Month: January 2007

Harry Potter Naked!

Potternaked

The actor, Daniel Radcliffe, is playing Alan in Peter Shaffer’s Equus. The role requires a couple of scenes of total nudity. I know this because I played Alan in a Harvard production. I’m sorry to say I wimped out, and wore briefs. My only excuse was that the production was in the round and audience members were merely feet away from my meat and veg. The play is a wonderful, if highly manipulative, exercize in psychological trauma. Good for Radcliffe for having more guts than I did.

Religious Freedom and Psilocybin

Shrooms

We now have very solid evidence that magic mushrooms – or, more scientifically, mushrooms containing psilocybin – are astonishingly effective in giving humans life-changing mystical experiences. More research is needed – but the National Institute for Drug Abuse won’t cough up the funds. Memo to wealthy libertarians: open your checkbooks. Mark Kleiman makes a further point:

Though psilocybe mushrooms grow wild in much of the country and are fairly easily cultivated, the psilocybin they contain is a Schedule I controlled substance, contraband except for specially-approved research purposes, and therefore so are the mushrooms themselves.

But the Supreme Court recently held (Gonzales v. O Centro) that the use of hallucinogens in religious ceremonies is protected under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act and must be permitted unless there is a particularized showing of harm. It is well-established fact that psilocybin is neither addictive nor physically toxic, though it is not without psychological and behavioral risks, especially when used haphazardly.

If taking a dose of psilocybin under controlled conditions has a better-than-even chance of occasioning a full-blown mystical experience, it seems fairly hard to argue that forbidding such use doesn’t interfere with the free exercise of religion. How the courts will deal with those who want to seek out primary religious experience on an individual rather than a congregational basis remains to be seen.

This strikes me as a very basic principle for religious freedom. I look forward to the Christianist movement standing up for the religious freedoms of others. But I don’t have my hopes up.

Anti-War Conservatives

Bruce Bartlett (TimesDelete) notes a major difference between Iraq and Vietam. In Vietnam, conservatives generally supported Nixon until the bitter end. In Iraq, many conservatives bailed very quickly, once the shambolic war-management of Bush, Rumsfeld and Cheney came to light. Among these conservatives are some major figures. William F Buckley Jr, in June 2004, wrote, "If I knew then what I know now about what kind of situation we would be in, I would have opposed the war." Newt Gingrich in April 2006 said "it was an enormous mistake for us to try to occupy that country after June of 2003. We have to pull back and we have to recognize it." Earlier this year, Ken Adelman, David Frum and Richard Perle all excoriated the Bush administration’s war-management. Milton Friedman opposed it from the start. General William Odom refuses to buy the latest snake-oil from Dr Cheney. On the crunchy con wing, we have Rod Dreher. Derb has described the war as a "gross error."

Brooks is now in favor of soft partition; Krauthammer sees the Maliki government as a joke (the government which is the basis for the "surge"); Peggy Noonan was for the surge until she heard president Bush’s speech in favor of it; George Will has been witheringly shrewd from the get-go. In the Congress, Hagel, McCain, Specter, and Warner have all essentially voted yes in a motion of "no confidence." I could go on. Those of us who jumped off this bus in 2003 have found ourselves in an increasingly crowded wilderness. Our job now is to think creatively and strategically about how best to manage the failure in Iraq for our long-term advantage, at minimal moral cost. That is the current conservative challenge. Everything else is spin.