Month: May 2021

Last week I thought that I would write a blog post on India as soon as I finished the one I was writing on WWI (which I struggled with). After all, India was all over the news because of its COVID crisis, and I have always been captivated by the country. Its culture. It’s history. Its religions. It was very distressing to see this wonderful, crazy, beautiful, outrageous country go through a very predictable, yet horrific health emergency. 

• 

• 

• 

However, by the time I turned my attention to this new post I had to search through the New York Times to find out what was currently going on in India. Did the crisis end as soon as it began? Were the 1.4 billion citizens of India vaccinated overnight? Did I just dream it all? The answer to each of those questions in no (though I have been having some weird dreams lately). India is still getting about 300,000 new cases a day, and suffering through over 4,000 daily deaths. The emergency has not moved on, but we have. 

Of course, there was reason to move on. The Israeli Palestinian conflict had flared up again. Palestinian rockets. Israeli airstrikes. So many questions about the cause and nature of the Palestinian attacks, and the scope of the Israeli response. On the one hand this seems like a never-ending story, and, yet, on the other hand, there is no doubt that it too will retreat to the back pages now that a ceasefire has been agreed to and, hopefully, we have a period of relative calm (relative being the operative word). 

We consider ourselves the most informed people in the history of the world. After all, the daily goings on globally are at our fingertips. We are immediately informed of a coup in Myanmar, or China landing on Mars (and probably claiming it as a historic territory of the Ming dynasty), not to mention the myriad insanities around the United States, from a police shooting in Elizabeth City, North Carolina to Representative Chaney being cancelled by the GOP (pardon me if I don’t shed tears for Liz).  And yet I wonder.  

• 

• 

The more I try and pay attention to what is going on in the world, the more I am convinced that I know very little. I feel like Jon Snow in Game of Thrones. As much as I think I may be aware of the forces at play, I cannot escape the taunts of that voice which says “You know nothing Tom Wamser”. (I just learned Ygritte and Jon are a couple in real life. It warmed the cockles of my heart!! Though don’t ask me why they got married in a cemetery).

• 

• 

There is no doubt that we hear more of what’s going on than at any time in human history, and we hear about it in as close to real time as possible. But the truth is that I don’t have the time, or, admittedly, the inclination, to delve deeply into any one news item, and I doubt if many people do. Plus, I am just as susceptible as anyone else to forgetting the important story of yesterday as soon as I am presented with the crucial news story of today. In many ways it seems that more news is less news. 

I think that this information overload is one reason blind loyalty to certain news channels is prevalent. It is a pragmatic way to filter what is going on. Let someone you trust decide which of the myriad of stories is worth your attention. The trouble, of course, is that you are then beholden not only to their view of what is important, but also the slant put on the news you do hear. Consistency can be reassuring, but it’s rarely enlightening. 

If you are ambitious, you can try and take in a variety of sources, with multiple viewpoints. Yeah, right. And you can also write the great American novel, or discover the secret of cold fusion in your spare time. There are too many stories, too many slants, too many people willing to craft any narrative to achieve their own ends.  

Sometimes I fear that I am caught in the Pink Floyd approach to the news. Every now and then something happens that acts as a pinprick to wake me from my stupor, whether it be renewed violence in Syria, or the Supreme Court confronting Roe v Wade. I read a few articles in my favorite sources, catch a fleeting glimpse out of the corner of my eye. Then I turn to look and it’s gone. Once again, I have become comfortably numb.  

• 

I must admit that I see little way around this dilemma. There is too much in life to bury oneself in every news story. More importantly, even if I could I am not sure that it would be worth doing so. News items come and go, and usually it takes time to truly evaluate what is important and what is a blip (Will this health crisis in India abate, or is it a harbinger of larger societal issues? Will this current conflict between Israelis and Palestinians lead to any change in the status quo?). Often it makes more sense to read some history to gain context than to focus on the ins and outs of today’s headlines. 

I guess I will just continue to gather what surface knowledge I can about what is happening in the world, and wait for those occasional pinpricks of importance to delve deeper. Like the bombshell dropped by Luis Elizondo, former Department of Defense intelligence officer, backed by Harry Reid (who is looking a bit like an alien himself these days), that there are UFOs and they have been officially documented by our government. Now that is a story worth pursuing. I want to believe!!!!  

• 

• 

• 

 

In the summer after Law School my friend Mike and I spent a month wandering around Europe. One of the stops we made, at Mike’s urging, was Verdun. I probably would not have considered stopping there if he hadn’t suggested it. Battlefields are interesting to a certain extent, but I had never been to Europe before and there was so much to see. However, that stop started an obsession that continues to this day. 

