It is an "open secret" whispered on the subcurrent-- the difference between what Americans think and then what they "officially believe". Because the average emotional age of a citizen today is about 15 years old, many wounded teenager-types vociferously "running" from the horror of the world, most feel that "it is easier to let alone" and not stir up trouble because the problem is so huge, the forces marshaled to wage "the drug war" so bloodily entangled, "the loss of face" so great in case "the establishment" should fail in front of the impressionable-- especially the children.

Quite frankly, there is little incentive "to go out on a limb" and risk someone's wrath and those who tend to congregate on one side of a radical alternative tend to be cruddy, unsightly people "with little to lose" who only end up "scaring away" the mainstream. As Lee Atwater, the ace Republican strategist once quipped-- "people with a third hand growing out of their heads".

This was once pathetically played out on a talk show when a far-out character from N.O.R.M.L. (-- The N.ational O.rganization for the R.eform of M.arijuna L.aws) attempted to discuss the comparative commonsense of legalization next to a sullen, bereaved Caroll O'Connor who played T.V. Land's "Archie Bunker" and lost a son to the drug culture. The latter's stately, leonine presence and more identifiably "everyman" credibility and personal tragedy "won the argument" next to Tommy Chong's younger, more cosmic relative.

What was not said is that there is always "a fast crowd", a tier of skittery nihilists endemic among the spoiled & privileged who do such things no matter who writes the laws. It's like hearing a strange, strange story about a gang of transsexuals trying to give themselves silicon injections with do-it-yourself "plastic surgery" and showing up in the emergency room with distended, uneven rear-ends in purple spandex. Just because there will always be "a certain base-line of idiots" does not mean that it should reflect badly on everyone else. . . . . especially when it occurs to you, "that everyone else" is us.

Just about everyone has a scuzzy history, a skeleton stashed somewhere back in their closet, and some operate openly in "the present tense"-- and why that should be considered "any more acceptable", I can't say. Some might reason "that the ends justify the means", an increasing stack of egotistic justifications that we all "wink at" when we agree with a cause and we can't find a candidate "any more expedient". When folks doubt their own ability to affect change, they desperately wish "that someone else would do it"-- whether "a man on a white horse" or the government, whose laws by implication are ultimately "rooted in force". It is a "cheap shortcut" for what they themselves do not have the courage & grit to do.

No less true on the right, then it is on the left with Friedrich Engels who wrote that "an ounce of action is worth a ton of theory". Most "political activity" comes down to "lifestyles" and "impotent posturing" that is of no consequence except to oneself and their immediate circle. Upon the indifferent face of things, the emptiness looks on.

Some folks out there deal in "emotional projections", as if spirits and energies fly through space and are of eternal importance. Once, a Christian youth minister was appalled at the fact that I listened to a band like "Cannibal Corpse". The music to me was so wretched, over-the-top, and putrid with churning guitars and thumping drums and "Cookie Monster" vocals that the only thing I could do was howl at the outrageousness of the act laid up to the comparative misery of my teenaged life.

"Don't you think you're supporting such mayhem?" he angled reflectively.

I pointed out that if you bought the records "used" they didn't see a cent.

He looked on with an uncomfortable, shit-eating grin as if to express what "the right answer was".

His arguments were equally as hollow when he learned that I had been buying my underage beer at a liquor store-- as if the law was a petty, unhip "rule book" that preached a withered code of self-abnegation and "right-thinking".

"If one law is broken, then all the laws will be broken!" was how his fundamentalist mind wrapped itself around the question with a squishy obeisance to "law n' order" in all its forms.

I laughed at him like a meek tee-totaler lecturing on temperance in a Wild West saloon.

But whatever he was, this man was an apologist for laying down a boulder across every alternative exit in life with an outlook that grew ever more kooky and inefficient and clunky like the government trying to solve a problem but only creating three more in its place and then trying to fix those with something even more sprawling and hypocritical until you simply could no longer conceal the falleness of "the damned human race" crawling over the ruins like cockroaches. If he could understand the extent to which life is scuzzy and subterranean and unclean. . . . . and always was since the dawn of time. Though sometimes one habit will tend to lead to a certain constellation of behaviors, part of freedom is standing behind others' right to do what you don't necessarily agree with.

Makes you wonder what he would have thought of "The American Revolution". . . . .