Banner Image: Not Photoshop
September 16th, 2010Some questions have been coming in with regard to the current banner image. No, I didn’t make that in Photoshop. Yes, that’s marijuana.
Via: Boston Globe – Big Picture – Reuters:
Cpl Ryan Belgrave with the Canadian Army’s 1st Battalion, The Royal Canadian Regiment Battle Group, walks through a field of marijuana plants during a patrol near the village of Salavat, in the Panjway district west of Kandahar on August 4, 2010. (REUTERS/Bob Strong)
apologies, somewhat tangential but…
i HATE the word marijuana.
it is cannabis, hemp, asa, ganja…etc.
but marijuana is a word made up by Hearst in the 1930s as a way of demonizing Mexicans, African Americans and ganja. and apparently…
“it a “spanish” name so people would think it was something that only was of concern to Mexicans.”
tochigi: You don’t need an apology.
I had a coworker who thought that those people in the line to the “Gassenzimmer” (centre with an injection room according to dict.leo.org (?) ) where all pot smokers.
The rest of that morning I could explain the differences between pot, heroin, cocaine, mdma/extacy and lsd, where it originated earlier and today etc.
He seriously thought if you smoke too much pot you would end there (its possible, though, but not the statistical reality in switzerland). And he didn’t know that cocaine is consumed mostly by the upper class.
Linguistic mis- or even disinfo is the daily business of our overlords, so precise use of words is subversive in itself today.
kevin, if i could afford to, i’d send you a copy of Terence McKenna’s book, ‘Food Of The Gods’, not for anything new it would tell you but the overview and compilation of history on drugs it puts all together, and my hope it would be graced with an amazon link here on cryptogon.
the banner image easily brings that history to mind, of course.
at this seemingly pivotal point in cannabis’s history comes now these notions of internal (so to speak) resistance and obstructions to legalization. the article does not speak to the global/military related aspects of continued drug control. it should.
elsewhere on alternet, under it’s ‘marijuana’ tag, is an article on Nixon’s war on pot, which mentions the pot-smoking viet nam war protesters. i don’t know what Nixon knew or thought of the pot-smoking troops themselves, but as far as military missions and objectives go, marijuana, with it’s mitigating effects on hostility and aggression, is certainly counter-productive. (as viet nam demonstrated.) is that soldier in the banner image smiling?
again, i’d return to McKenna’s Food Of The Gods, and ask, seriously, if there is not a greater historical contest between alcohol and all psychotropic substances.
http://zuma.vip.warped.com/fotg-147.jpg
http://zuma.vip.warped.com/fotg-170.jpg
http://zuma.vip.warped.com/fotg-178.jpg
http://zuma.vip.warped.com/fotg-176.jpg
this level of discourse and such a version of the big picture is what’s absent. rather, the current reductionist simplistic characterizations remain holding sway; the drunk blows through a stop sign whereas the stoner waits for it to turn green.
my own ‘reductionist simplistic characterization’ is that marijuana isn’t the issue, cognitive liberty and the sovereignty of the individual is, as always.
“There are two sets of principles. They are the principles of power and privilege and the principles of truth and justice. If You Pursue Truth And Justice It will always mean a diminution of power and privilege. If you pursue power and privilege it will always be at the expense of truth and justice.” -Julien Benda
“The truth is useless. You have to understand this right now. You can’t deposit the truth in a bank. You can’t buy groceries with the truth. You can’t pay rent with the truth. The truth is a useless commodity that will hang around your neck like an albatross all the way to the homeless shelter. And if you think that the million or so people in this country that are really interested in the truth about their government can support people who would tell them the truth, you got another thing coming. Because the million or so people in this country that are truly interested in the truth don’t have any money.”
-Jeb Bush
truth&justice are subjective evaluations. power&privelege are objectively evaluated. groups vs. individuals: groups tend to lean toward power&privelege ends. this mitigates, disinclines, or even predicates against, individual exercises of will, and most certainly dissension, such as truth&justice innately tasks conscience to enact.
the authority of the individual, the sheer sovereignty of the individual, cognitive liberty itself, is the end all and be all. without that, there is no recognized consciousness to even address. so goes the disenfranchisement of human dignity, john locke be damned.
human dignity. up against the wall. bound and blindfolded. opposite a firing squad of robots. the diminishment of man precedes this civilization’s end. the law of the jungle precedes this, and having prevailed continues onward unimpeded. once more.
Food of the Gods, one of my all-time favourite books. did not comprehend a big chunk when i first read it, but life and the warped course humanity has taken over the last 15 years has shown McKenna to be mostly right.