I'm oddly sleepy tonight, so rather than go into anything thoughtful or at length, let me get something off of my chest that's been bugging me all week.

Last Sunday, I was at a party at a friend's house, and one of the guests got literally falling-down drunk. So be it; not everybody does as good a job of holding their liquor, and some people actually like (and some hosts actually tolerate) getting so sloppy drunk they can't even walk. No big deal. No big deal, that is, until along about 10 or 11 pm, the drunk decided it would be a crisis of biblical proportions if he didn't get home to feed his dogs before morning, so he had to drive home, right now. We stopped him by talking him out of it. Then we had to stop him from making a break for the door; it took four of us to get him away from the door, sitting down, and agreeing to wait for the cab we called for him. But because of last weekend's storms (which are what's reminding me, we're having a lovely one now, too), the cabs were running too slow for him ... so he made another break for his car. It took three of us to stop him, but it was made easier by the fact that he was so falling-down drunk that he went arse-over-teakettle trying to navigate his way down a half a flight of porch steps, even while clinging desperately to the railing. We got him away from his car, assured him the cab would be here any minute now ... and he waited until we were distracted by the storm, and made another break for it, almost making it into his car before the biggest of us tackled him. It took physical force and threats of a 911 call to distract him long enough for the host to actually pick his pocket and steal his keys. Which he responded to, over the next several minutes, with plaintive pleas for his keys, and with two attempts to take his keys back from the host via deception in one case, then force.

I'm religiously contemptuous of people who get that drunk. But that's not the part that's been gnawing at me all week. The part that's been gnawing at me all week is this: the whole time, he kept insisting he was completely, perfectly, 100% sober. He couldn't walk two steps on flat level flooring without holding onto something. He couldn't navigate three stair-steps while holding onto the railing without falling down. And he couldn't speak a sentence longer than four words without losing his train of thought and trailing off into awkward silence for long, long seconds at a time. But he was still convinced, or at least thought it was plausible to convince us, that he was sober and safe to drive. And you know what? I can almost, not really but almost, excuse that in someone the very first time they get drunk, if they've never been confronted with external evidence of how impaired they are when they're in that condition. But this guy's as old as I am, and been drinking even longer, and he still hasn't learned better? Inexcusable.

But you know what? I've been around a lot of intoxicated people in my almost 48 years of life, intoxicated on just about everything ever invented to get off on except (oddly enough) cocaine, heroin, or PCP. I've been around people who were trashed out of their mind on drugs you've maybe never even heard of. And I'm told that what I'm about to say may not actually be true about cocaine, so I'll accept that caveat, that possible exception to what I'm about to say, which is this: with only that one possible exception, I have noticed this huge and glaring difference between drunks and between stoners, and it's that only the drunks don't think that they're intoxicated. Drunks insist that they're completely fine, and then go on to demonstrate their confidence that they're completely fine by attempting physical feats that are flatly impossible for them in their current condition. The results range from minor property damage up to and including mass murder by driving their cars at 100 mi/hr and up head on into busloads of orphans, all of them insisting the whole way to anyone who tries to stop them, "leave me alone, I'm fine." Stoners, on the other hand, without exception I have ever seen, not only know that they're screwed up, not only tend to sit almost completely still because they know they're too screwed-up to function, on top of that? How screwed up they are is practically all they can talk about, or at least topic #1 of any conversation, the one they keep coming back to.

And even after studying the culture and physiology and history and theology of alcohol at substantial length? (And not for the first time, let me recommend an extraordinarily good book on the subject, Stephen Braun, Buzz: The Science and Lore of Alcohol and Caffeine.) I am still baffled as to why this is. But I have long past had it up to here with it.

This link's been sitting on my desktop for almost two weeks now, constantly reminding me that I wanted to bring it to your attention and say a thing or two about it: Eric Eckholm, "Reports Find Racial Gap in Drug Arrests," New York Times, May 6th, 2008. It's based largely on a newly updated report from Human Rights Watch, Targeting Blacks: Drug Law Enforcement and Race in the United States, and its main conclusion, as reported by the Times, is that "large disparities persist in the rate at which blacks and whites are arrested and imprisoned for drug offenses, even though the two races use illegal drugs at roughly equal rates" (emphasis added by me).

I emphasize the end of that sentence because most Americans who get their news from television take it for granted that this is not true, but you can look up the numbers yourself in the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration's recurring reports. This paragraph in the Times was a major breakthrough of reality into most people's racist fiction; I've heard it claimed that it's the first time a major newspaper in the US has admitted, above the fold, that blacks and whites use illegal drugs at basically identical rates.

Now, here's the fascinating thing that I didn't know until I saw it in the Times: this is a more localized problem than I ever guessed. In every state for which they were able to get data, black drug users are more likely to go to jail than white drug users. But the level of the disparity varies from a low in my own home state of Missouri of 2.7 to 1, to a high in Wisconsin (of all places) of forty two point four to one. The comments to the Times article include a lot of speculation, only some of it at all informed by facts, as to why the disparity is so wide. One plausible hypothesis about Missouri's numbers is that it's the result of a very high profile campaign against both marijuana and methamphetamine by the state police in (very, very white) rural south-central Missouri bringing up the arrest rate for white drug users. One hypothesis that I find equally plausible about Barack Obama's home state of Illinois, knowing what I know about Illinois politics, is that one of the things that makes Illinois' rate the 2nd worst in the nation (23.6 to 1) has to do with the fact that the state police and the feds both almost completely ignore down-state Illinois (almost entirely white outside of the East St. Louis area), that all the police resources are up in (more racially mixed) Chicago, so there are no state or federal cops to bust the vast majority of Illinois' white drug users who live in nearly-all-white rural counties. Anyway, the actual results are in a table in the report I linked above, but to give you a taste for it, here's the Times' map:



Oh, and I can't resist saying it, but isn't it just fascinating overlaying that map with the map of the states that Hillary Clinton won?

Want to do something really important about racism in this country, particularly about deteriorating relationships between police and black men? There's a problem we've got that's pretty nearly insoluble. I've been busting some serious skull sweat over this one for over a year now, since I first started to realize what this one particular part of the problem might be coming from, and I'm stumped. But if we as a nation don't find a solution to this problem, it may yet get to the point that Spider Robinson used to fret about in his writings, the day where black and white America can no longer live together in peace at all. First, let me lay out the problem, then let me go over some of the obvious things you might suggest we should try and why they won't work.

Let's start with something that almost everyone who teaches law enforcement knows, and that almost everyone in black America knows, and that at least some cops know, and that you probably have heard but don't think about much. There is a "gold standard" ongoing scientific study of Americans' drug use, an almost impossible to criticize, widely recognized recurring survey by the US Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, a branch of the US Department of Health and Human Services. As a former mathematician myself, I can tell you that the methodology of this study is bullet-proof. And one of its rather important and too-often over-looked findings is that there is no statistically significant difference in drug usage patterns between blacks and whites. None. So since black male drug users make up roughly 6% of the drug-using population, then if both black drug users and white drug users were arrested, tried, convicted, and sentenced at the same rate and in the same way, one would expect that black males would make up 6% of those in prison at any given time for drug-related offenses. The actual number is closer to 75%.

How did we get to this point? Three words: Terry versus Ohio.

Way back in 1968, when the "War on Drugs" wasn't even a glimmer in not-yet-President Richard Nixon's eye, the Supreme Court ruled that any time a police officer is interacting with a member of the public and feels unsafe, whether they've arrested that person or not, the officer is entitled to make the other person submit to what is called "a Terry stop," to pat-down the outside of their clothes looking for any easily detectable evidence of a weapon. The Court has subsequently ruled that if a Terry stop turns up any evidence of another crime, even if it's one the officer had no reasonable expectation of finding and there was no grounds for a search warrant, that evidence can be used to arrest someone for and convict them of a crime. So if you get pulled over for a traffic stop, and the cop decides that you might have a gun or a knife on your person, and he wants to make sure you don't, and he pats you down and finds no weapon but does find a crack pipe with crack residue, or a bong with marijuana residue, or if while he's patting you down a little baggie or square of foil falls out of your clothes and lands on the ground, that's evidence that's okay to use against you in court, even though it was found without your consent to a search and without a search warrant.

