Yesterday afternoon, I watched a popular entertainment program like I usually do, to be somewhat familiar with today's pop stars, because it's hard for a punk rock fan like me to identify with such rabidly followed trends like its the final Wimbledon match or the last game of the World Series. I wasn't exactly a "Tiger Beat" reader* growing up, and I'm pretty sure it would've been banned from the house for being stupid, anyway. My parents can be really egotistical about their educations. Like a lot of bourgeoisie in suburbia, they're still uptight about their relatively recent "escape" from blue collar life in the city; they can be fretfully uptight as a result.
And entertainment news is considered lowbrow t.v. fare, but I am thankful I'm not working their celebrity beats, too. They all look, sound, and act the same to me, anyway. In between the latest "bad boy" arrest was a refreshing live interview with former t.v. host Montel Williams, a proud American military vet and an outspoken advocate for fellow MS sufferers, which speaks to the heart of my family. He spoke about the relevance of medical marijuana to his treatment, and it wasn't the first time I'd heard of it. My mom and I talked about an article I forwarded her about cannabis for her MS, and she didn't reject it as an option outright, which was surprising at first.
When I was growing up, a common attack amongst my mother's family was the demonizing of anything illegal, like smoking pot or underage drinking, that served as an effective cloud cover for their shopping/sugar/pill-popping addictions that had thus far escaped mainstream notice, though times were quickly changing. With the advent of reality t.v. came widely-available media content about mousy fringe types, like the extremely anti-social cat hoarder, or the guy who dresses up in diapers to heal from his abusive childhood.
Unlike obvious (and legal) social behaviors like smoking and drinking, mental illness became a mainstream topic, thus blowing the lid on their hereto hidden afflictions, especially when my aunt's "dear friend" died from botched surgery as a quick fix to the hoarding habit that placed her in a low-rent apartment around the corner from her late mother's Bronx multi-level townhome that she filled to the roof with junk, floor by floor. Nowhere to run, after that. Still, their semi-public bristling at my lifestyle differences behind their closed doors worked well among their small familial group, where clinically-diagnosed paranoia reigns supreme. Pot smoking became attached to schizophrenia through their compulsive repetition of it, aided and assisted as their pea brains were by so much widely available "newsie" propaganda.
With the crack craze of the 80s and 90s, lawmakers were desperate to end the murderous rampage from the drug's use that practically bankrupted the city, causing the "white flight" that my mother and her family still rant about, comfortably entrenched as they can be in their casual racism. There were news reports after news reports about "gateway drugs" and "latch-key kids" that my mom and her sisters passive-aggressively sent as news clippings to one another, in a search for the minutely incremental leverage that marks the habitually anti-social. But, they were just following along with the masses.
Of course, me and my friends attending a well-regarded teacher's school in upstate New York knew better about a plant called "MaryJane". Me and my Irish/French-Canadian boyfriend referred to it as "herbe" and "l'herbe" at the same time that classes like "The History of Jazz" and "The History of Rock n' Roll" were filled with students every semester. And therein lie our generational cracking open of the case, forever. I mean, we were taking astrophysics and/or high school SAT's on weed and beer, yo. We already knew what science would eventually catch up to. But one cult movie classic really tied up the loose ends for us, culturally.
Marginalized as African-American people and their works were, no one could deny the artistic relevance of jazz and blues as predominant musical forms that were (and still are) undeniably American. Classes about another American artistic import, the movies, showcased cultural prejudices on a world stage, like the stigma portrayed in the old film "Reefer Madness" turned white audiences against some jazz cat's homegrown stash, versus the huge pharmaceutical megacorporation's factory-manufactured outputs of "Class One Opoids" that are much more addictive, and much more of a gateway to hard street drugs like heroin than some ole weed could ever be. And therein lies the brilliance behind co-opting artistic businesses for mass coercion.
I was impressed by Mr. Williams for being a public proponent for research about alternative delivery methods of medical marijuana that don't open patients up to smoking-related health issues (which my mom and I had already discussed, because she's a pill-popper), as I also noted that he is no longer a daytime t.v. talk show host, either. Still, he represents a celebrity voice in the African-American community that stands by its roots, one rational conversation at a time, now that the real junkies in society are dying off in droves. Finally, GenX gets to share its healing message of peace, love, and understanding through traditional medicine, one patient at a time. "You're welcome" for saving your lives, once again.
* https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiger_Beat
