GRGR(20) 1904 revisited

[Doug Millison]

I wonder, during the historical period when cocaine was legal and freely
available, do we find the same kind and frequency of reports of violence --
attributable to cocaine -- that Christopher rightly rails against?

Alcohol does a pretty good job of stimulating violence, of course. A-and
what about that TV -- I bypass the debate about whether violent acts on TV
reproduce same in the flesh world, and pass to the perhaps more Pynchonian
point example of  the thrilling recruitment advertisements for the Armed
Forces, 50 years of TV indoctrination (following centuries of same, taking
other cultural forms) into the dark dream that convinces people it's good
to kill for country, church, or tribe. I expect you'll have a hard time
isolating cocaine -- or any other drug -- and making it carry all the
freight for violence in society.  And, isn't that just the kind of
diversionary debate that keeps people from looking to the real root causes
of misery and suffering, as Ann Oy pointed out earlier in this thread, and
which seem to be of considerable interest to Pynchon as objects of his
scorn (he doesn't have a lot good to say about the War or the people and
companies that profit from War, does he), while he seems to celebrate the
liberating effects of some drugs, cocaine included. Your mileage may vary,
of course. And it is a lot harder to make this case in the year 2000, after
Nixon-Reagan-Bush and in the midst of the neo-fascist revival.  For a
fuller treatment of these issues in a context that dovetails nicely with
Pynchon's, see _Whiteout_ by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair, or a
book which lies closer to the period in which Pynchon was writing GR, _The
Politics of Heroin_ by Alfred McCoy.

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