And who are cops most afraid of in this country, even the ones who think that they aren't racist at all? Black men. Even the black cops are mostly only afraid of black men. As I've said before, it's our national shame. No, really. If you see someone getting patted down for weapons (anywhere outside of a TSA security checkpoint), I'll bet you 6 to 1 it's a black man. If you tell me first that the person who is being searched did nothing suspicious and was polite to the officer, but still got patted down for weapons, I absolutely guarantee you it was a black man. And Terry stops are where nearly all drug investigations and arrests begin in America. So "everybody knows" that almost all of the drug users in America are black men (even though that's completely false). Think that isn't reason enough for black men to be angry? Think that anger doesn't make them even scarier? Think that steadily escalating fear of their anger doesn't make the cops even more likely to search them for weapons? We're in a spiral here, and it goes to a very ugly place.

And that even assumes that everybody involved has good intentions. We don't know what percentage of the police force are bigots who would plant evidence on a black man if they didn't find any. But we know that number is non-zero. And have reason to believe it's dangerously large. This, more than anything, is why the idea of any American being searched without a warrant from a judge based on sworn eyewitness testimony sufficient to total up to probable cause is on the short list of things that the Founding Fathers fought to the death to prevent.

But you don't even have to assume that race is the bad reason. Every cop who's ever worked narcotics knows that if he could just come up with some way to search people, he'd find people with drugs. He knows that if he searched 10 people chosen any old which way at any given time, one of them would be carrying drugs. But the only warrantless search he can do is a Terry stop. And what's going to happen to him on cross-examination if he tries to say to the jury, with a straight face, that he was worried that a 60-year-old breast cancer survivor might have a knife? What's the jury going to say when he says that he thought that corporate lawyer in the $3,000 imported Italian suit was going to pull a gun on him -- never mind that that's the guy who probably has the most drugs on him? Which is the jury going to believe, that he really was in fear for his life or that he was illegally looking for an excuse to execute a warrantless search? No, other than teenagers who are dressed sloppily or who give him attitude, who are the only people he's allowed to search for drugs without probable cause? Black men.

But what can we do about it?

End the War on Drugs? You wish. Not this decade, or the next, maybe not even in your lifetime at this rate. Certainly not in time to solve this problem. By all means, if you want the War on Drugs to end, keep campaigning for it. But don't count on that being this country's salvation; by the earliest possible time it could come, it will come as too little, too late.

Make the cops give up Terry stop pat-downs without probable cause? Never going to happen. You are never going to get a 5-vote majority on the US Supreme Court to tell cops that they just have to accept the possibility of some suspect pulling a gun on them without giving them some chance to prevent it.

Make the cops search everybody they interact with, making getting patted down for weapons something that happens every time you talk to a cop? By the reasoning of Terry v Ohio, this really is what they ought to be doing. Because once you look past the irrational fear of black men and look at the actual reports of police officers being shot or stabbed, there's no age, income, ethnic, or racial profile that helps. Anybody could have a warrant that they'd rather kill someone than face. But look at how loud and persistent the calls have been for the TSA to use ethnic profiling in their pat-downs, even though all that would do is tell al Qaeda they can smuggle anything they want onto a plane if their agent looks white enough. The American people would not sit still for rich white men, for elderly grandmothers, for pre-teen kids, for priests and nuns being patted down every time they come face to face with a cop.

Change the Terry stop procedures so they can't come up with drug evidence? Now that's an interesting prospect. But it poses serious technological challenges. Because they are required to search everyone, the TSA is desperately trying to get away from pat-down searches, and spending a small fortune to find ways to do it. But there's no way every police officer on patrol could fit a backscatter x-ray machine into his car or onto his bicycle. On the other hand, my friends who've been through US Secret Service checkpoints lately tell me that the Secret Service, which has at least as much reason to be concerned about concealed weapons as your average cop making a traffic stop, makes do just fine with hand-held magnetometer (metal detector) wands unless they do have probable cause for a more thorough search. Could we require all Terry stops to be done without coming into contact with the person, by use of magnetometers? Well, it wouldn't catch all plausible weapons, not anything made of plastic (or glass, or obsidian, or bamboo, or whatever). But then, a current Terry stop won't catch all plausible weapons, either. No, the bigger obstacle is that it's one more thing to tell cops they have to carry with them at all times. Have you looked at a cop's belt lately? What they have to carry is already getting insane. So yeah, if you can find a hand-held magnetometer likely to catch any gun, or any knife larger than a couple of inches, from a distance of a couple of inches from the body through cloth, that is weather proof, shock resistant, reliable, affordable, and under a couple of ounces of weight, yeah, that might work. Years from now, when we get them all rolled out. Do we have that long?

If anybody else has any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Take your time. But don't wait too long, or Meacham Park won't be the only part of the US that boils over.

I'm an odd sort of sports fan. Each individual game bores me to tears. Individual players and their careers bore me even more. The actual games being played on the field, their rules and their history and their culture and their traditions, are of only the slightest interest. I have absolutely no interest in any particular team. That goes double for any "home team," none of whom I ever felt were representing me in the slightest. Nonetheless, I do follow sports in two regards. I am modestly fascinated by the changing nature of sports, not of any individual sport but of sports, through history. And I am extremely fascinated by the economics of professional sport, which I recognize as one of the world's major entertainment industries, as a major employer (counting suppliers and peripheral industries). To me, sports news is like crime news: I could hardly care less about news about any particular crime or criminal unless someone I know personally is involved, but I'm deeply interested in statistical trends in crime and crime fighting.

If you share my interest in sports trends news but only in the slightest way, you could do a lot worse than to get your sports news from my favorite sports "journalist," Tank McNamara (the fictional cartoon avatar of Jeff Millar and Bill Hinds). Knowing that the Mitchell Report was coming out this week, Tank spent a chunk of last week making absolutely sure that whether former senator Mitchell got it right or not (and he did), that people remember there are a lot more people culpable in the baseball cheating scandal than the cheating players and the designer drug dealers and the body sculptors who hacked the cheaters' bodies. (As an aside, how can any science fiction fan who was reading cyberpunk in the 1980s not be fascinated by an early 21st century business scandal involving performance enhancing designer drugs and extreme body sculpting?) For the next couple of days, you can read the relevant strips (December 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 8th) on UClick.com. And at the top of Millar and Hinds' list of points to make is that it was always in the power of the team owners and of the commissioner of baseball to do something about this before it got out of hand. Why didn't they? Money. Steroids and human growth hormone and life-threatening training regimens have been good business.

Now, most of the attention to this point, today, has been with regard to the danger that, in the long run, they weren't going to be good business. Even if having a few players cheat made the game more attractive to fans in the short run, in the long run those players' success created pressure on other players to cheat. (The first law of systems analysis, as I was taught it: "The behavior that a system rewards is the behavior the system produces.") If enough players cheat, the secret of their cheating becomes impossible to keep. If enough players get caught cheating, the game gets a reputation for being rigged, and full of cheaters. So, much of today's analysis has centered around the question of what the league needs to do, at bare minimum, to keep the tax-subsidized wealthy in their deductible sky boxes, to keep the middle class and working class attendees in the bleachers buying massively overpriced refreshments, and most importantly to keep the butts on couches all over America tuned into the advertisements that provide nearly all of the non-taxpayer revenue that props up the asset value of those monopoly franchises. And I don't mean to demean that question! It's a fascinating question, it's one that touches on important matters of fiscal policy, and of corporate law, and of economic policy, and of law and justice, and of consumer psychology. Yes, by all means, keep discussing these questions.

But while we're at it, let me ask you another question, one that only a few cranky sportswriters (and paid whores for the players' union) have asked. Let's say we manage to make the game of baseball squeaky clean. Will anybody still watch it?

Right before the steroids era, I think it was around 1980, some comedian described baseball as two guys playing catch, one guy with a stick trying to stop them, and seven guys standing around in a big open field with nothing to do but scratch their testicles. He wasn't far off. Advances in pitching technology and training had turned baseball into something that baseball jargon and statistics still treat it as; the term is "a pitchers' duel." And if you're a baseball nerd, especially a baseball statistics nerd, there is nothing more exciting to you than that rare "perfect game," a no-hit shut-out. A game where one side fields exactly 27 batters, not one of which ever connects with the ball. The thing is, careful frame-by-frame analysis of baseball pitching and other advances in training got it to the point where that was happening almost regularly, where a pitcher's career was suddenly in danger if more than a couple of runs were scored, between the two sides, in the entire course of a 9 inning game. Baseball scores were starting to resemble hockey and soccer scores. And half or more of the fans, myself included, were bored to death. If pitchers get that much better than batters, it's even worse for baseball than when 8% (estimated) of the batters turn themselves into heavily juiced semi-cyborgs and don't really bother to hide it, because slow-motion pitchers' duels are boring.

