If you think my post come out of the middle of no where, I'm sorry. I hate the news. I hate the 24-hour news networks. I like the Sunday morning news shows better, because they put the most important things from the week, into one hour. I agree with the following statement:
"To read a newspaper is to refrain from reading something worthwhile. The first discipline of education must therefore be to refuse resolutely to feed the mind with canned chatter."
So this is kind of out of the middle of no where, but I have been thinking about Mitt Romney and his drug policy vs. Barak Obama and his policy. That led me to the following ideas. What do you think?
(This is a photoshop, just incase you are stupid).
Barack Obama was melodramatic about his drug use.
- Obama said, "I got high [to] push questions of who I was out of my mind." People do things for a lot of reasons. To say that he used drugs for one reason, because he was having problems with his racial identity, seems to be playing the melodramatic race card. I'm not saying that it might have been part of the reason that he used drugs, but to fully blame all his drug use with racial identity problems, like he did in his book, seems a little melodramatic.
- Melodrama involves an oversimplified hero. Obama seems to see himself as a hero, in a very simplistic way. He wrote two or three autobiographies about himself, before he was even un unaccomplished senator. Now that he is president, he can write a few autobiogaphies, but he has already written two or three.
- Obama goes on and on about how honest he was about drug use. He even went on and on about how he "wasn't the first president to use drugs, but the first one to be honest about it". However, if Obama is so honest about his short comings, why did he keep his smoking habit such a secret. And how can the press go on and on about how honest he is and they are, when they never published, and I mean not a single news outlet, published a photo of him with a smoke?
- When Obama said, "Pot had helped, and booze; maybe a little blow when you could afford it. Not smack though" (Dreams from My Father) perhaps he thought he would reach those who had used drugs and convence them to go straight. However he will have reached more straight kids and convinced them to use drugs, by making it sound cool, showing that he was able to beat it, and using their street names, as though he is still trying to have "street cred".What do you think? Was Obama too self centered with his drug use story? Will heavy drug use go up? Perhaps it will go down. Obama can be a good or bad role model to people in a powerful way. Boys without fathers. Obama was able to beat it… or maybe he never got in far enough.
How about this. Obama ties his drug use with his search for his identity. Bush's mother started the just say no movement. Republicans are about abstinence. Democrats don't like the goody-goody, never used drugs image. Steve Jobs said, "I wish him the best, I really do. I just think he and Microsoft are a bit narrow. He'd be a broader guy if he had dropped acid once or gone off to an ashram when he was younger." So according to Steve Jobs, Bill Gates wouldn't be so "narrow" if he had "dropped acid". Was Barack Obama trying to tell people he wasn't "narrow" when he told the world all about his drug use, but he hides, and the media helps him hide his continued cigarette addiction? Did Obama think it was sexy of him to have used drugs in the past, but he is embarrassed of his continued cigarette addiction? If not, why did he tell the world about the former, and no one knows about the latter?
Some of this may be old news, but I hope I am covering new territory.
Perhaps the important question is what party are we? Obviously, we are Bill Gates. We are not the party tries to glorify dropping acid. And it all goes back to these old battles from the 60s, that just won't go away. Forget Romney's Mormonism. It had nothing to do with his church… if Mitt Romney had used drugs in his youth, like Glen Beck, no one would have cared about his Mormonism. Perhaps Romney reminded people of things they don't want to admit were mistakes. Saying you don't like people like Romney is an important part of convincing yourself that people like him are narrow.
Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe you do gain some great insight from dropping acid. Maybe Obama doesn't think he is really a cool guy because he used to use drugs. Maybe there is a logical explanation why he was "honest" about using drugs in the past, but doesn't admit his un-politically fashionable current cigarette use.
Of course the "I used to do drugs" thing glamorizes it, but the "I don't use drugs, made something out of myself, and became president" thing also de-glamorizes it. But that is not my point. I don't care about the glamorizing drugs thing. I don't even care about the hypocrisy of Obama saying how honest he was, when it serves his purposes of appealing to people who love to pat themselves on their back by saying how "nuanced" they are. What I really care about is what the whole thing says about Obama, and about the democratic and republican parties.
How many democrats are democrats, even though they want smaller government, but because they think it is cooler to be in a party that embraces nuance, or to put it another way, they are embarrassed of the goody-goody-religious right image of the republican party.
Everyone I know who grew up republican, and religious, when they started experimenting with drugs or Alcohol, they stopped calling themselves religious, and republican.
When Obama was looking for a political party, was their anyone that he could identify with?
Do we want to be the party of Youth? Do we want to be the cool party? What image do we have? I don't want the Bill Gates Microsoft image, and I don't want the Steve Jobs Apple image. What about the Mitt Romney image? I think Mitt Romney would make a hell of a president, and do the right things, and make things run more efficient, but what image would he present for our party? Is Mitt Romney cool?
Mitt Romney's dad was cool. Mitt Romney's dad was a man's man, told it like it was, was entertaining, and fun to listen to.
I think if we are going to win in 2012, we have to win the debate, and show how self serving and shallow the democrats are in their immature attempt to be cool.
That shouldn't be too hard.
1. Barack Obama was melodramatic about his drug use.
2. Barack Obama thinks its cool that he used to use drugs.
3. People should have to pass drug test to get government assistance.
4. We should legalize drugs.
