Light On Dark Water

Folly Chasing Death

One last note on the general lack of repentance on the part of
the cultural revolutionaries of the late ‘60s, after which
I plan to leave the subject alone for a while: I haven’t
yet mentioned the evangelization for drug use that was as
prominent in its time as the sexual revolution.

There’s been a joke going around for some time that
“if you remember the ‘60s you weren’t
there.” Very funny. Let me revise that, with no
humorous intention whatsoever: if you believe that drugs and sex
were not at the center of the late ‘60s counter-culture,
you weren’t there. Of course there were many other
ingredients, left-wing politics most obviously, but those were
the essential common ground. If you dissented on either of these,
in principle or in practice, you were at the margins of the
revolution.

If you can push aside and ignore the self-congratulatory
history of the movement written by those who created it or at
least sympathized with it, the truth looks something like this:
certain of the spoiled young people of the ‘60s made it
popular and fashionable to take a wide variety of illegal and
mostly quite dangerous drugs, with harmful, sometimes
devastating, consequences for millions of people. The fashion
spread at the expense of the physical and mental health of those
drawn into it and has taken its worst toll among the poor who
have fewer resources for recovering from mistakes. Going on forty
years later, it has become a major and apparently permanent
social problem. And yet one rarely finds, among those who still
feel allegiance to the counter-culture of the late ‘60s,
any sense of real regret for having initiated this
phenomenon.

It is true that the counter-culture did not invent
or even introduce these drugs, but it did make their use glamorous
and help to push them into every nook and cranny of society. It
is true that I’m generalizing about a wide assortment of
drugs, not all of which are equally harmful. It is at least
arguable that the laws against drugs have actually done more harm
than good. Granting all that, though, it remains a fact that the
counter-culture believed its drugs to be a positive and
liberating good and that most of the people involved have never
admitted they were terribly wrong.

If you read the history of the counter-culture as written by a
sympathizer or participant, you will most likely find very little
sense or acknowledgement of any connection between its embrace of
drugs and the devastation that followed. You may not find open
applause for drug use, but you will find it winked at as a sort
of engaging naughtiness, and quite possibly given credit for
freeing people from convention and so forth. You will find this
same attitude in present-day treatments of rock stars and other
celebrities.

Of course there is nothing now that the aging hippies can do
about all this; the evil genie was out of their control as soon
as it emerged from the bottle. So why am I saying these things,
and what do I want? Public confession and recantation from a lot
of fifty-something men with gray pony tails would be of no use
now. I suppose what I’m after is, simply, a clearing of the
air, something like what has been called, in reference to the
crimes of Communism, the purification of memory. I want it
understood and acknowledged that a kind of crime occurred, in
which dangerous foolishness was set loose, to the terrible and
continuing harm of many. And I have the sense that in some
obscure way the moral progress of our society is inhibited by the
lack of this acknowledgement.

And if these reasons are too vague, I have more immediate and
concrete ones. Over the past summer two families of my
acquaintance endured the death of a son from a drug overdose. I
don’t know either of the families intimately but I do know
they were both stable and as far as I know healthy, and that the
young men were not, prior to their involvement with drugs,
pathological in any apparent way. In short these were not the
sort of deaths that can be explained by easy references to
poverty and family breakdown.

No parent needs any prompting from me to imagine what these
families are suffering. After the second of these deaths I
started making a mental list of the number of people I know who
have died or been seriously damaged by drugs. It grew appallingly
long. I began to wonder if any family has been untouched. When I
remember the way drugs were advanced in the ‘60s as part
and parcel of liberation, I am sickened and angered. And
I’m ashamed of the part I played in what I am beginning to
think of as the Stupid Revolution. (As I related in my
autobiographical essay, my involvement with drugs was pretty
limited, but that was due more to a constitutional inability to
enjoy them, not to any good sense on my part.)

One of the Mardi Gras societies of Mobile, the Order of Myths
(no, I don’t know how they come up with these names), is
traditionally the last one to parade on Mardi Gras Day. (We use
this redundant term to distinguish the actual Tuesday from the
weeks-long season leading up to it.) One of their floats carries
a strange device which seems a bit macabre when you first see it
in the middle of the festivities: a pole around which revolve two
figures, a skeleton and a fool in cap and bells, with the legend
Folly Chasing Death. It’s a perfect end to the
silliness (and, to be honest, the occasional sin) of Mardi Gras,
and a good beginning for the seriousness of Lent.

It’s also a perfect epitaph for the sex-and-drugs
movement. In the end, real folly is no laughing matter.