That's why everybody in a position of authority looked the other way when juiced up baseball players grew to the size of small tool sheds and bulked up to the point they could no longer turn their heads or raise their arms above their shoulders. There was, among insiders and not a few professional sportswriters, a sense that the juice was all that was saving baseball from terminal ennui. Nor is it a coincidence that the players' union and the owners and the commissioner's office waited to even start talking about curbing steroid use until the mid to late 1990s. Why, because of negative publicity over steroids? Maybe a little; during the 1998 McGwire/Sosa home-run race, the fact that McGwire was no longer recognizably human did attract some negative publicity. But 1998, and to a lesser extent 1993 before it, changed baseball in another way that made discussion of curbing illegal enhancement of batters discussable at last: the addition of 4 more teams to major league baseball diluted the pool of available top-quality pitchers. There were no longer enough guys in America who were capable of learning to pitch at the very top level to provide each team with enough such pitchers to have one on the mound at all times in all games, and suddenly even non-juiced players were able to hit the ball occasionally again, too.

But population keeps going up, and players are recruited from many countries, and the technology of pitcher training keeps improving in ways that don't qualify as cheating in baseball. (And yes, admittedly, occasionally in ways that do.) So major league baseball faces a question that seems fascinating to me: if we take away the hitters' human growth hormone and steroids and it turns out that ordinary well-trained human athletes can no longer reliably hit the ball, what are we going to do about it? For what it's worth, I think it may be time for yet another rules change. It's not unthinkable, you know. The pitchers' mound used to be a lot closer to the plate than it is now; maybe it's time to move it farther back yet again to give batters more time to see the ball coming. Or maybe lower the mound or eliminate it altogether, making the players arc their pitches more to cover the distance. Strike zones have theoretically not changed ever, but we know that umpires vary widely over time in which way their errors bias, against the pitcher or for him. Maybe it's time to change the bats themselves to improve hitting, or change the design of the balls to make them easier to hit. And if minor tweaks don't keep the game lively, remember that other sports have rewritten their rules in even more aggressive ways before, like imposition of the shot clock in basketball after players determined to run out the clock boringly got too good at keeping the other team from stealing the ball. So, yeah: If honest baseball turns boring again, like it was when I was a kid, will they go back to turning a blind eye to cheating by batters, will they let baseball wither on the vine for a few years, or will they change the game itself to make it more active and more interesting? That's the question that's most interesting to me.

On March 22nd, St. Louis baseball Cardinals manager Tony Larussa was greeted with a standing ovation when he showed up for a spring training game. He wasn't being applauded for having won the previous year's championship; that applause had come earlier. No, his applause on March 22nd was in praise of his drunk-driving arrest. At 4:07 am on the 22nd, the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office had found him on the side of the road, behind the wheel of his car, with the engine running. He was so drunk that he barely managed to pull over and stop before he passed out; he passed out so hard and so fast that he didn't even manage to put the car in park. But, hey, he apologized. He didn't say what he was apologizing for, since he's also plead not guilty despite having been literally caught as guilty as a cat in a goldfish bowl. But when you're in Major League Baseball, nobody brings these things up. You admit that something happened the night before that you're "embarrassed" about, and that's enough for the fans to give you a standing ovation. (Assuming you're a winner, any way.)

I guess new St. Louis Cardinals relief pitcher Josh Hancock wanted his standing ovation, too.

He didn't get one. Although he did get a couple of moments of silence. He also got a media-frenzied but lovely funeral service. Which, thank the Gods, the guy he hit didn't quite need. Because you see, Saturday night (well, Sunday morning at 12:41 am, but that's still more or less Saturday night) he left a bar after drinking for at least three hours, way more drunk than the law allows, and while speeding and chatting on his cell phone, he rammed his SUV into a flatbed tow truck where some ordinary working class guy was helpfully trying to get some poor guy's Geo Prizm off of the side of the road. Hancock was so drunk and so distracted (and possibly so stoned, as they found dope in the car, too) that he didn't even tap the brakes; he barely even tried to swerve.

And right up until the police announced, today, that marijuana was found in Hancock's car, the fans were almost completely 100% defensive of Hancock's right to get drunk and then race down the highway at lethal speeds and crash into a tow truck while chatting with some girl he was on his way to go see. The marijuana, you see, "set a bad example for the kids" I heard several people say tonight on the news. Committing vehicular suicide and nearly killing at least one other person isn't "setting a bad example for the kids," but half an ounce of dope in the glove box is.

I'm so mad about this I could spit. I'm sick and tired of drunk drivers getting a pass. Notice that Larussa's drunk driving arrest record, linked above, says that it's his first offense? It always is. Because nobody who can afford the $200 for a lawyer ever gets actually convicted of drunk driving unless the media are there to film it. So the next time they get busted for drunk driving, that's still a first offense, too. And so will the next one be. And so on, and so on, until they do something that makes the news like getting caught on camera or killing somebody or getting busted for leaving the scene of an accident. And, of course, the rules are different for rich people and celebrities, too. You'll notice that on Friday Paris Hilton was sentenced to serve out her sentence for her drunk-driving conviction, because she couldn't be bothered to remember that she was on parole or that her driver's license was suspended, or to even show up on time for her parole revocation hearing? Yep, they're going to throw the book at her. As the New York Times was just talking about, they're going to ... charge her about 2/3 to half of what a cheap hotel room in that city costs to put her in a celebrities- and rich-people-only "jail cell" that differs from a cheap hotel room only in that it locks from the outside and she has to have a roommate. And rich athletes don't even end up having to do that much: no, right up until they die or kill somebody, they keep getting the standing ovations for driving drunk.

Look, it's hard to keep drunks off of the road, because drunk driving factors in almost every standard failure mode in the way the human brain calculates probable outcomes. If somebody knows that they shouldn't drive, they've got a two by two decision matrix to add up in their head: either they drive or they take a cab, and either they would have gotten away with it or they wouldn't. The problem is, if they take a cab, there's one of those awful numbers that the human mind deals badly with: 1. That is to say, 1.00, or 100%. There is a 100% chance that they will have to wait 15 minutes for a cab, and wait 15 minutes for a cab when they leave where they're going, and take another half an hour or more to get their car back via another cab ride the next day. When you make what a major league baseball player makes, the cost of the cab is nearly zero. But when you make what a major league baseball player makes, when you get paid hundreds of dollars an hour for what you do for a living, you tend to rather over-value those several inconvenient quarter-hour chunks of time. And if you would have gotten away with it, then you "paid" those annoying time delays and you paid those cab fares for nothing.

If, on the other hand, you do drive, you have a chance of getting away with it. How high a chance? Look, even sober people are going to screw up that estimate, because (as John Allen Paulos famously documented) people over-value their own skill when they feel like they're in control. Remember, 80% of all drivers think that they're above average drivers. Now factor in how badly they're going to screw up that estimate because (as we all know) almost never do drunks know how drunk they are. So your drunk driver is going to way, way, way over-estimate the odds of getting away with it. So what's he risking if he doesn't get away with it? A (in his mistaken opinion) very very very tiny chance of dying, so small a chance he can't take it seriously, especially since if he's gotten away with it a couple of times he no longer thinks it can happen to him. And an only slightly higher chance of having to pay some ridiculously tiny fine ... offset by the kind of loving public attention that was lavished on Tony Larussa.

That tendency on the part of the fans to excuse anything is a substantial part of what enables athletes to get away with so much, and their well known ability to get away with so much is why they feel no shame or hesitation to keep getting away with so much. Which is why, even if all of the above weren't outrage enough for me, it enrages me even further that the tow-truck driver himself has gone public with a statement forgiving Josh Hancock for almost killing him. Because the driver's a good Christian who believes in forgiveness? No. Because the driver is, as he said in his statement, "a loyal citizen of the Cardinals Nation." Gaaaaaaaaaaach.

