Rethinking Tactics in War on Drugs. After 30 years of fervent support by the church-at-large for the war on drugs since

the Nixon administration declared war on

drugs in the late 1960s–a war pressed by each succeeding

administration–growing numbers of religious leaders are breaking

ranks.

Not only are they questioning the war’s effectiveness and its

burgeoning costs–they also charge that its execution violates

biblical imperatives of justice and mercy.

Rather than reducing the threat to society posed by illegal

narcotics trafficking, the war is making orphans of tens of thousands

of children by unnecessarily jailing their parents and

disproportionately targeting people of color, religious critics charge.

A new group, Religious Leaders for a More Just and Compassionate Drug Policy, counts many of the U.S.’s most influential religious leaders among its founding members. They focus on disparities in policing drug offenses by race and class; the decreasing opportunities for prosecutorial or judicial discretion in sentencing in face of “get-tough” policy pressures; and the lack of rehabilitative efforts in the penal system. (Update: Human Rights Watch report cites disparity in race-based drug offense sentencing in the U.S. [New York Times]) “When it comes to addiction, the rich go to Betty Ford, the poor

go to county jail,” the Rev. Scott Richardson, of All Saints

Episcopal Church in Pasadena, said recently.

A Rand Corp. study in 1997 found that treatment reduces 15

times more serious crime than mandatory minimum sentences and

that residential treatment programs cost a little more than half of the

$30,000 annual cost of housing a prisoner, Richardson notes.

Gen. Barry McCaffrey, “czar” of the White House Office of National Drug Policy, warns that if the public begins to think the war on drugs is unfair, it will lose crucial momentum and support. [LA Times]

In other WoD (War on Drugs) news, powerful U.S. anti-drug forces in Congress and the corporation supplying the raw goods are compelling Colombia to apply fusarium, a fungus that acts as an herbicide, to the coca crop in their country. Trouble is, it can destroy other crops and farm animals and may cause overwhelming infection to immune-compromised humans. Years of U.S.-backed aerial spraying of other herbicides has been at best useless against the coca and opium crops, and at worst harmful. “The New York Times reported in early May that US-funded

spraying of the herbicide glyphosate (marketed as Roundup by

Monsanto Company) may have exposed scores of Colombian

villagers to harmful toxins and damaged nondrug crops. But the

proposed Fusarium program, experts say, could unleash far

worse consequences.” [The Guardian]

David Brake just pointed me to his blog, with a worldview quite consonant with mine.

Stuffing Yer Holes: Feasting Black Hole Blows Bubbles.

“A monstrous black hole’s rude table manners include blowing huge bubbles of hot gas into space. At least,

that’s the gustatory practice followed by the supermassive black hole residing in the hub of the nearby

galaxy NGC 4438. These NASA Hubble Space Telescope images of the galaxy’s central region clearly show

one of the bubbles rising from a dark band of dust.” And: Black Holes Shed Light on Galaxy Formation. “Astronomers are concluding that monstrous black holes weren’t

simply born big but instead grew on a measured diet of gas and stars

controlled by their host galaxies in the early formative years of the

universe. These results, gleaned from a NASA Hubble Space Telescope

census of more than 30 galaxies, are painting a broad picture of a

galaxy’s evolution and its long and intimate relationship with its central

giant black hole. Though much more analysis remains, an initial look at

Hubble evidence favors the idea that titanic black holes did not precede

a galaxy’s birth but instead co-evolved with the galaxy by trapping a

surprisingly exact percentage of the mass of the central hub of stars

and gas in a galaxy.”

www.sticker.com

American ‘Culture,’ Cooked by the Melting Pot. In the strict (anthropological) sense of the word, culture no longer exists; we live in a post-cultural world, says Christopher Clausen, whose book Faded Mosaic is reviewed here by Jonathan Yardley. And the distinction is not merely a semantic one [Washington Post]:

“The truth is that “the connection with an ancestral culture is now so vestigial that whether to assert or deny it has become entirely a matter of choice.” The greatest influences on us are not ethnic or religious or racial (though this last, for African Americans, remains a powerful and unavoidable consideration) but “the expanding reach of a homogenizing federal government, universal access to the same products and television programs, interstate highways and a restlessly mobile population.” Today, Clausen argues, “what most ordinary people who call for multiculturalism want is something more like post-culturalism: no conflict based on cultural factors, none of the sharp edges that cause bleeding.” The idea of the melting pot may no longer be fashionable, but a melting pot is where we live.

Instead of a crazy quilt of conflicting cultures with specific rules, demands and expectations, we inhabit a mass society that claims to value individuals and that places “extreme emphasis on personal feelings and self-gratification” yet is in fact a society of “mass individualism, an individualism without much individuality.” We are “oriented to pleasure–the desires of the self, not its duties,” yet because we all worship at the same altars–most notably, or notoriously, mass entertainment and the cult of personality, or celebrity–the result is “a mass individualism that encourages people to assert themselves in nearly identical ways.”

New Statesman: Scott Lucas, a University of Birmingham cultural historian, asserts that George Orwell was not a socialist, despite usually being held up as having impeccable “English socialist” credentials. For one thing, he apparently “named names” in the British equivalent of the McCarthy witchhunt; for another, Lucas says, his values were not particularly socialist.

Praise, if you will, Orwell’s fighting spirit, praise his

generous anger, praise his free intelligence. Just

remember that, no matter how smelly the

orthodoxies, 19th-century liberalism and 20th-century

anti-communism did not, and still do not, constitute

socialism.

New Statesman: After a long preamble on Ted Hughes’ gatekeeping on Sylvia Plath’s posthumous legacy, Ian Hamilton decries the stranglehold T.S.Eliot’s widow has on his reputation.

So, one day, one day. In the meantime, let us hope

that, by the time an Eliot biography gets nodded

through, he won’t be consigned to the popular

histories as an anti-Semite who wrote amusingly

about pussy cats and had his first wife locked away

for keeps in an asylum – a first wife who may have

written certain of his best-known lines. Eliot’s

posterity, one feels, will always need an extra

measure of protection from the philistines, and

maybe, in his case, disclosure will serve his

reputation more effectively than reticence.

A Dangerous Masquerade

“Anyone watching the hostage

crisis in Luxembourg last week

would applaud the release of nursery

school children and their caregivers

after a crazed gunman was shot by

local police. But by using a camera crew as camouflage for

their gun and by shooting the suspect who thought he was

getting ready to give a television interview, the Luxembourg

police have now made it more dangerous for other

journalists to do their jobs and thus harder for them to get

news of critical importance.” [New York Times]