The Dish aired arguments about the question here and here. Chad Wellmon deepens the debate, arguing that our discomfort with the digital humanities stems from literature having taken on an almost religious quality: “After the death of God, literatureis a resource for self-transformation, and reading–closely, caringly, silently–is one of our modern liturgies.” But it wasn’t always this way:
Until the end of the eighteenth century, literature referred to everything that had been printed. It wasn’t until around 1800 that it was used to refer to a particular kind of writing. Only when there was too much literature did Literature become a distinct category. In 1803 Wilhelm Schlegel, a German Romantic and one of the first scholars of Literature, lamented the pitiful state of German reading and writing. Given the ready availability of printed texts, German readers no longer read with “devotion but rather with a thoughtless distraction.” To remedy this situation he invoked Literature as a particular kind of writing that had been filtered and sorted from among the surfeit of all that had been printed. What was needed to remedy the sorry condition of German literature and thought more generally, claimed Schlegel, was a normative, critical category that would separate the good books from the bad ones and help readers make their way through the proliferation of print. Literature was not simply a “raw aggregate of books”; it was a source of spiritual relief and discovery.
For some, the digital humanities threatens to interrupt this experience of Literature by reducing texts to an aggregation of data points.
These contemporary cultural anxieties echo similar anxieties that accompanied the desacralizaiton of other kinds of texts. Consider the double bind of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century British scholars of the Bible. With the profusion of apocryphal material and new scholarly methods, they pioneered forms of inquiry that many worried would undermine the divine authority of the Bible. The enumeration of 30,000 variants among various Biblical manuscripts by the Oxford scholar John Mill, claimed some, made the Bible seem all too human. Something similar happened when eighteen-century German philologists like Friedrich A. Wolf, flush with newly discovered information and refined techniques of philological criticism, suggested that the Odyssey was not the result of one author, Homer, but the product of textual accretion over time—just as biblical scholars had eventually concluded about the Old Testament. Similar to biblical scholars, Wolf thought that he faced a choice: he could either save Homer as creator and obliterate the text or save the text and destroy the author—a figure who had become a model for humanist education.
Richard Beck argues that cultivating friendships, especially across class boundaries, might be “the most important thing the church can to do help lift people out of poverty”:
[W]hat I find lacking in many churches is friendship, a face-to-face, first-name-basis relationality between rich and poor. This is what is missing in many churches. Programs abound but there is too little friendship.
And in many ways this call for friendship is both harder and easier than starting up a poverty program at the church. It’s easier in that you don’t have to save the world. You don’t have to eradicate world poverty. You just have to be a friend.
To be sure, you’ll be faced with issues regarding material want. But the needs of your friends will be expressed within a relational context. And because of the friendship you’ll be able to discern the legitimacy of the requests and, given your knowledge of your friend, how best to respond. And most importantly, the situation will be reciprocal. Your friend will be giving to you as well. Perhaps not materially, but there will be life-giving exchanges flowing back and forth.
So in many ways, being a friend is much easier than trying to save the world. And yet, it’s also much harder. Your life will get messier. You’ll have to struggle with how best to help your friend and those decisions can be heart-breaking at times. Volunteering a few hours at the food pantry or sponsoring a child in Africa is a whole lot easier and cleaner than making friends and opening up your life to the needs, demands and sin of others. To say nothing of how your needs, wants and sins will affect them.
Gracy Olmstead explains one facet of Beck’s argument – the way “weak ties” help us meet the various needs of those struggling:
Beck emphasizes the fact that “weak ties” in friendship are very needed. Why? Because our closest friends are usually insular groups, “bundles of sameness.” Weak ties—distant relatives, acquaintances from our neighborhood or past—are usually more diverse in their background, tastes, and employment. This wider “social web” gives us philanthropic ammunition: when you see someone in need, you don’t just bring your own talents and gifts to the table. You bring everyone you’ve ever met—”Bluntly, you might not be able to help this person in a particular situation but you might know someone else who can. In sacramental friendships you are bringing the gift of your weak ties.” …
Beck’s friendships of “weak ties” provide a hidden and important ingredient in the inequality discussion. Friendship is a diverse and beautiful thing—it’s a proactive, personal, and private solvent to a very large and public problem. It deals with the dilemma on a case-by-case basis. It reaches out via the various spheres and circles open to the people in question. Granted, it’s not a solid, comprehensive, quantifiable solution to inequality. But it is an important, and oft-ignored, piece in the giant solution puzzle.