True story: Quite a few years ago was what I call The Year of the Million-Jillion Tickets. I had gone to bed on March 31st 100% confident that I knew that my license plates were due for renewal in two months, which meant I needed to start soon on scheduling the necessary inspection. The next day, on my way to work, law enforcement in every postage stamp sized suburb I passed through was eager to inform me that my memory was incorrect: my plates expired March 31st, not May 31st. I called my mechanic, and couldn't get an inspection scheduled with a mechanic I trusted until Saturday. So for that whole week, wherever I went whether grocery shopping or to work or on other errands, every municipality I passed through ticketed me twice: failure to display current plates, failure to display a current inspection sticker. I think (think!) that it ended up being about 18 pairs of tickets. Unfortunately, because this is what happens to any piece of paper smaller than 8.5" x 11" that enters my life, all but about 4 of those pairs of tickets got lost long before the court dates came around. If I could have remembered which jurisdictions the other 14 were, I could have called them and dealt with it, but I couldn't remember. So I was stuck waiting for however many of those 14 jurisdictions that wanted to do so to issue warrants for my arrest on the charge of failure to appear in court as ordered. As a result, on two separate occasions I spent an evening in local jails waiting to be bailed out by friends, and one of those evenings is the source of the following story.

The St. Louis County lockup is a pair "tanks," a communal cell for each gender, where everybody waiting arraignment or bail is thrown in together. It was no more uncomfortable than the average bus station waiting room, which it more than casually resembled. It was more than adequately safe, since the wall that separated us from the dozen or so dispatchers for county emergency services was transparent bullet-proof plastic; we were never not under observation and, of course, surrounded one wall away by more cops than there were of us. I felt no fear, and spent my waiting time making origami toys (out of a "How to Make Bail" flier) for my fellow inmates, which were well appreciated because they were just as bored as I was. (It's a thing I do.) All of us, that is, except for one guy, who stayed frantically busy for the whole four and a half hours I was in there.

The room also had six or eight telephones with phone books and unlimited free local phone calls. This short, skinny youngish black guy, I'd guess his age at maybe 20, was already hogging one of those phones when I got in and was still frantically looking up numbers and dialing when I left. After about an hour or two, I asked one of the guys I'd made a toy for what the other guy's deal was, what the heck was he doing on the phone this whole time? This deeply amused my new African-American acquaintances, all of whom knew perfectly well what happened to this guy without even asking, and didn't have to overhear his conversations to know what they were. (Later, when I wandered within earshot, I found out they were right, too.) I can now supplement their explanation with some additional details, because I had occasion (during private security training) to study some of the law involved.

Our friend here was pulled over for a routine traffic stop: improper lane use, failure to signal a turn, failure to come to a complete stop at a stop sign, speeding 47 mi/hr in a 35 mi/hr zone or whatever it happened to be. Per US Supreme Court decisions, police in a routine investigation such as a traffic stop do not have to show probable cause to perform a casual, cursory weapons check; it is sufficient for the officer to say, if asked about it, that they felt less than totally safe and wanted to reassure themselves that the person they were questioning wasn't concealing a knife or a gun. These "pat-downs" must be quick, cursory, and confined entirely to the outside of the clothing. But if they find something that might be evidence of another crime, they may ask the subject for permission to search their pockets or inside their clothing. The question is pro-forma, purely rhetorical; the courts have also ruled that saying no is sufficient grounds for the officer to detain the subject while phoning out for a search warrant. Our subject, here, would almost certainly have consented; as someone almost all of whose friends had gone through this experience, he knew the drill. If a warrant was involved, he would have to be prosecuted. But if he consented, a deal was possible: the standard deal.

The standard deal that is offered to every black or Hispanic traffic stop subject when the (nearly inevitable) pat-down turns up any evidence of drug paraphernalia or drugs themselves is this. Cops don't want users as badly as they want sellers. So if he'll tell them the name of at least one dealer, and call that dealer from the lockup and setup a buy (preferably for an undercover officer, or at least while under consenting surveillance in a public place), they'll drop all charges against him and go after the seller. Since there really is no line in the real world of illegal drugs between buyers and sellers, since nearly everybody who buys will also share their drugs with any friend as long as the friend pays their share, it doesn't have to be the person who actually sold him or gave him these drugs. So what our young acquaintance was doing was telephoning literally every person he knew by name, asking them if they had an ounce of marijuana they could spare if he was willing to pay what they'd paid for it. His staying out of jail was contingent on his finding one acquaintance that he could sell down the river in his place.

I am given to understand, although all cops deny it, that among many cops this is 100% routine procedure in traffic stops involving brown or black skinned people. I will also tell you right now, in case any of you can't guess, that you will grow old and die before you hear about this happening to a white friend of yours, unless the white friend does something really stupid to provoke the cop into a search. And this is why, even though the National Institutes of Drug Abuse routine survey of drug use finds that blacks and whites use the same drugs, and use them in statistically similar amounts and at the same rate, it is blacks, not whites, who make up 11% of our population but half of our prison population, and why at any given time a quarter of all African-American men are under formal law enforcement supervision: in jail, in prison, on bail, on probation, or on parole.

Now, here's my modest proposal. We have tried, over and over and over again, to weed out the cops who are performing these one-sided searches and to educate them that race isn't a legitimate grounds to decide who to pat down for weapons. This has clearly failed. So let's make it a routine part of being pulled over. Let's have everybody, black or white, searched for weapons during traffic stops. Let's have everybody who has a lump in their pockets either consent to have those pockets turned out or face a search warrant; let's swab all of their clothes for drug residue. If we're going to put a quarter of our black and brown men in jail for this, and we can't stop doing so, then it's long past time to put a quarter of our white men, white women, and black and brown women in jail for it, too.

Where was I, before a heat wave with its resulting disrupted sleep and constant 35dB humming started rotting my brain? Oh yeah ... A Scanner Darkly. I went to see it for the first time a couple of nights ago, and I love it. That's why I say "for the first time," because I guarantee you I'm going to want to see this one a couple of more times. One one level, I'm having exactly the same reaction to this movie that I had to the Sin City movie. In that case, what we had was what producer/director Rodriguez called an entirely faithful frame-by-frame adaptation of a series of books that I just couldn't get into. It turned out not to be frame-by-frame line-by-line faithful; Rodriguez had shown an almost eerie skill at cutting out the redundant, boring parts that I kept bogging down in in the Miller originals. In this case, what we have is a movie based on (to my taste) the least interesting, least readable book by an author that I'm more than a little fond of. It's being pitched as the most faithful adaptation of a Philip K. Dick novel that's ever been made, and that's just as true of this movie as it was of Sin City. And just like in that movie, what Richard Linklater has done is trimmed out the more redundant, self-pitying, and/or boring of the endless internal monologues of that book. Not all of them, thank Prime. It wouldn't be worth reading (or watching) Dick if it weren't for the ruminations about the relationships between reality, identity, consciousness, society, and repressive government. But no, Linklater's genius here in his best movie since Slackers is that he has managed to keep exactly the right ones.

The result is a movie of almost Zen-like perfect contradiction. The greatest "drug movie" of all time is also the greatest anti-drug movie ever made. The movie, even more than the book, manages to capture a specific long-ago time, best summed up by a throw-away remark of the late Hunter S. Thompson. Thompson thought of himself as a sports, political, and features journalist who wasn't afraid to admit that he was on drugs during the events he was chronicling; this lead to intense pressure from his editors and readers to report more and more about his own drug experiences, for him to become something he never wanted to be, namely America's primary reporter on the internals of the Drug Scene. When he'd finally had enough of that and announced he wouldn't be doing it any more, he gave an interview to a national magazine (I forget which one) where the reporter's first, clueless question was, "What's new in the drug culture?" Thompson's pitch-perfect answer was, "There is no drug culture any more. It's just an increasingly big, increasingly dirty business."