Verdun just knocked me out. There was the sea of French graves, all of unknown soldiers. There were markers showing where villages had been before the war, but were no more. There was the town itself, which had been destroyed in 1870, 1914 and 1940. More than anything else, however, there was the pervasive sense of insanity. In the four years this area was contested, the front moved a less than ½ a football field at the cost of hundreds of thousands of lives. Oy vey!!  

• 

• 

World War I has largely faded from memory in the United States. It just doesn’t have the pizzaz of World War II. Our involvement was much shorter. We weren’t directly attacked. The venality of the enemy was not as obvious. It wasn’t fought by the “Greatest Generation” (whatever that means). Plus, and maybe most importantly, WWII played much better in the movies.   

Hollywood churned out a seemingly endless string of compelling, taut dramas covering all aspects of WWII, both during the war and after, that deftly combined a sympathetic view of the men (and occasionally of the women) fighting, tales of personal heroism, and a sense of the global conflict. Hollywood also had a ready-made bad guy in the Nazis, that it could fully exploit. In some way, albeit through tinted glasses, the home front lived this war with the soldiers.  

• 

• 

• 

The movie business was in its infancy during WWI, and not in a position to dramatize the war. It was left to writers to try and bring to life the reality of WWI to the American people. That wasn’t possible during the war because of censorship. Plus, Americans did not really experience the reality of the trenches the way the Europeans did.  

For Europeans WWI was much more immediate. From the euphoria of August 1914, through the grind of four years of unrelenting warfare, to an unstable peace. The endless clamor of the artillery. The self-defeating lunacy of gas attacks. The desolation of no-mans-land. For much of the war, on the Western front at least, the two sides were sitting a soccer pitch away from each other. Battles were an exercise in mass slaughter (British forces suffered more than 57,000 casualties—including more than 19,000 soldiers killed—on the first day of the five-month Somme offensive alone). Between battles was the looming possibility of sudden death through snipers, shelling, or small raids, all while living like moles.        

• 

• 

• 

But WWI also embraces an incredible heroism. I cannot envision what it took to clamor over a rampart and run full tilt across a muddy field through a hail of machine gun fire as your mates fell all around you. Or to volunteer as a nurse in a field hospital close to the line, facing a never-ending stream of wounded and dying, all looking for help. Incredibly, the memoirs make clear that even those who left with injuries were inexorably drawn back to the front, as if by a psychological magnet.  

• 

• 

The war was integrated into the European home front as well. After all, the war was right on the doorstep, even for the Brits. The Somme battlefield was only 150 miles from London, approximately the same distance as between Abington, where I live, and Washington, D.C. Those on the coast of England could hear the guns. More importantly, soldiers could come home on a regular basis, either for leave or because they had been injured, constantly reminding those left behind of the nightmare in France, even if they couldn’t really understand it.   

After the war, writers like Erich Maria Remarque, Robert Graves, Siegfried Sassoon, Henri Barbusse and Ford Madox Ford (what a great name!!) took readers into the trenches, depicting the war from the perspective of the individual soldier. Grand strategies were less important than the experience on the front line. More than that, the WWI writers expressed the absurdity of war in a way that had never been done before, forever changing our view of war generally. You can’t read Robert Graves “Goodbye to All That” (which I recently did prompting this post), or Erich Maria Remarque’s “All Quiet on the Western Front”, without wondering what the point of all this was. 

• 

• 

• 

When the movies caught up, they were generally as cynical as the literature. The film version of “All Quiet at the Western Front”, “Paths of Glory” and “Grand Illusion” painted a grim picture of the conflict, and through that of war in general. (There were exceptions, like Wings and Sargeant York, both quintessentially American movies). War was not something to be celebrated, but a vehicle to look at the absurdity of man.     

• 

• 

• 

Maybe that’s why I keep coming back to WWI. It strikes me as the turning point in our view of the rationality of humans. Before the conflict people could believe that we Sapiens were inexorably moving forward to a better world. Progress was inevitable. War was a positive, necessary test of the metal of a nation. Afterwards, that just wasn’t possible. The modern became the postmodern. Truth was up for grabs. 

I admit that’s overly dramatic. The world does not turn on a dime that neatly. Plus, of course, it’s a very Western-centric view of history, which I find hard to escape. Yet I can’t envision anything like Picasso’s “Guernica”, Ginsberg’s “Howl”, Godard’s “Alphaville” or Vonnegut’s “Slaughterhouse 5” without WWI, and the literature that followed. 