Stefan Kanfer’s tribute to Maurice Sendak underlines how the late writer-illustrator’s “favorite pose of curmudgeon” concealed a profound sensitivity:
Sendak became increasingly Sendakian in his last years. A triple bypass left him diminished, but not too weak to roar. Stocky, bearded, and glowering, the Connecticut Tevye railed against the excesses of technology, sentimentality, and commercialism.
Last summer, New York’s Society of Illustrators paid homage to one of its greatest members with an exhibition that covered two floors. In addition to scores of Sendak’s sketches and finished artwork, the show included videotapes of his final interviews, most of them theatrically grumpy. Asked about e-books, he snapped, “I hate them. It’s like making believe there’s another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of sex. There isn’t another kind of book.” As for posthumous tributes, he wanted “no statue in the park with a lot of scrambling kids climbing up on me, à la Hans Christian Andersen. I won’t have it.” When comedian Stephen Colbert asked him, “What’s it take for a celebrity to make a successful book?,” Sendak was ready: “You’ve started already by being an idiot.”
But these fulminations didn’t deceive the people who understood him. We knew that Sendak needed his hard carapace to cover a psyche as sensitive as a light meter. Without it, he would never have survived, let alone triumphed. We also knew that toward the end, he made his peace with life—and with death. Shortly before he suffered a fatal stroke in 2012, he looked back in unaccustomed tranquillity: “I have nothing now but praise for my life. I’m not unhappy. I cry a lot because I miss people. They die and I can’t stop them. They leave me and I love them more. There are so many beautiful things in the world which I will have to leave when I die, but I’m ready.”
Noah Gittell notices that a “new series of pop culture protagonists are not fighting the end of the world; they’re welcoming it”:
Take Darren Aronofsky’s Noah, which is at once an epic disaster movie and a penetrating exploration of the misanthropy that underpins the genre. How else to describe films that wring entertainment from the potential end of humanity? As played by Russell Crowe, Noah has a deep, simmering hatred for man even before God asks for his help. Civilization is ruled by rape and savagery; Noah, meanwhile, teaches his children to respect even the smallest flower.
Most disaster movies would end when the great flood comes and our hero saves his family. Noah lets the story continue and takes misanthropy to its logical endpoint. Once aboard the ark, Noah receives another message from God telling him that mankind is to end his with his family. Since his daughter-in-law (Emma Watson) is pregnant, Noah pledges to murder his infant grandchild, if she is born a girl, i.e. with the capability of repopulating the planet with humans. Mankind, we are told, is a failed experiment, a harsh assertion for a Hollywood movie.
David Sessions finds that such misanthropy isn’t reserved for Noah; his first response to the movie was, “I think the moral of the story was that God is evil”:
It’s not very clear here what the sins are, but we know that man is accused of a) multiplying and b) being violent. But as Noah’s family quickly finds out, they’re just as violent as everyone else. After watching the shocking goings-on at a nearby camp of Canaanites, Noah realizes he and his wife would kill them in a heartbeat to protect their children. Near the end of the ark ride, he’s become a raving madman chasing two newborn babies with a knife, and his two oldest sons are prepared to bring him to what would appear to be a very righteous end. (They kill Tubal-Cain instead, and after a dramatic knife-raise, Noah leaves the babies in peace.) Even if most of this isn’t in the Bible, we know that the reboot of humankind produced even greater achievements in multiplication and mass murder. So God killed millions of people because they were violent, and then saved enough of them that they could return to exactly that state? It’s not surprising that Aronofsky’s Noah comes to believe that humans are supposed to die out in the new world. Either he kills those babies, or God is cruel and insane.
And speaking of the end of the world, Joel S. Baden questions the way the film’s environmentalist message fits with the account of Noah and the flood in Genesis, arguing that of “all the stories in the Bible, the flood narrative is perhaps the least environmentally friendly”:
In the end, the deluge does nothing to wipe out the violence and wickedness that brought it about in the first place. It is God who changes, accepting that the human race is inherently superior to mere animals, and bloodthirsty at that: “Every creature that lives shall be yours to eat,” he says after the waters have cleared. “The fear and dread of you shall be upon all the beasts of the Earth and all the birds of the sky and all the fish of the sea; they are given into your hand.”
In fact, in the Bible, the motivation for God’s promise never to bring another flood is Noah’s sacrifice of some of the animals he brought with him on the ark. (The Bible tells us that Noah brought not only two of each animal, but seven pairs of the clean — that is, sacrificable —animals.) It is the smell of burning animal flesh that reminds God that humanity is worth saving: No other species cooks for him. That aspect of the biblical account is nowhere to be found in the film. There is no sacrifice at the end of the movie.