From when white hipsters first began to discover marijuana through the Jazz clubs of the 1920s, through the informal distribution of LSD among the extended friends network of east cost intellectuals and west coast writers in the 1960s, there were no real "drug kingpins." The wealthiest drug dealers in America were barely making enough money to pay the mortgage and utilities on a small house in a declining neighborhood, with barely enough money left over for groceries for themselves and one or two friends. How could it be otherwise? Supply was ubiquitous, and demand low because drugs really were, back then, only something used by a fairly small number of bohemians and drop-outs. Even when the Mafia stepped into the heroin trade during the 1950s (over the corpses of the older generation of mafiosi who wouldn't touch the business) in hopes of regaining the wealth their parents had made during alcohol Prohibition, the wealthiest "drug kingpins" in the world were barely living a comfortable middle class lifestyle. No, it wasn't until marijuana, then cocaine, became fashionable in the 1970s that the market for illegal drugs had enough money in it to make anybody rich. Before that, there was no reason for anybody to become a drug dealer except for the same reason that some people start model railroad shops, or comic book shops, or independent book stores or coffee houses -- to make a bare minimum living doing something that doesn't involve working for other people, where you get to work with stuff that you like and sell to customers who you mostly like because they're just like you.

But as the market expanded beyond the initial core of creative drop-outs, upper middle class dilettantes, and their loser friends, the government became obsessed with finding the "wealthy drug kingpins" who they reasoned (based on their experience with alcohol Prohibition) must be somewhere out there, at the top of things. They set out to do this the way they still do, to this day -- by surveilling, then blackmailing users to find their friends who have a connection that can get them the drugs, hoping to work their way up the chain to the ultimate sources. And Dick was not the first, nor the last, author to write about the specific paranoia that comes from living in a subculture that's under heavy government surveillance and wondering who among your friends is really secret police in disguise. The life and fragile sanity of the narc, of the man or woman who has to live a double life and who makes a living making friends and then betraying them, is sufficiently compelling that it's been an inspiration for hundreds of books and movies.

A Scanner Darkly, like virtually all of Dick's books, takes that experience and makes it science fiction by taking early 1970s politics, whether the Cold War or Watergate or organized crime or the War on Drugs, and taking it to the reductio ad absurdam level. But that makes this the perfect time to make A Scanner Darkly into a movie. Because right now, the overlapping nature of the War on Terror and the War on Drugs, and the culture of corporate corruption most famously reflected in the Enron, Worldcom, and Arthur Andersen scandals (not to mention ongoing corrupt war profiteering from the war in Iraq), manage to make Dick's paranoid vision of a world where guys like Dick Nixon were given every power they fantasized about and it tore the country apart are suddenly not so hard to imagine. When East Germany fell, we got a look into the records of a society where half of the population was living double lives, on the payroll of the secret police and reporting on each other and the other half of the population. Networks of sensors and cameras set up by private individuals and businesses for their own purposes aren't quite networkable to the point where the police can track somebody all the way across town by switching in real time from traffic signal camera to ATM camera to police surveillance camera to the webcams on their computers and secretly planted government microphones and cameras placed under secret "War on Terror" sealed warrants and secret courts. Not in real time, anyway -- but the NSA spying scandals suggest that the technology for this isn't that far off, certainly not any farther out than the "7 years in the future" that Linklater (unlike Dick) specifies. So for both historical and current political reasons, there couldn't be a better movie to make right now, and Linklater's adaptation of A Scanner Darkly perfectly fulfills both needs.

The movie itself is a work of art. I'm not even vaguely a fan of Keanu Reeves, but I have to agree with the critics that he is the perfect actor to voice the lead in this movie; no matter what role he's played, Reeves has always sounded like he was vaguely disconnected from the reality around him, like he wasn't really all there and wasn't really firing on all cylinders, and that's exactly what was needed for a character whose brain is literally falling apart under the weight of the drugs he has to take to do his job. Winona Ryder, Robert Downey Jr, and Woody Harrelson have all had their own famous breakdowns, which makes them the ideal actors to voice the mentally-fragile slackers who all hang out with and do drugs with our lead character. Rory Cochrane does a great job of playing a guy that, you sense, they let hang around them even though he's as dumb as a post and way, way too far gone into personality disintegration and insanity, because he used to be a friend of theirs and used to be cool. And in fact, if you've ever had any friends who were really into drugs, you've known all five of these characters. (I'm mightily resisting the urge to tease an old friend of mine the way his wife teased me about Marv in Sin City, by pointing to Downey's character and saying, "Look, they made a movie about you!") I'm never crazy about rotoscoping as an animation technology, but here it exactly captures the right mood for the movie. Everything looks real, and unreal, at the same time, with perceptible flickering as if you were seeing tracers or having trouble focusing your burnt-out eyes.

No, I'm definitely going to be seeing this one again, and I'll be first in line for the DVD.

An exercise in unlikely outcomes: It will be George Bush's fault when, in a couple of years, they make a big-screen movie adaptation of the old TV show Miami Vice (which will have little or nothing to do with the original show). George Bush may even have set the wheels in motion that will lead, in a few years, to a big-budget movie adaptation of the classic computer game Grand Theft Auto: Vice City.

Because the Iraq War has used up and worn out just about every soldier, weapon, and other asset in the US Army's inventory, on Thursday Donald Rumsfeld proposed that the US stop using the fleet of seven Blackhawk helicopters that are currently patrolling the Caribbean to interdict cocaine smugglers, so the choppers and their crews can be sent to Iraq. Instead, their current job will be turned over to the Coast Guard, which has only three much slower, much shorter ranged Jayhawk helicopters. Those Blackhawks were sent down there 20 years ago specifically because the Jayhawk helicopters couldn't do the job.

In part because of a few of the CIA's "self funding operations" in Central America in the early 80s, but also because of how easy it was for cocaine smugglers to out-maneuver and out-run the Coast Guard, two things happened in the Caribbean at the time that had a powerful influence on popular culture. The first was that the "cigarette boat," a deep-water racing boat with top speeds that could almost impress a jet pilot, became a cultural icon. Even then-President George H.W. Bush bought one. The other was that, since nearly all of the US's sixteen and a half million dollar a day cocaine trade was coming ashore in Miami, the "Casablanca of the Caribbean" became literally awash in money. With those kinds of profits concentrated in that small a space, even trickle-down economics eventually works, sort of. As a result, Miami politics achieved legendary levels of corruption far, far beyond Florida's already famously high baseline. Miami real estate prices soared, as cocaine importers had so much money they were desperate to find anything, anything at all, to buy with it. And at the intersection of Guys With Too Much Money Street and Way Too Much Cocaine Avenue you always find supermodels hanging out, so the cutting edge of the American fashion industry rushed to finish its migration from New York City to South Beach, Miami, Florida. In the 1980s, Miami became legendary throughout the world for glitz, fashion, conspicuous consumption, political corruption, and murderously deadly drug traffickers.

Many artists and writers of the time sought to capture this cultural moment. Not the least of them, political satirist and hard-boiled thriller author Carl Hiaasen owes his entire career to the fact that he picked just that time to be assigned to that classic awful entry-level job in journalism, the night-shift crime reporting beat, at the Miami Herald. But the two works of popular art that captured the imagination, that came to fully symbolize the excesses of Miami, Florida during the height of the cocaine boom, were a buddy-cop TV show about two detectives working the cases at the intersection of cocaine and assassination, called Miami Vice, and the first major upgrade to the now-famous computer game franchise, Grand Theft Auto: Vice City in which a convicted former Miami drug dealer who's released from prison at the height of the cocaine boom tries to force his way into the new, bigger money.

Well, with the US so desperate for military assets to send into Iraq, desperate enough to give cocaine traffickers in cigarette boats a free pass into Miami, everything old will be new again. And there was already a long-standing trend towards cherry-picking the pop cultural icons of Hollywood financiers' childhood and remaking them as big-budget movies -- consider, if you will, the Dukes of Hazzard, Charlie's Angels, Josie and the Pussycats, and Super Mario Brothers movies. A few years from now, the odds were already uncomfortably likely that we were going to get a Miami Vice movie and a Grand Theft Auto: Vice City movie. But with the current administration's policies all but guaranteeing that in a few years the old classic Miami Vice and Grand Theft Auto: Vice City plotlines will suddenly be topical again, has the President raised those odds from merely likely to nearly guaranteed?

