Friday

It's Friday, 35 minutes to Maher, and the laptop is in front of me. I don't really have time to write actual posts any more (although I'm fucking money with a table saw), but the debilitating condition that caused me to start this blog still afflicts me - where I feel compelled to write down my thoughts before they wander off into the wilderness - so I'm hoping to capture a few I have floating around right now.

Bill Maher has grilled some reporters in the past few seasons on how they fell asleep in the run-up to war with Iraq. I'm sure a lot of reporters out there do feel upset that their profession looked so bad when all that was happening. I'm just starting to wonder when one of those people is gonna point out that we're watching CSI: Crazytown on the news while our law breaking President is putting together a war against Iran with the sophistication of a sleepover camp panty raid.

I've finally stopped pestering Steve Schwartz on his blog. And to be clear, he's actually a different Steve Schwartz than this guy. I've gotten some comments and emails thinking I'm arguing with the other Steve Schwartz, but I'm not. And that might be a good thing, because the other Steve Schwartz wrote this:

The suicide of Hunter S. Thompson, aged 65, according to the New York Times, or 67, according to the Washington Post, at his home in Aspen, may definitively mark the conclusion of the chaotic "baby-boomer" rebellion that began in the 1950s and crested in the 1960s, and which was dignified with the title of "the counter-culture."

"Counter" it was, as an expression of defiance toward everything normal and reliable in society. "Culture" it was not, any more than Thompson's incoherent scribblings constituted, as they were so often indulgently described, a form of journalism.

As for the Seattle Steve, I found it interesting that he'd think that I'd bristle at comparisons between drug use and religion, considering that I wrote about that last Saturday. The one thing about the war on drugs that's vitally important to understand is that we'll have the most success in dealing with drug-related problems here when we take the time to discern between use and abuse. Many people use drugs responsibly, some don't. This is no different than religion, any religion. Many, if not most, people deal with faith responsibly. However, some use it in a way to incite violence or hatred. The reason that all of this matters is that if we declare Islam an evil religion the same way we assume that any kind of illicit drug use is a gateway to death, we're going to lose the war on terror the same spectacular way we're losing the war on drugs. By attacking only a symptom of the problem without concern for the liberty of others, every push of the war will backfire. Problems have to be solved at their root, and the root of the problem in the Middle East has never been about religion, it's always been about autonomy.