Though humanity makes no promise of better stewardship in the Bible, God makes a unilateral promise never to destroy the Earth again, no strings attached. Whatever we may do, however evil we may be, however much we destroy the planet, we need not fear wholesale natural destruction, says Genesis, in what can only be seen as the antithesis of the environmentalist message.
Douthat recently addressed (NYT) an oft-invoked paradox of American life – that social scientists associate religious faith with a number of social goods, from personal well-being to participation in civic life, while areas like the Bible Belt suffer from more than their fair share of social ills, like out-of-wedlock births and poverty. How to explain this? He argues that the “social goods associated with faith flow almost exclusively from religious participation, not from affiliation or nominal belief,” and that such mere affiliation or nominal belief – the “Christian penumbra” – could be the problem:
In the Christian penumbra, certain religious expectations could endure (a bias toward early marriage, for instance) without support networks for people struggling to live up to them. Or specific moral ideas could still have purchase without being embedded in a plausible life script. (For instance, residual pro-life sentiment could increase out-of-wedlock births.) Or religious impulses could survive in dark forms rather than positive ones — leaving structures of hypocrisy intact and ratifying social hierarchies, without inculcating virtue, charity or responsibility.
And it isn’t hard to see places in American life where these patterns could be at work. Among those working-class whites whose identification with Christianity is mostly a form of identity politics, for instance. Or among second-generation Hispanic immigrants who have drifted from their ancestral Catholicism. Or in African-American communities where the church is respected as an institution without attracting many young men on Sunday morning.
Seeing some of the problems in our culture through this lens might be useful for the religious and secular alike. For nonbelievers inclined to look down on the alleged backwardness of the Bible Belt, it would be helpful to recognize that at least some the problems they see at work reflect traditional religion’s growing weakness rather than its potency.
What to make of this? Well, my first instinct is to challenge the social science: for one thing, its categories are usually vague to the point of imprecision, and for another, the strong religion Douthat is drawn to has as one of its core beliefs the conviction that social goods can’t be understood (or fostered) in a general sense, social science-style — can’t be understood apart from particular traditions with specific conceptions of the good, conceptions that are meant to challenge our common-sense, social-science-y ideas of what social goods are. …
[W]hat’s easy to miss is the (seemingly) obvious point that the most powerful and effective way to promote a social good is personally, not culturally – for individuals or communities to reach out to those in their midst who are in need and try to hear them, and help them. Call this virtue, or kindness, or charity, or love – but this, and not promoting social goods as a means toward the maintenance of the community and the strengthening of its position in an “ideological battle,” is the heart of the matter, isn’t it?
Also responding to Douthat, Dreher indicts his generation for failing to pass on their faith, creating “the murky space where many, many Americans dwell: between unbelief in Christianity and committed belief in Christianity”:
My fear — and it is that: a fear — is that so many of us older believers are making it difficult to impossible for our children to believe, simply by failing to teach them the basics of the faith, and to demonstrate by our lives that these things we believe are true.
It is the case that not everyone in ages past knew much theology, or even cared to know. But I believe it was the case back then that the faith was nearer to hand than it is today, for those who cared to embrace it. This no doubt led to Christianity as little more than middle-class respectability; this, in fact, is what Kierkegaard railed against in 19th-century Copenhagen: the reduction of the radicalism of the Christian faith to bourgeois ideology. Maybe the times we’re in now require those who profess Christianity, in all its forms, to embrace its core radicalism more consciously. Yes, this must be true: Christians have to push back against the world as hard as the world pushes against them. The lukewarm and their descendants will be seduced by the siren song of individualism, shoved over the cliff and washed down the river by the irresistible current. What a terrible judgment to inflict upon one’s children. I’ll be crude here, but the seriousness of the situation demands straight talk: you are a Christian, but half-assed about it, you had better face the likelihood that your children and your grandchildren will be strangers to the faith.
This Lenten season, Carolyn Browender made “the commitment to pray every day,” a spiritual practice she admits can be a struggle. To guide her efforts, she’s turning to different faith traditions – spending a week with each one – beginning with Mormonism:
To say that Mormon prayer was a shift from my usual practice is an understatement. Instead of praying all curled up in my cozy flannel sheets, I prayed on my knees next to my bed both in the morning and at night. I was not raised in a church that had the congregation kneel for prayer. When I attend services where this happens, I opt to remain seated with my head bowed and hands folded. This past week was the first time I knelt in prayer consistently, and I was surprised at how much of a difference it made. The physical shift from my bed to the floor facilitated a mental and spiritual shift. It was easier to focus solely on prayer because I kneeled specifically for that purpose, though admittedly I did a much better job with this at night.