The reason that the Current Mood field has been set to "Sore" since last Friday or so is that on last Friday afternoon the 27th, virtually without warning, my back started screaming in mortal agony. By last Friday night, it had reached the "torments of the damned" level, and the pain covered the entire area from the top of my left kidney in back to about two to four inches down the inside of my left thigh. Even with 2 off-brand Aleve every 8 hours, it felt (and still mostly feels) like I'm being kicked in the gonads approximately every one to two hours, with the pain made worse by any attempt to bend over or sit down. By the next morning, after a mostly sleepless night, I began to wonder if it was kidney stones, because according to the NIH web site, the area of pain for kidney stones exactly matched the area of pain on me.

I got in to see the doctor on Tuesday and got a $800+ abdominal CT scan late Tuesday afternoon, along with a dishonest prescription. (More on that in a minute.) By Wednesday morning, the CT scan confirmed that the doctor's guess (based on the urine workup) was right and my guess was wrong. He said it was just lower back pain. I insisted on further testing because nothing has happened to me that would explain any kind of a major back injury. The only thing I could think of was that my faithful (trash-dock road-killed) executive desk chair was finally losing its back support pins, the pins that held the back in place, and so I wasn't getting as much back support as I'm used to. But heck, both back in my rent-a-cop days and when I was working for The Company That Would Rather I Didn't Use Their Name, I sat in much worse chairs for longer at a stretch with fewer breaks, with nothing like this much pain. He, of course, asked if I'd been in any serious automobile accidents, and I said, no, none that I could remember.

Late Thursday afternoon, I had a flash of inspiration. Yes, I was in an accident. I'm such a dork that I'd forgotten it altogether, because it was such a minor accident, and because I experienced absolutely zero pain ... not just at the time, but any time since then. Some of you may remember it: back on November 18th I got run into, at about 5 mi/hr, by some senile blue-haired octogenarian who needed more than 5 minutes to react to the "sudden" shock of her foot having slipped off the brake pedal while parking. I escaped injury at the time by doing a rather acrobatic roll across her hood. The muscles that hurt now are exactly the muscles I would have over-extended doing that lean, jump, tuck, and roll. So the current working theory is that I received a very, very, very minor back injury a month and a half ago, that hadn't completely healed. I wouldn't have noticed, because I have a fairly high pain threshold and very little bodily awareness. Then when the back support on the chair I spend 8, 10 hours a day in started to fail, the chair exacerbated the back injury enough to start crippling spasms.

kukla_tko42 told me that I might have hidden long-term injuries, and that phobias about dealing with bureaucracy or not I should have gotten the driver's insurance information and demanded a police report. Learn from my mistake: Kukla is always right. Dammit. Anyway, I got the broken chair replaced; the new one, a $99 cloth-covered "manager chair" from Office Max (+$10 to extend the warranty on the casters and the fabric to 4 years, and as much as I use this chair, it was worth it) has even better lumbar support (but less padding overall) than my old faithful companion. Hopefully the back will just heal.

To my vast aggravation, the doctor sent me home with a very expensive and completely worthless placebo: nabumeton (the generic version of Relafen). I'd never heard of it, which I suspect is why he picked it. What I was lied to and told was that it was a combination pain killer and muscle relaxant. It being a new drug to me, I of course searched the online literature as soon as I got home with it, before I took even the first pill. What I failed to find puzzled me enough that I emailed a doctor friend of mine, who did some professional literature searches of her own. Relafen is by no means a muscle relaxant. It's just an NSAID, not significantly different from aspirin. It's not even as effective a pain killer as the 3 times cheaper over the counter drug I was already taking and tolerating well, the generic Aleve. I've scheduled a follow-up visit for this coming Tuesday, and I intend to have words about this. Not least of which I want to know, since he was (correctly, it turns out) so convinced it was spasming back muscles, why didn't he prescribe a muscle relaxant like his office told me told me he had?

Oh, but the CT scan turned up one thing that faintly amuses and faintly aggravates me. Way the holy heck back in 1989, at my pre-employment physical for The Conspiracy, the company-picked doctor said that I had a small hernia. So I asked my regular doctor about it, who checked and then said that the company's doctor was smoking crack. As I've had to change primary care physicians over the years, I kept asking about this, until something like 4 out of 5 doctors in a row said no, no hernia. So I stopped asking. What was the one thing that the CT scan did turn up? "Small right inguinal (groin) hernia." Upon viewing the CT scan, the doctor gave me the same advice that that first doctor gave me back in 1989, that it's so small that since it's not causing me any problems, it's not worth the risk of surgery to fix it.

So four doctors in the row, when specifically asked, failed to find a common health problem on me. Only one doctor I've visited in my entire life went to the trouble of doing a really good medical history on me, and that had more to do with the fact that she was a personal friend than anything professional (although I gather that she's that determined to extract a thorough medical history from all her patients, which is unsurprisingly why she finds and solves problems that no other doctor at her hospital finds). And my current doctor just sent me home with a bunch of $3/pill aspirin and lied to me about what it was supposed to do for me. So I asked my doctor friend, what is it that we Hickses are doing wrong, that this is the quality of health care we've all gotten, all the time, all the way back to when my parents were kids seventy years ago or more? Am I doing something wrong? She says no, it's the American health industry, which does everything it can to dis-incent any competent doctor from going into general medical practice, to all but force all the smarter ones to become specialists, and which then rigs its reimbursement schedules and industry-standard pricing models to a schedule of, ideally, no more than 5 minutes per patient visit. She says that her own father, a retired surgeon, can't find a good primary care physician. I'm a bit crabby about that. And I don't think it's just the shortness of sleep, my fear of disappointing my too-patient girlfriend by getting crippled up this early in the relationship, or the solid week of constant pain that flairs up into mortal agony every hour or so, talking here.

The other day I asked as many of you as can spare the time to go watch the Internet version of a short animated video called "More," and (so far) six of you did, and thanks. Adding your interpretations of it to kukla_tko42's, and my own fragmentary interpretation of it, I think I sort of understand. Like all bits of Terribly Meaningful Art, it means something a little different to each person. My primary concern was to try to understand what it meant to Kukla, and why she (mistakenly, this time) thought it would be powerfully meaningful to me.

The opening scene is of what we're given to understand is a dream of a happy memory from childhood that haunts our hero. He wakes from the dream into an ugly room in a dreary city, rides a dreary bus to his dreary job, where his screaming boss bullies him to make the only non-gray object in his whole gray world, a popular consumer product called Happy, faster and faster. Our Hero fancies himself an inventor, and eventually finds a way to design something even better than Happy, into which he's invested some of his own happy memories and his own spirit, which he calls Bliss. Bliss is so much better than Happy that he becomes wealthy and famous, and he takes over the Happy company. Now the same screaming boss pesters the same workers (plus his replacement) to make more Bliss, faster and faster. And in the CEO's office, our hero suddenly realizes that while everybody else is buying Bliss, his original source of bliss, the happy memories inside him, has gone out; he no longer has any joy of his own. Gazing out the window, he sees in the distance a group of children playing ... just like he was, in the happy memories he can no longer reach.

Now, here's the part that seems to be the point of confusion: just what the heck is Bliss? Bliss looks like a high-tech pair of binoculars, and when you look through it, the gray and ugly world stop-motion animated world disappears and is replaced by a bright, cheerful, rainbow-colored cell animated world. Bliss is a product that lets people step out of their ugly world for a while and live in a beautiful world. And the point of contention between Kukla and me was over whether or not that's a good thing. As someone who remembers the time, fairly long ago, when I used to make approximately annual use of LSD, she assumed that I would share her opinion that seeing the world as a beautiful thing instead of as an ugly thing, and feeling momentary bliss, was a good thing. She saw our hero as a man who'd made a messianic sacrifice to share his bliss, the energy he got from his uniquely-preserved memory of happy childhood, with a needy world. To the extent that I have any opinion at all (because the whole thing left me strangely unaffected, truthfully, the way that most non-"doggerel" poetry does), it's that what he's done is a monstrous thing. Because when I compare the world as seen through his manufactured Bliss to the real world, he's doing people a horrible disservice by encouraging them to see the world other than as it is.

