I just want to add a few things to Tim's post. Before it was Barack Obama's year, it was Michael Phelps' year. The image of the lanky 23-year-old with 14 gold medals and seven world records wrapped in the stars and stripes was iconic. It seems distant, largely because of the historical significance of Barack Obama's triumph, but Phelps' athletic feats were possibly the biggest story of the year until the election was over.
Of course, both of them are now facing similar falls from grace. The press is already proclaiming Obama's outreach to Republicans a failure without acknowledging the deliberate efforts on the part of the GOP to inflict a defeat on the president and diminish his credibility. The media is also eagerly looking down its nose at Phelps, who was caught in a photograph smoking weed out of a bong. One MSNBC anchor this morning sneered, "I bet your mom's proud of that." Yeah, I mean he only won 14 gold medals, I'm sure his mother is down at the courthouse changing her name right now.
Obama and Phelps do have one other thing in common besides media obsession and lankiness. They've both smoked weed. Between the first black president and one of the most successful athletes in American history, the case that puffing a blunt destroys one's life as easily as addiction to crack and heroin has pretty much been destroyed. Apparently, smoking weed doesn't necessarily result in you running over a little girl on her tricycle while picking up burgers at the drive-thru. Jesse Singal writes:
The inarguable fact that tens of millions of perfectly successful people use marijuana recreationally has yet to penetrate our shrilly hysterical anti-drug id and the thick crust of paranoia that surrounds it. Countless lives are ruined because of our inability to have an adult conversation about marijuana.Singal is right. It's obscene. The amount of money, manpower, and misery that the United States spent on fighting marijuana use is an incredible waste. There's no bigger proof of that than these two men, both of whom reached incredible heights in their own careers despite having had a toke at some point. But rather than question our approach to drugs in general and marijuana in particular, we're treated to the sneering contempt and finger wagging of media figures who help perpetuate a useless, counterproductive war on drugs when we should be asking, "why is this such a big deal again?"
-- A. Serwer
