Both Towleroad and the Internet Movie Database are reporting that actor Brad Renfro has died, aged 25. Speculation abounds that his death may have been drug-related, though the coroner has not yet ruled on the cause of death. Speculation also abounds that it was the "Hollywood culture" that was the proximate cause of Renfro's death, that he was shoved into prominence too young, and lacked suitable adult guidance in the dog-eat-dog world of professional acting.
But that's too easy. No culture, whether Hollywood, New York, Chicago, or Bumfuck USA, can create an addiction. But it can certainly make feeding one a lot easier. When you make an awful lot of money in a very short time, when you're surrounded by people whose job it is to puff you up and make you look larger than life (and in some cases to satisfy your every whim), it's difficult to keep your head about you and make good decisions. It's somewhat similar to the situation of the worker in the candy factory: with all that chocolatey goodness around, it's bloody hard not to sample it--until you gorge yourself sick. At least with chocolate, if you overindulge the only thing you have to worry about is feeling a little queasy and putting on a few pounds (and maybe acne, if you're young enough).
Heroin, cocaine, methamphetamine, and all the rest of the recreational pharmacopoeia, on the other hand, are quite a different kettle of fish. Once you get hooked on one of those, a whole new world of hurt opens up in front of you.
No, this is most emphatically not going to turn into a Nancy Reagan-esque "Just say no!" rant. That campaign was a stupid fucking idea when it was introduced in the 1980s, and it hasn't improved any with age. The only difference between then and now is that now we have ironclad proof that it doesn't work.
So why is it that our drug laws are still stuck in the days of bad hair, greed, and bad politics? It would be easy, fairly pleasant, and even mostly true to blame the Republicans. "Just Say No!" is yet another Reaganite albatross they have willingly bound around their own necks. It fits too easily into the Republican paradigms of how the world works and what it ought to look like. In Republican-World, virtually everything is a personal choice. When someone makes what is held to be a wrong choice the answer isn't to fix the mess or to treat the problem, the answer is to shame the transgressor and appeal to his/her moral nature so that s/he doesn't repeat the transgression.
The problem is, of course, that many of the things Republicans want to portray as choices are really not choices at all--at least not in the morally and/or philosophically relevant ways. In Catholic theology, for example, in order to commit a sin and be held responsible for it, one must first know that a particular action (or sometimes a thought) is wrong--and then decide to do it anyway. One must absolutely be in control of one's faculties, and also know the difference between right and wrong. It is not at all clear to me that this can be reasonably said of an addict, given what we know about the biology of addiction.
However, while the Democrats may have their hearts and their heads in the right places, they have nevertheless been enablers of the Republicans. The problem on our side of the aisle is, I believe, the perennial fear of being seen or portrayed as weak or soft or wishy-washy. Never mind that we're right. Never mind that if we'd had our way, we might have escaped untold thousands of wasted lives, blasted homes, petty crimes by the million--and saved whole boatloads of money on prisons. No, our biggest worry is that the Republicans might run an attack ad and say we're soft on crime and want to coddle drug addicts and drug dealers. Heaven forfend, and somebody bring me my fainting couch!
As is usually the case when we point fingers at someone else to blame them for a particular problem, some of our fingers point back to ourselves, too. And in a certain sense, we're at least partially to blame (potentially) for Brad Renfro's death, along with his addictions and the Hollywood culture that enabled them. Why do I say that? Because we're the ones that buy the movies that Hollywood culture pumps out. We go to see the "stars" in theaters. We (or at least some of us) buy the magazines that print the pictures of the "hot" stars. We read the tabloids and the blogs devoted to celebrity gossip, and watch those tacky television programs. We allow our news programs to be hijacked by endless puff pieces about who's "hot" and who isn't, and, worse, the petty trials and tribulations of anyone who is even remotely famous are guaranteed to chase anything that looks like actual news off the page and/or the screen. Without us, without our apparently bottomless appetite for inane celebrity "news" gossip, without our willingness to fork over insane prices for movie tickets, cable charges, PPV rates, and DVDs, there wouldn't be a Hollywood culture, and Brad Renfro would probably still be alive and living a reasonably happy life in Tennessee.
Taking the metaphor even further, I see echoes of this same adulatory tendency in the current primary battles, particularly though not exclusively, among the Democrats. We Democrats have been wandering in the wilderness of the minority for close to a decade. We're so passionate about our country and the ideals it once espoused that we're heavily invested in the outcome of this election cycle. Our field of candidates is the best, or at least one of the best, we've ever had. The differences between our various candidates are, for the most part, both minuscule and trivial. Any one of them would, in all likelihood, make a fine president--and would do an infinitely better job of running the country than either the present incumbent of the Oval Office or any of his fellow Republicans trying to take the job after he's done with it.
Perhaps that is why we are tearing ourselves apart as the primary season gets underway. We've built up our candidates into these gargantuan, larger-than-life totems (I'm using that word in the sociological/theological sense of Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss), onto which followers can--and frequently do--project what I consider to be dangerous amounts of their hopes, dreams, aspirations, and desires. We're looking for a Superman/woman, and hanging that impossibly unfulfillable wish around the necks of a group of all-too-mortal humans with feet of a very palpable clay. I can confidently predict that this process will not end well for anyone.
The longer we puff up our candidates into thinking they can do no wrong, the greater the risk we run that our candidates will start believing that bilge, and acting accordingly. (See Bush, George W., for an excellent object lesson in why this is prima facie a Very Bad Idea.) Moreover, after we've hung the hero's mantle around the shoulders of our candidate, it's going to be a huge letdown when s/he reveals the first sign of weakness. And if we willingly blind ourselves to our candidates' flaws (those feet of clay again), we're setting ourselves up for a galactic disappointment when Superman turns out to be no more than mild-mannered Clark Kent, unable to walk on water or leap tall buildings even in multiple bounds, and completely incapable of outrunning a speeding bullet.
Choosing a candidate--and choosing a hero--is something that we really need to divorce from the corporate media. It should be a process, in the words of the old form of the Anglican marriage service, that ought "...not by any to be entered into unadvisedly or lightly; but reverently, discreetly, advisedly, soberly, and in the fear of God." And the first thing that we--and our candidates--should do when we start the process of choosing those people whom we want to represent us in our system of government is to acknowledge that we are all of us less than perfect: that we have sinned or fallen short, in the words of the Confiteor which frequently begin the penitential rite at Mass in the Catholic tradition, "...in [our] thoughts and in [our] words, in what [we] have done, and in what [we] have failed to do."
None of the candidates for the presidency--no matter their qualifications--is going to be able to fix every last little thing that is wrong with this country and the wider world to which it is connected. None of them is even going to be able to fix all of the messes that the Hedgemony will leave behind when, in a matter of three hundred-odd days, it finally rides off into the sunset and the obscurity which it so richly deserves. None of the candidates will be able to deliver on each and every promise s/he has made--and none of them intends to. All of them will have to compromise on some issue, some point, some principle, no matter how vehemently or how often s/he tells us that is absolutely the last thing s/he'll ever do. If we expect anything less from them, we are only deluding ourselves, and it will be entirely our own fault when we're eventually disappointed.
Our politics, like at least some aspects of our allegedly modern culture, are really becoming self-destructive. That has to change. But it won't change until we demand it and stop buying all the hype and the hyperbole that feed it.
In the meantime, God be good to Brad Renfro, and be with his family and his friends as they mourn his loss. And God be with us all, as we go about the very serious business of deciding whom we want to be the next person to lead us. We owe it to ourselves, to our country, and to those who will come after us to choose that person wisely. Thus far, I haven't seen much evidence that suggests we're doing a very good job of that.
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