Another practice that focused my mind on prayer was saying the prayers out loud. This isn’t required for every time you pray, but the church guide says “we should make an extra effort at times to pray vocally.” The only times I pray out loud are when I’m participating in a congregational prayer or mentioning a concern in a bidding prayer, so this felt foreign to me. It also made me feel quite vulnerable, as I often pray about what is causing stress or pain in my life. That said, I also felt like my prayers for others were more heartfelt. There’s something about naming a person or group of people that seems to pack more of a spiritual punch than merely thinking of them.
The next week, she followed the Quaker way of prayer – and was again challenged by the transition:
The best prayer guidance I was able to find was something about some Friends telling people that they would “hold them in the light.” Basically, the Quaker version of “I’ll pray for you/be thinking of you.” I liked this phrase. It seemed like a respectable hybrid between offering thoughts or prayers, though I could see someone giving me a weird look if I uttered the phrase out loud. But when I actually tried to do this it felt like I was mentally setting the people I was praying for on fire. Yes, I visualized these folks amidst a sea of yellow-orange light. I blame the transition from the formality and specificity of Mormon prayer protocol for this error. I was used to following very clear, literal directions about the right way to communicate with God. Quaker prayer is quite different. …
I … discovered later in the week (thanks to some readings referred to me by @LondonQuakers via @RobertaWedge) that for many Friends, prayer isn’t something that you do once or twice a day, as I am used to, but a constant awareness and awe of the holiness around you. To be sure, I’d come across this idea in some of the research I did earlier, but I was too focused on finding a specific set of praying instructions to realize this.
For an overview of Jody Bottum’s new book, An Anxious Age, check out Bottum’s lecture at AEI. In it, he argues that “our purely political concerns have been reduced to nothing more than footballs with which we happen to play that public game of spiritual redemption”:
The major event that allowed this spiritualizing of our politics is the utter collapse of the Protestant mainline churches, those once central and stabilizing institutions in the American experiment. With their collapse, since the 1970s, strange entities have broken loose to find a new home in politics. There’s a reason far too many Americans think their opponents are evil. Politics has become a supernatural battleground, where we want to work out not our political problems, but our spiritual anxieties.
The disappearance of the Protestant ascendancy that defined the American new world for 300 years is a cause of enormous amounts of our current political situation, of our incivility toward one another, and of our politics of salvation.
Last weekend we featured laudatory reviews of Buttum’s book. Greg Forster wasn’t as impressed, describing it as “a bad book with a good book trapped inside it, struggling to get out.” He particularly laments its “cartoon caricature” of Protestantism:
Bottum’s sneers at evangelicalism arise from a deeper contempt for Protestant religion as such.
Having uncritically assimilated Max Weber’s long-discredited account of Protestant theology and sociology, Bottum sees the religious anxiety of the social gospel movement as a natural product of Protestant religion. Thus, the current downfall of American culture is merely the necessary historical consequence of Protestantism.
As Bottum’s own evidence shows, the social gospel did not develop religious anxiety and hand it down to today’s secularism because it was following the natural direction of Protestant religion. Bottum describes, complete with damning original source quotations, how social gospel theology denied the power of the cross to save anyone. Yet he never explains why he doesn’t accept what would seem to be the theory best supported by these facts—namely, that the social gospel created religious anxiety precisely because it abandoned Protestant religion.
If Bottum made a serious case against Protestantism, providing argument and evidence, his book would be worth taking seriously. But Bottum is no Brad Gregory. He is simply tossing around unexamined prejudices.
Geoffrey Kabaservice picks up on the pessimism of Bottum’s book:
The American experiment, in Bottum’s telling, has always rested on the three-legged stool of democracy, capitalism, and religion. Throughout most of the country’s history, these three legs both “accommodated one another and, at the same time, pushed hard against one another.” At times, the force of democracy pushed back against overweening religion, as with the immigrant-led populism that halted anti-Catholic oppression in the nineteenth century. At other times, religion used its prophetic force to call democracy to account, as with the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Bottum worries that with the collapse of Mainline Protestantism, much of what we value about America may not survive in the future, leaving us with either a rapacious consumer society or a nanny state. He also warns that liberalism itself may be undermined by the disappearance of religion from the public square; liberalism is based on religiously derived ideas of human dignity, and “every attempt to anchor human dignity in something other than biblical religion has failed.” …
Time will tell if Bottum’s more pessimistic conclusions will bear out. In the meantime, this book drives home what we have lost, as a culture, with the death of Mainline Protestantism, and the ways in which religion continues, in one form or another, to shape our American present.