Isn't that what I took LSD for? God's teeth and miserable dentures, no. This goofball idea that hallucinogens make you see things that aren't there is a popular media misunderstanding. In my youth, even on the rare and mostly regretted times when I didn't take the sacredness of the drug as seriously as I should have, and even when I've taken far more than the recommended dosages, and regardless of which drugs I've taken, I've never seen anything that wasn't actually there. I took those drugs to learn from them. I took those drugs not to muddle my thinking, but to clarify it. I valued those drugs for their unique power to call my attention to things, both inside me and outside of me, that I had been ignoring. Some of those things were beautiful, and the drug taught me much about the beauty in my world that I might otherwise not have known to look for. (But mostly not. I've always been inclined to see beauty in the world around me.) Some of those things were ugly things that I'd been half-consciously overlooking because I wasn't ready to face them. But all of them were there before the drug showed them to me, and are still there decades later.

She thought that I took the drugs to revel in the roughly 15 to 20 minutes of intense bliss that happens at the peak of the experience. That would be foolishness at best and insanity at worse if it were true. It's an 8 to 14 hour experience. Setting aside 8 to 14 hours of my life, incapacitating myself for 8 to 14 hours, for 15 minutes of artificial mood elevation? God's teeth, I'd never do that. It's what I learned and saw and felt in the roughly 4 to 10 hours of the most powerful parts of the non-peak experience that I valued enough to do it again and again until it had taught me as much as it had to teach me. When Those Who Have Seen It came back to Eleusis for their chemically-enhanced experience, as some of them did several times to serve as volunteer guides to the new initiates, you can't tell me that they put themselves through all that work just for the 30 seconds or so of intense experience at sunrise; I believe that they must have valued the whole experience. As intense as the brief peak from that weak hallucinogen was, the experience of it was repeated from year to year; it had nothing new to show them after that first time. It's the rest of it, and the sharing of that other many hours with a hundred or a thousand other new and returning initiates, that brought them back.

It deeply disappointed Kukla, I think, that I would have preferred to see the gray real world in "More" and to find the beauty in it, than to have paid money for a consumer product that let me escape into artificial hallucinations of beauty that isn't actually there. For this, she called me a bitter pessimist. Would a bitter pessimist think that there was beauty enough in the real world to look for it? I don't need to ignore any ugliness or pettiness or ignorance or casual negligence or even the infrequent actual malevolence in my real world to know that there is more beauty in it than has any right to be there, and to take comfort therein. I'm not an optimist, if by optimist you mean someone who doesn't see the ugliness and pettiness and ignorance and negligence and cruelty. And if there are only optimists and pessimists in the world, and no third or fourth or nth alternative, then I guess not being an optimist makes me a pessimist. And yet, somehow, I don't feel pessimistic.

I make frequent recourse to the joke about the Thirteenth Beatitude: "Blessed are they who expect the worst, for they can be pleasantly surprised." I don't, truly, expect the worst. (One could say that I aspire to that blessed state, but that would be being silly.) But I know that I live on a planet that only evolved intelligence a few hundred thousand years ago, that only evolved even rudimentary civilization perhaps twenty thousand years ago, and among a species to whom the blessed gods who live forever only revealed to us the happiest and best way of life (perhaps because they had only just learned it from some of us) and began to reward it less than three thousand years ago. I know, with the certainty of mathematical proof, that it is hard for human beings to do the right thing some times, that the temptation to cheat each other and war against each other for short term personal gain is part of our biological heritage. Knowing these things doesn't make me a pessimist. It makes me someone who is delighted every day to see, every day and everywhere I look, the vast majority of people doing more or less the right thing, doing not only the best that they can but sometimes even doing better than there is any reason to think that they could. And I refuse to call someone like myself who sees that and delights in it on a daily basis a pessimist.

I mentioned in comments that I got invited the other day, on no credential stronger than a personal recommendation from a friend and the trivial amount of celebrity I have from this journal, to be a guest speaker at a small, informal liberal political discussion group? Once we got done beating the assigned topic to death, and were still all sitting around, they started throwing questions at me at random. If you've ever seen an open Q&A for a political primary candidate, it was exactly like that. Everybody had an opinion on one or two or a dozen topics, and they wondered whether or not (since I agreed with them almost entirely on the main subject) I agreed with them on every other subject they had a political opinion on. Being more left-libertarian than true leftist, we weren't in perfect harmony, of course. But where I had a different opinion, position, or proposed solution than they did, they were following my arguments for my side with interest, and respect, and I could see them often coming around towards my side ... right up until one of them came up, and then the whole room turned on me. Let's see if the same thing happens here.

We were working our way through various criminal justice subjects. I mentioned in passing that there's an obscure issue, on which my side lost politically years ago, that is still sand in my shorts. Every time I'm in downtown Clayton, Missouri (the St. Louis County county seat), I can't escape looking at evidence that I lost that argument, and I get angry all over again, just as angry as I was years ago when the topic was fresh. My anger over this one isn't going away. What am I talking about? The "new" (at this point it's what, three years old? five? more?) County Jail. For one thing, it's an architectural monstrosity. Not because it's an ugly building, but because it isn't. The County understood, although they shied away and talked all around the subject when asked about it, but still, on some level understood that it said something bad about us that we needed a jail that big, and it is absolutely huge. So they told the architects to disguise it as an office building. And they very successfully did. It's one of the tallest, biggest buildings in Clayton, which is saying more than you'd think, if you're not from here; Clayton is as much a sea of skyscrapers as downtown St. Louis is. If you're looking for it, you can see it as you approach Clayton from any angle. And to look at it from the outside, you'd think it was a corporate headquarters. And that pisses me off.

You see, their emotional need to disguise the Jail is only a symptom of the larger problem here, the one they flat-out denied going into the election for the bond issue that paid for its construction, the one where even when confronted with the facts, the voters (of both parties) preferred the lie. The reason we needed a new Jail was that the previous one, big as it was, was massively, illegally overcrowded, as jails mostly are in America. Overcrowding had gotten so inhumane that the courts were getting involved, were threatening an injunction against locking up any more people without releasing at least as many first. If they were going to keep locking people up, they had to have a new jail. Well, the ACLU did their own study of the problem, and they found out something interesting. They found out that the real reason our jail was so overcrowded was that nearly everybody in there had been waiting, often a year or more, for their trial. Why? Because it was taking them at least that long to get a meaningful interview with someone from the public defender's office. This is a mockery of the US Constitution's promise of a "speedy trial." Because the County flatly will not adequately fund the public defender's office, you're only entitled to a "speedy trial" in St. Louis County if you're willing to plead guilty, or if you can afford a private attorney. If you're poor and refuse to plead guilty, in St. Louis County this is considered sufficient grounds to revoke one of the most important rights in the Bill of Rights. And when the ACLU crunched the numbers themselves, they found that it would cost less to fully fund the public defender's office than it was going to cost to pay off the debt service on those bonds. Fully funding the public defender's office would have let us convict the guilty and move them on to actual prison in a timely manner. Fully funding the public defender's office would have let us acquit the innocent and send them home in a timely manner, as the Constitution requires. Whether acquitted or convicted, getting the overwhelming majority of those awaiting trial out of the County Jail and either home or on to prison would have reduced prison overcrowding sufficiently that we wouldn't have needed the new County Jail. And when the ACLU got front-page coverage for this argument, the radio airwaves, the political forums, and the newspaper op-ed pages and letter columns were deluged in a torrent of scorn. Why? Because the ACLU was proposing that we coddle criminals, that we spend more money on protecting the criminals' rights instead of locking them up. The public reaction pissed me off so much that I'm still angry about it.

So far, so good; my audience was still with me. Then someone asked me what I wanted done about this. Before I could talk, one of the other guys said, "Well, most of those people are in there on drug charges. What we obviously need to do is to get those people out of jail and into rehab." To which I replied, "Fuck that. Fuck court-ordered rehab. Fuck court-ordered Alcoholics Anonymous, too." And already I started to lose them. Being good liberal Democrats, they were deeply and emotionally committed to this idea that drug suspects needed court ordered rehab. Oddly enough, two days later there was an article in the Post-Dispatch trumpeting the success of court-ordered rehab that I think proved my point instead of theirs. The St. Charles County Drug Court, using a carrot and stick approach to make sure that as many drug suspects finish rehab as possible do so, was just given an award for being the most successful such court in America. More of their suspects complete court-ordered rehab programs than any other in America. What's more, it's cut the one-year recidivism rate, which they were very proud of. By how much? Buried way, way down in the article: by less than 2%. Given the tiny sample size, that's not even a proven reduction. At that sample size, 2% less than the control group is statistically identical. By honest methods of statistical proof, they just proved my point, not theirs, that court-ordered rehab programs don't work. I say that they can't work, because court-ordered rehab is a contradiction in terms. People give up drugs or alcohol when they want to go straight, not because somebody else tells them they need to go straight. I didn't have those facts on hand to back up my argument that court-ordered rehab is a waste of everybody's time and money at the time.

