also allow him to escape American prejudices toward blacks and homosexuals. In Paris, he found the distance he needed to write about his personal experiences and the struggles of black Americans from the point of view of not "merely a Negro," or a victim, but as a man, thus resisting the easy categorization of his work as that of a "black writer."
In the '60s, Baldwin returned to the United States to take part in the civil rights movement. He became friends with Martin Luther King Jr., Medgar Evers, and Malcolm X, and because he didn't see himself as a public speaker, used his ability to craft stories and essays to write about black identity and race in The Fire Next Time and No Name in the Street. One by one, Baldwin's outspoken friends were killed and, following the assassination of Martin Luther King, Baldwin was sick at heart. Unable to escape the pain of his loss, he fled again to Europe, which remained his home until his death in 1987. Despite his grief and the anger of the times, despite the harsh tone of his book If Beale Street Could Talk, which some reviewers criticized for sounding bitter, Baldwin always remained an advocate for universal love and brotherhood.
James Baldwin's influence on other American artists, whether of spirit or love or style, is undeniable. He and the poet Langston Hughes were responsible for getting the singer Nina Simone involved in the civil rights movement. Maya Angelou, remembering Baldwin in The New York Times after his death, said that he "set the stage" for her to write I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. He told Angelou she was "intelligent and very brave," introduced her to his family as one of their own, saying she was his mother's newest daughter, and was, in Angelou's words, "my friend and brother."
Toni Morrison, in her goodbye and thank you in The New York Times, wrote that James Baldwin agave her three gifts: " language to dwell in, a gift so perfect" that it seemed her own; "the courage to live life in and from its belly as well as beyond its edges"; and his tenderness and vulnerability and a love that made one want to be worthy, generous, and strong.
Friday, August 01, 2014
Leggo-Makers at the Library
This summer the library has offered a Leggo making session every Friday from ten thirty until eleven thirty in the side room with a million windows. I offered to photograph the participants for today and it was great fun. The kids each titled their pieces and their captions were as wonderful as their creations.
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