Today marks the 20th anniversary of Kurt Cobain’s death. Tom Slater insists that “try as we might, it’s impossible to separate the man from his music”:
Cobain was widely hailed as the last great rock icon – someone whose life, work and time coalesced to form one totemic legend. Any claim that pop music, in and of itself, can attain some level of immortality, as if, like the great works of antiquity, we can easily separate the work from the man and the myth, is ludicrous. Popular culture is always intertwined with the conditions, and often the person, that helped create it and make it cool. The question, two decades on, is what do we make of it all; of Nirvana, Generation X and Cobain himself.
In an angst-ridden satirical essay, Zachary Lipez offers advice to writers looking to mark the occasion as “an excellent opportunity to write about what Kurt Cobain meant to you.” Josh Jones criticizes some recent commemorations of Cobain, particularly grimacing at the media’s “cultish fascination with newly-released police photos of [his] death scene”:
Atrocious though such coverage may be, there’s good reason beyond nostalgia, hero-worship, or sick fascination to revisit Cobain’s legacy. On April 10, Michael Stipe will induct Nirvana into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, formally enshrining the once scruffy outsiders in the hallowed company of ultimate rock insider-dom. This gesture might make some people (maybe it’s just me) feel a little conflicted. After all, wasn’t it precisely the grandiose, popular-kid culture of halls of fame that drove Cobain to the margins, where he did his best work, and ultimately drove him to hate what he’d become—a star? In his strange suicide note, we see Cobain beating himself up for being unable to live up to the hype—unable, as he put it, to be a “Freddy Mercury” and “relish in the love and adoration from the crowd.” There’s something, perhaps, almost tragically insensitive, however well-intentioned, in posthumously turning Kurt Cobain into Elvis.
Two days after his body was found, thousands of fans met to mourn at a candlelight vigil in Seattle, where they heard a recording of Courtney Love reading her husband’s suicide note (a note that sparked the Dish’s long-running thread on suicide):
Anyone can now read Cobain’s suicide note. Google showcases a series of image files, JPEGs tinted in different shades of scanner. Some have been rendered artistically with superimposed images of Cobain’s face, or the less tactful splattering of digitally generated blood. If you prefer, you can read the note in print in several Cobain biographies or his published journals. You can study the directions his handwriting slants and the cross-outs and the font size. You can read it over and over, thinking that you are in that moment and might be able to stop what’s coming before you finish.
But in 1994, two days after his body was found, there was no search engine waiting to share the most private moment of his life. There was only his wife, who–like him–understood that generation and foresaw the sea change his death would cause. By reading the note, she offered them access to all of the incomplete answers–that he was overwhelmed by a lack of passion for writing and playing music, that he felt guilty about that emptiness, that he believed himself to be infantile, narcissistic, too sensitive, unappreciative, erratic, hateful. The note was not vengeful; it was hopeless and apologetic. She delivered it with periodically dispersed commentary, as though reading aloud a harsh break-up note she’d found shoved into the slats of her locker. But she also cried, and her sobs were genuine and resonant. Her uninhibited grief transformed his death into something messy and visceral and selfish and ultimately public, offering the several thousand impressionable young adults in Seattle Center the opportunity to identify with her pain, not his.
Jillian Mapes pays tribute to Cobain with a thoughtful round-up of articles, interviews, and photographs. She highlights David Fricke’s January 1994 Rolling Stonecover story on Cobain, in which he spoke candidly about pain and suicide:
Have you ever been that consumed with distress or pain or rage that you actually wanted to kill yourself?
For five years during the time I had my stomach problem, yeah. I wanted to kill myself every day. I came very close many times. I’m sorry to be so blunt about it. It was to the point where I was on tour, lying on the floor, vomiting air because I couldn’t hold down water. And then I had to play a show in 20 minutes. I would sing and cough up blood.
This is no way to live a life. I love to play music, but something was not right. So I decided to medicate myself.
Even as satire, though, a song like that [“I Hate Myself And I Want To Die”] can hit a nerve. There are plenty of kids out there who, for whatever reasons, really do feel suicidal.
