hell and worse ahead

The NYT Mag has an admiring portrait of the ultimate horror that is Hillary. Oddly, the more hopeful article is about Buckley’s campaign for mayor in 1965. While Buckley exhibited the thinly sheathed bigot in that campaign – in one of those odd, convulsive spasms of coercive moralism to which conservatives are liable he even proposed that drug addicts be quarantined, one of those bizarre notions like tattooing people with AIDS that seem to emerge in the Buckley brain, and of course in the face of real civil morality, ie Martin Luther King, Jr, he was clueless -- he also campaigned to legalize drugs for adults. A simple measure that would have removed infinite misery in the last forty years, and probably even more in the next forty. In a strong sense, that move, if it had caught on, would have retrieved millions of black men from the clutches of the legal system, and would have put states like Alabama (where 30 percent of African American men can’t vote, due to felony convictions) and Florida (ditto) and all over the South into play for much more liberal politicians. Not only in the U.S. would the past forty years have been gentler, but all over the world – for instance, Mexico, where realistically, narco-trafficking is as it should be, an economically sound venture, the repression of which is insane, leading, naturally, to massive corruption, since the only way to produce and market drugs is outside of the law. And of course this diverts the flow of income that could be really be used by average Mexicans into the pockets of the most violent. One can’t say the same about the income flow generated by, say, viagra, which is legal due not for any moral or health reason – hell, viagra is no more safe and no more moral than a joint -- but simply because it was developed by big pharma and marketed by them. I do know that if joints gave you an automatic woody, that would be down on the black list of reasons why it must be banned. Since only in hell is rationality a product manufactured by corporations, and since rationality about drugs seems wholly manufactured by corporations, I think it is evident we live in Hell. I hope that is clear.

The other hopeful thing was Lindsay. An awful mayor, but still -- a genuine powerful liberal Republican. They once existed. They can exist again...

As for Hillary – she represents the worst instincts of the right and the worst instincts of punitive liberalism in a sort of corporate identity of all that is evil -- Newt Gingrich's feminine side. She is so bad that she seems almost destined to lead this Republic as it continues to fall apart. God’s curse is obviously on the land. Luckily, the NYT Magazine is almost always wrong about American politics. I trust my older sister, a feminist since the seventies who tells me, Hillary doesn’t feel right.