The Seven Dopes
Have some Madeira, m’dear,
It’s really much nicer than beer.
I don’t care for sherry, one cannot drink stout,
And port is a wine I can well do without.
It’s simply a case of “chacun a son gout�…
--Michael Flanders
We all know Snow White, but now I’d like to introduce the Seven Dopes. No, not Stumpy, Lumpy, Frumpy and the rest, but real dopes, the ones that define our culture, all or some of whom all or some of us are addicted to. They are, in descending order of ubiquitousness:
Television
Movies (and Hollywood generally)
Sports (watched, not played)
Tobacco
Alcohol
Drugs, naughty and legal
All the other stuff.
Regarding the first, if I only had a nickel for every study that has shown TV more useful than trepanning for emptying the brain case, I’d have almost enough to buy a 40 foot wide screen HDTV with surround sound. One has only to consider the millions of dollars advertisers pay for one minute of Super Bowl time to realize how effective they KNOW it is for making people pay more than they can afford for something they don’t need. TV is the most powerful dope ever, Marx notwithstanding.
A close second is the wonderful world of Hollywood. The distance between, say, Archibald Leach and Cary Grant or Marion Michael Morrison and John Wayne is approximately the same distance between reality and Reality TV. But they named the airport after John Wayne. And people pay big bucks to be flown over Jennifer Lopez’s swimming pool, and cigarette companies still pay for “placement� in movies because the connection between fantasy and reality, between us and our dreams, are the products our idols consume.
What is called “sports� has nothing to do with exercise, and more to do with feeding Christians to the lions in days of old. How many calories does a fan burn watching a Super Bowl game? I lost interest in football when it became plain there was no connection between the team (in my case the Raiders) and the city (Oakland) where they played. Team owners like Charlie Finley and Al Davis didn’t inspire loyalty, and too much of my money was going to them. Several cents. The players, with their studied illiteracy and massive amounts of legal and illegal drug ingesting, don’t seem like idols to me.
With what has come out in the past decades about what smoking does to people, it amazes me that anyone with a shred of conscience can sell the things. If you have to take care of somebody who is dying of lung cancer, like I did my mother in 2002, you’ll know exactly what I mean. The people who produce them knew and know very well what they’re doing, condemning millions to a slow, ugly death, but they do it anyway. And they, and I as a former smoker for 27 years, know how addictive this dope is. Smug? Not hardly. I’d love a smoke right now.
An alcoholic friend of mine used to say, “Why be little and weak when with just one drink you can be big and strong?� A number of the brightest people I’ve known have become alcoholics to allow them to cope with a brain that has not enough to do and lots of time to do it in. Their excuses are bogus, though human. Once when I was a journalist interviewing a family whose star daughter was killed by a repeat offense drunk driver, I found it hard to take notes through my tears at their loss. Interviewing mothers of drunk driving victims, whose lives are blasted forever, I find it hard to sympathize with drunks who kill, and who are still alive and drinking. But it’s legal.
The illegal ones are illegal for a reason: they’re more profitable that way. While Humboldt’s cash crop may have “medicinal� value for a few, the real impetus for its legalization has nothing to do with healing (they could take it in pill form), and everything to do with the fact that marijuana makes you stupid and pliable. What better way to control a population? So much better than alcohol, which makes the user stupid and aggressive. The thing for a government to do is make it LOOK like you’re trying to irradicate drug use, while at the same time profiting from the sale. Just make sure the “War on Drugs� is never WON.
Finally, there’s all the Other Stuff: computers, cookies, coffee, newspapers, gardening, cooking, model trains. My brother, one of the smartest people I knew, was addicted to information. Whether it was technical journals, the news on TV, radio and newpapers, non-fiction books, whatever: every receptor had to be receiving data during every waking hour, or he would crash and burn. My drug of choice is books. I have a lot of them, some might even say more than is good for me. I wallow in them, they cost pennies an hour, they don’t give me hangovers or make me oblivious to injustice and crimes against humanity. And I can quit reading, or writing, any time I want. Really. I just don’t want to.