That pretty much defines our band. It’s both those contradictions. It’s satirical, and it’s serious at the same time.
Alan Light contemplates how Nirvana affected the music industry:
In the wake of Nirvana’s success, the low-wattage radio stations and Xeroxed fanzines of the “college rock” scene were transformed into a marketing monolith known as “alternative culture”. Seattle’s thrift-store anti-fashion took over couture runways and mall stores. Nirvana, like Woodstock, marked both the pinnacle and the end of an underground movement – the moment that Madison Avenue witnessed the scale of a new audience and pounced. This commodification was a big part of what tormented Cobain in his final years, but ultimately it’s neither good nor bad – it’s just what happens when culture meets capitalism…. So, yes, Nirvana changed the world, at least for a moment.
(Video: Cobain performs “Come As You Are” in a rehearsal for MTV Unplugged, November 1993)
A study just published in the Journal of Bisexuality provides at least a partial answer about interest in specific types of threesome. Researchers Heather Armstrong and Elke Reissing of the University of Ottawa were interested in heterosexual adults’ attitudes toward dating and hooking up with bisexual partners of the opposite sex. They asked 720 participants (a mix of Canadian undergraduates and non-students, ranging from 18 to 60 years old with a mean age of 21) about their interest in a threesome with two partners of the opposite sex across three different relationship scenarios—casual sex; dating; and committed relationship.
As you can see in the graph below, regardless of the proposed relationship type, very few women showed interest in having a threesome with two men if given the opportunity. On a scale of 0 (completely disagree) to 6 (completely agree), women’s desire for an MFM (male-female-male) threesome barely surpassed 1 in the “best case” scenario—casual sex.
Men’s desires told a different story.
In the casual-sex context, men leapt at the opportunity to have a threesome with two women, their desires far surpassing the midpoint of the scale. Although this desire was lower for more involved relationship categories, men’s interest in an FMF (female-male-female) threesome still hovered at or slightly below the mid-point of the scale for both dating and committed relationship partners.
The results were similar when participants were asked how arousing they found the idea or fantasy of having a threesome with two opposite-sex partners: Women’s average score (across all three relationship categories) was a meager 1.62 on the same 0-6 scale; the men’s average was a whopping 4.48. This gender difference was statistically significant and quite large (for any stats geeks out there: Cohen d’s was = 1.50).
Finally, only 2 percent of women said they’d already had an MFM (and all had reported only having one such experience); by comparison, a full 10 percent of men said they’d had an FMF (and half of them reported having had more than one such experience, with a few reporting up to 20).
A big caveat:
Of course, this survey doesn’t give us a complete picture of people’s interest in threesomes—women were not asked about an FMF scenario, for example, and men were not asked about a MFM scenario. The gender difference might be much smaller, nonexistent, or even reversed, as anecdotal evidence suggests both women and men are more interested in a threesome with two women than with two men.
Laura Miller reviews Tony Dokoupil’s memoir about his father, who smuggled marijuana into the US during the ’70s and ’80s:
The pot Americans smoke today is almost entirely homegrown, sleekly and cleanly bred and raised. By contrast, “my father’s pot was dirty: doused in ocean spray, soaked in fuel, infested with spiders.” But for decades, the heyday of Dokoupil’s father and his cronies, smuggled dope was the only — or at least the best — game in town. Dokoupil offers a history of the American marijuana trade during those years, when smugglers were celebrated as daring counterculture heroes by magazines like High Times, men and women who put their freedom and occasionally their lives at risk to help their fellow freaks get high. Well, and also to make a buck — lots and lots of bucks. For a while, during the Carter administration, decriminalization advanced and legalization seemed imminent, but then Ronald Reagan and his gaunt, piously anti-drug wife took the White House and turned up the heat again with their war on drugs.
In a recent interview, Dokoupil elaborated on what motivated his father to move illegal drugs:
In the late 1970s, 90 percent of the marijuana was coming into Florida. It was primarily Colombian; some of it was Jamaican. My father’s weed would be delivered to an old fishing shack in the [Florida] Keys. … It’s only one road that connects that necklace of islands and everyone knew that that was the road on which marijuana was smuggled into the country. So to smuggle on that road took an incredible amount of tolerance for risk.
So my father, despite being a partner in the operation, volunteered, for $25,000 a shot, to drive Winnebagos of weed out of the Keys and into America, just for the sheer thrill of it. He had no financial reason to do it. He had no operational reason to do it. … But by then he was addicted to the sensation of it, to the risk.
The Dish 