False Edge

Most consumers of television and movies have, by now, noticed that certain ingredients are always present in Hollywood's offerings. “Identity” and intersectional characters, existential dread due to global warming, presumptive correctness of woke issues, and twin identity-based hierarchies of competence and evil. Pay attention to the heroes and villains, and you'll find that the bad guys are far less likely to be women or people of color or of nonconforming sexual/gender identity, and the heroes far more likely. As in, well beyond society’s actual percentages of each (if the offerings reflected current society, no one would have a legitimate gripe), and with blatant “social justice” bias on top of it all.

Much of this, I've concluded, is driven by a cloud of coercion that hangs over that business sector. Businesspeople are cowards when it comes to identity politics, so they go along with what the societal scolds that have come to dominate that world rather than risk their wrath. Yes, there are true believers peppered throughout, but my gut sense is that they are not as numerous as they want us to believe.

Once this is pointed out, it’s hard not to see.

Someone somewhere recently pointed out another something in this vein. Specifically, the frequency of pot use by characters we are supposed to like. Now that it has been pointed out, I realize it's everywhere.

Kinda like the skunk smell I so often encounter when I sally forth into Manhattan to visit friends.

Regular readers know I've been advocating drug legalization for a long time, having concluded that prohibition and the "War On..." have done much more harm than good. I've even written a short book on the subject.

Why, then, would I be annoyed by pot's omnipresence in movies and television?

Because the fact that pot is an intoxicant is being ignored by the people in charge. As is so typical, government has bungled legalization, in more ways than one.

First, it's not truly legal, nor can the full liberty benefits of legalization be reaped, until the Feds legalize it.

Second, legalizing it as a money grab, which is what NY and CA and some other states have done, pretty much ensures that the black market will continue to thrive. Just as high cigarette taxes in states like New York created major rewards for smugglers and counterfeiters, and liquor taxes spawned the bootleggers of yore, legalizing pot so the states can fill their coffers does nothing to undermine the criminal side.

Third, it is an intoxicant, and should be treated as alcohol is. No driving while high, for example.

That aside, the real rankle for me is the fake "edginess" of the TV and movie depictions. Back in the GWBush days, comedians playing to audiences in blue cities like New York and San Francisco could get cheap laughs while thinking they were speaking "truth to power" by mocking the President. Those same comics would never dare mock Obama a few years later, thus exposing the hollowness of their supposed "daring." Goofing on someone everyone around you goofs on is trite and hackneyed. It’s risk-free, and that makes it stale and unoriginal.

In the Internet-era bestiary, we have the "edgelord." One definition reads:

someone on an internet forum who deliberately talks about controversial, offensive, taboo, or nihilistic subjects in order to shock other users in an effort to appear cool, or edgy.

That's what pot smoking on the screen feels like. It's a cheap gambit to inform viewers that the main characters and the show runners are hip (to borrow a half-century old term that's bound to come back) and at the fore of culture. But, like so much else, when people who aren't at the edge latch on, the edge is gone. The shark has been jumped.

I recall a TV commercial where a teenage daughter says the word "phat," then spells it out for her clueless dad. That's the day that "phat" got relegated. I still cringe at the memory. I won't mind when the false edginess of pot smoking on screen goes away. Tobacco went from being everywhere to being almost nowhere, and I don't think anything was lost. Certainly, the "cool" factor that drew young people to cancer sticks went away - and I figure that, as the taboo-thrill fades, pot use will diminish in time. I may sound like a fogey (denying my fogeydom would be pointless, TBT), but I always try to point out the difference between allowing and condoning. As with alcohol and tobacco, pot should be legal, but it shouldn't be exalted. It is a “vice,” after all.