So, they asked me, what I wanted to do with drug suspects? "Shoot the users ..." WHAT? OK, now I lost them altogether. The room got ugly, and the shouting started before I could finish the sentence, let alone make my argument. Even though I then laid out my argument, and made it just as well as any other political position I took, this point they were not willing to concede. Nor, I suspect, will most of you. What's more, those of you who know how I feel about the drugs themselves, who know that I'm religiously devoted to Dionysus, the god of theater, madness, and intoxication, are probably scratching your heads and wondering where in the world reality jumped the tracks. But the rest of that answer, when I got to give it, was, "Shoot the users. Or repeal Prohibition. Personally, I'm OK with either one, but the voters won't go for repealing Prohibition, so shoot the users. Nothing else, nothing in between, will work." And what we've been doing, which is everything else under the sun except shooting the users or repealing Prohibition, is destroying this country. Now, once I got it that far, someone who was trying to figure out how a nice liberal libertarian like me could possibly advocate killing people for a harmless social-status crime stopped everybody else from shouting to get a clarification. "Wait," he asked me, "which one do you prefer?" I said, again, that that I call the War on Drugs by its real name, Prohibition, should tell you which one I prefer -- obviously, to repeal the War on Drugs. To adopt the same system that the UK and the Netherlands has, which is that if you walk into a doctor's office showing symptoms of heroin withdrawal, you walk out with a prescription for heroin. Legalize it all, let the users and their families sue the people who make and sell the ones that get proven in court to be harming people. But the voters won't go for that.

So if I'd rather end Prohibition, and I almost had the crowd back with me at that point, how on God's green earth can I justify shooting people for using drugs? Because nothing else works. Because everything else leads to widespread disrespect for the rule of law, to chronic and irreversible police corruption, to rampant witness intimidation and jury tampering, and many other problems, any one of which is guaranteed, over time, to be the death of democracy and freedom. Democracy, trial by jury, a bill of rights, a free market, and all of the rest of the freedoms that make life worth living are dependent upon, can not survive without, honest law enforcement and public respect for the rule of law. What we're doing now, if we keep it up much longer, is going to destroy the Republic. Let me clarify this by laying out all of the alternatives, all of the strategies that might be employed:

1. Legalize the drugs in question, let the civil courts and the free market sort things out.
2. Legalize or de-criminalize possession and use, but continue to apply harsh penalties to manufacture and sale.
3. Maintain minor to moderate punishments for possession and use, and use them to twist people's arms until they testify against the "real" criminals, the manufacturers and dealers. (This is the current American system.)
4. Impose draconian punishments, nothing less than life in prison and up to the death penalty, for anyone involved in any way in possession, use, distribution, manufacturing, or any other part of the criminal enterprise, whether as customer or supplier, of the drugs in question.

I'm OK with #1, it's what I would prefer, but it will never happen in my lifetime. #2 is very popular among lifestyle liberals and pseudo-libertarians in America. It would be even worse than what we have now. How do I know that? Because that's how the original Prohibition worked. And because there were no penalties for the customers, there was absolutely no way to curb demand, and because so many customers considered themselves perfectly virtuous voters and they wanted the sellers to illegally remain open, the voters quietly acquiesced to a system of rule by organized crime gangs, the famous "machine" faction of the Democratic Party, acquiesced to a system of mafia rule that, no longer than Prohibition lasted, took us almost 40 years before we even got started on freeing the affected cities from, and we're still not done.

You can see for yourself that #3, our current system, doesn't work; so long as (just to pick an example) the total amount of money the government spends combating the cocaine trade exactly matches the total number of dollars per year that Americans spend on cocaine, the cocaine trade isn't going away. Not doing anything serious, anything that would actually make an impression on someone with so little regard for long-term consequences that they'd use a deadly or dangerous drug and consort with organized crime gangs to buy it, puts us in a position where the American taxpayers are equally subsidizing both sides in the War on Drugs, and that's a recipe for permanent warfare. Permanent warfare is a recipe all by itself for totalitarianism, even if you don't factor in the resulting financial incentives for police corruption, witness intimidation and murder, and jury tampering.

So what does that leave? The only thing that has ever worked. There have been countries that have won their wars on specific drugs. Singapore, for example, used to be the worst place in the world for the heroin trade. It had been ground zero for the Opium Wars, after all; they had no resistance left when the heroin trade supplanted opium. Then the new government adopted a get-serious policy about opium and heroin: life in prison without parole on first offense for possession, death by hanging on first offense for sale, conspiracy to sell, or possession with intent to sell. This solved the problem, and in only a few years; Singapore went from being the worst hell-hole in the world for the heroin trade to almost completely heroin-free. But in fact, last week there was a huge diplomatic row between Australia and Singapore over just this law. An Australian drug dealer got caught, in Singapore, with some ridiculous indefensible amount of heroin like 12 kilograms or something, in his hands. Even the Australian government didn't dispute the facts of the case. But Australia doesn't have the death penalty, considers it barbaric. So they applied every diplomatic pressure and threat to try to get this guy's sentence reduced, and the Singaporean government basically told them to piss off, and made no effort whatsoever to even condescend to justifying themselves to anyone who is so stupid they don't know to kill drug dealers. They just went ahead and hanged the guy. Why? Because they know, and they think by now it should be obvious to any honest person, that of all of the ways that have ever been tried by any government bent on eliminating any illegal mind-altering drug, nothing else has ever worked.

So yes, to me, this is on a longish list of political subjects where my answer is, "PICK ONE." One, or the other. Not both. Not some compromise in between. Either do what you're trying to do, or stop trying; anything in between will destroy us as a nation. In, or out; don't stand there with the door open.

Somehow, I doubt any more of you agree with me than agreed with me there.

With Halloween in the recent past, it wasn't that long ago that I was thinking, yet again, how much I love masked festivals. As Walter Otto said, Dionysus is a god of masks. The rural Dionysia and the Bacchanal provided people who lived in a rigidly structured, highly economically competitive, never far away from grinding poverty society, that was always in the middle of a protracted senseless war or could see one coming on the near horizon, with a much needed outlet. As Otto pointed out, when the stress of a society like that (which is to say, including a society like ours) is driving you stark raving crazy, you can do one of two things. You can go somewhere where your behavior won't be held against you and there isn't anything valuable you can break, and get crazy there, and get it out of your system so you can go back to your high-stress life refreshed and ready to work again. Or you can go crazy at home, or in your workplace, or anywhere in your daily life where everything you say and do will be held against you, and where all of the most valuable fragile things in the world (your family, your children, your home, your savings, your career) are there for you to destroy in a temporary fit of madness. Which is one of the reasons why, in one of the pieces of writing that I'm most proud of, I argued that drunken sex can be good for you. That's why I said, only half in jest, that the person of a bead whore is sacred to the God: because a bead ho knows that this is a Bacchanal, that she can flirt with the crowd as sluttily as she wants without being accused of being a slut when she gets back to her normal life.

Halloween means all of that to me, and two more equally special things, besides. For one, I'm a lover of the costumer's art, so Halloween means to me a time where I can wallow in perfectly acceptable folk art and boggle, with my jaw figuratively hanging down around my knees, at some truly amazing public art. For another, Halloween is the one night of the year when everybody can temporarily embrace John Lilly's mantra: "You can be anything you want, this time around." If there's some aspect of your personality that you can't fit into your daily life without mucking it up, there's a costume that will let you express that part of your personality for one night. If there's a road not taken that you sometimes whistfully dream about, you can be that person for one night. But yeah, especially now that adults have taken over Halloween, on top of those two wonderful things it is also a time when people from San Francisco to New York put on masks and then go to a party, or go to a bar, or go to a parade, and go totally freaking hog-wild nuts in a perfectly socially deniable way. I think of it as one of the two "bookends" of the year, the two times a year that you can mask up and do that: Mardi Gras in February or March, and Halloween at the end of October, both conveniently almost evenly spaced. It means that if you need to go wild in a deniable way, there's hardly ever more