• 

• 

• 

I continue to find in WWI an endless treasure trove of mass psychology, delusional judgment, individual bravery, disconnected leadership, and so much more. It remains, for me, a touchstone for the era we live in. A fascinating fulcrum when things could have gone differently, were it not for notions like national honor and the glorification of power. A trove of lessons that I am afraid we still have not learned.   

Why do a blog if you don’t take chances, reveal uncomfortable truths, risk losing your readers? Sometimes you have to go out on a limb and make confessions that may shock, may hurt, may alienate. Now is one of those times, so here goes. 

In my youth, I smoked marijuana. There, I got it out. And while I’m being brutally honest, I have to admit that there was nothing medical about it. I smoked marijuana purely because I liked how it affected me. I liked the sense of floating through the world. I liked that everything seemed a lot funnier. I even liked that it gave me the superhuman ability to eat an entire package of double-stuffed Oreos in one sitting. Let the judging begin.  

I have chosen this time to make my confession, and risk the pounding on the door in the middle of the night, because marijuana has been coopted by big business and it irks me. Why should all of those law-and-order zealots who spent years screaming about life terms for anyone caught with an ounce of weed profit now? And yet this is undoubtedly who is investing heavily in ganja, and pushing for its full legalization. It’s just not right.  

It’s especially irksome because it has been clear for the last 30 years that the drug laws have been both unfairly administered and obsolete. While all studies showed that drug use was just as prevalent for white people as for people of color, an inordinate proportion of those imprisoned for drug violations were African-Americans and Latinos. I would refer anyone interested in this disturbing history to read The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, by Michelle Alexander.  

Here is what I propose to remedy this historic wrong. We should identify all of those people who were arrested and convicted of the illegal sale and distribution of marijuana over the last 30 years and provide them with the seed money (pun intended) to begin their own legal Bhang business. My guess is that the initial reaction from most of you will be, “Oh no, another government giveaway”, but hear me out. I think grass roots generosity (another pun) would be beneficial for all. 

I contend that there is no one better positioned to crush the Maryjane market than those who have already shown the skills needed to master it. Let’s consider what it took to be a successful  reefer retailer.  

First of all, you had to establish reliable sourcing. Where were you going to get the hemp to hawk? Who could guarantee the steady flow of sinsemilla to assure success? These are difficult decisions that had to be made under adverse business conditions, like the potential for jail. 

Next the wannabe tea tycoon had to create a system of distribution. How could he or she establish their dope domain? Advertising was key. It had to be surreptitious, yet effective. Did it make sense to give out free samples/ have buy one, get one ½ off, sales events? A business strategy was essential. 

Administrative and employment options also had to be weighed. Do you want to keep staff small, or become a franchisor, with all the headaches that entails? How quickly should you grow your business? Can your supply keep up with the demand you are developing?  

Then there is pot pricing. What is the appropriate profit margin between cost and reefer rates? Are there Acapulco Gold adversaries, ready to underprice to increase market share? Does it make sense to keep prices affordable to attract new Panama Red purchasers, or should you highlight the most excellent nature of your product by charging a premium? 

What about quality control issues? This wad of weed may not be as good as the last. If you let potency lag, customers will look elsewhere. How do you assure heady hash time and time again? If quality begins to lag, do you look for a new supplier to assure dependable doobies?   

Finally, there is always accounting. How do you guarantee enough cash flow to purchase resalable reefer, keeping both suppliers and customers happy? On top of that you need to look like the well-established businessperson you are, which means that enough has to be made to finance personal grooming commensurate with your position in the community. Not a easy task. 

The productive pot producer had to exhibit all of these well-established business skills. Any flaws in the distribution chain could result in serious consequences. It is not easy to operate in that high-pressure, dog-eat-dog business environment, yet these Loco-Weed lords managed to do so, and we should acknowledge and take advantage of that expertise.      

You might argue that a flaw in this proposal is that we are funding the failures. Those who couldn’t establish the long term profitability we want to see. In other words, those who were caught. However, is one failure a criteria for cannibas cancellation? I think not. After all, apparently you can have as many as six business bankruptcies in this country and still be considered a successful entrepreneur.   

So you see, this proposal is hash heaven for everyone. Otherwise marginalized people are established in a business they know well, and for which they have the proven tools to succeed. The rest of us benefit from the roach revenue generated by a tax on their profits (estimated as up to 420 Million). It’s another marijuana miracle!!!!     

*With apologies to Jonathan Swift 

*Also, a shout out to Nathan McCall for his excellent memoir, Makes Me Wanna Holler, which put this idea in my head in the first place