In short, television works on the same imaginative and intellectual level as psychoactive drugs. If prolonged television viewing makes the young passive (dozens of studies indicate that it does), then moving to drugs has a certain coherence. Drugs provide an unearned high (in contrast to the earned rush that comes from a feat accomplished, a human breakthrough earned by sweat or thought or love).
And because the television addict and the drug addict are alienated from the hard and scary world, they also feel they make no difference in its complicated events. For the junkie, the world is reduced to him and the needle, pipe, or vial; the self is absolutely isolated, with no desire for choice. The television addict lives the same way. Many Americans who fail to vote in presidential elections must believe they have no more control over such a choice than they do over the casting of L.A. Law.
The drug plague also coincides with the unspoken assumption of most television shows: Life should be easy. The most complicated events are summarized on TV news in a minute or less. Cops confront murder, chase the criminals, and bring them to justice (usually violently) within an hour. In commercials, you drink the right beer and you get the girl. Easy! So why should real life be a grind? Why should any American have to spend years mastering a skill or a craft, or work eight hours a day at an unpleasant job, or endure the compromises and crises of marriage? Nobody works on television (except cops, doctors, and lawyers). Love stories on television are about falling in love or breaking up; the long, steady growth of a marriage — its essential dailiness — is seldom explored, except as comedy. Life on television is almost always simple: good guys and bad, nice girls and whores, smart guys and dumb. And if life in the real world isn’t that simple, well, hey, man, have some dope, man, be happy, feel good.
The doper always whines about how he feels; drugs are used to enhance his feelings or obliterate them, and in this the doper is very American. No other people on earth spend so much time talking about their feelings; hundreds of thousands go to shrinks, they buy self-help books by the millions, they pour out intimate confessions to virtual strangers in bars or discos. Our political campaigns are about emotional issues now, stated in the simplicities of adolescence. Even alleged statesmen can start a sentence, “I feel that the Sandinistas should …” when they once might have said, “I think. …” I’m convinced that this exaltation of cheap emotions over logic and reason is one by-product of hundreds of thousands of hours of television.
Most Americans under the age of fifty have now spent their lives absorbing television; that is, they’ve had the structures of drama pounded into them. Drama is always about conflict. So news shows, politics, and advertising are now all shaped by those structures. Nobody will pay attention to anything as complicated as the part played by Third World debt in the expanding production of cocaine; it’s much easier to focus on Manuel Noriega, a character right out of Miami Vice, and believe that even in real life there’s a Mister Big.
What is to be done? Television is certainly not going away, but its addictive qualities can be controlled. It’s a lot easier to “just say no” to television than to heroin or crack. As a beginning, parents must take immediate control of the sets, teaching children to watch specific television programs, not “television,” to get out of the house and play with other kids. Elementary and high schools must begin teaching television as a subject, the way literature is taught, showing children how shows are made, how to distinguish between the true and the false, how to recognize cheap emotional manipulation. All Americans should spend more time reading. And thinking.
For years, the defenders of television have argued that the networks are only giving the people what they want. That might be true. But so is the Medellin cartel.
ESQUIRE,
May 1990
FACING UP TO DRUGS
Hard drugs are now the scariest fact of New York life. They have spread genuine fear among ordinary citizens. They have stained every neighborhood in every borough, respecting no boundaries of class or color or geography. They have destroyed marriages, corrupted cops and banks, diminished productivity, fed the wild spiral of rents and condominium prices, overwhelmed the public hospitals, and filled the prisons to bursting.
The price of the drug scourge increases by the day. Hard drugs have injured thousands of families, some named Zaccaro and Kennedy, many others less well known. They have ruined uncountable numbers of careers and distorted others. Last year, when Dwight Gooden was sent off to the Smithers clinic, hard drugs almost certainly cost the Mets a championship. Gooden’s friend, the brilliant pitcher Floyd Youmans of the Montreal Expos, learned no lesson from this; he was recently suspended indefinitely after once more failing a drug test. But Gooden and Youmans are not isolated cases, young men ensnared by the life-style of the poor neighborhoods of Tampa. Hard drugs have damaged the lives of pitcher Steve Howe, prizefighter Aaron Pryor, and football players Mercury Morris, Hollywood Henderson, and Don Reese, to mention only a few. Many other talented Americans, with no excuses to make about poverty or environment, have been hurt by hard drugs. And they cost Len Bias, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Jim Morrison, and John Belushi their lives.
These terrible examples seem to make no difference; for the druggies, there are no cautionary tales. All over New York today, thousands of people are playing with drugs as if nothing will happen to them. And in this dense and dangerous city, such a taste for folly usually results in corpses.
New York, of course, is not unique. With the drug plague spreading all over the United States, the Feds now estimate that the country’s cocaine-user population is at 5.8 million. These new druggies include prep-school students, bankers, policemen, railroad workers, pilots, factory hands, stockbrokers, journalists, and — with the arrival of crack — vast numbers of the urban poor. According to the National Institute on Drug Abuse, the average age of first-time drug-users in the United States is now thirteen.
The drug trade is one of the most successful of all multinational capitalist enterprises, brilliantly functioning on the ancient rules of supply and demand. The demand is insatiable, the supply apparently limitless. In a business estimated by the president’s South Florida Task Force to gross more than $100 billion a year, there are fortunes, large and small, to be made. And the art of the drug deal always contains the gun. As the authority of the old mob faded in the seventies (with the breakup of the Istanbul-Marseilles-New York pipeline), new bad guys moved in: Cubans and Colombians first; then, as the cocaine business flourished, Bolivians and Dominicans. Israeli hoodlums out of Brighton Beach took a big hunk of the heroin trade. And 30 to 40 Jamaican “posses” began operating in the United States, starting with marijuana and hashish, then moving hard into the cocaine trade. The Shower Posse works out of the Bronx, the Spangler Posse in Brooklyn, the Dunkirk Boys in Harlem. Experts say the posses killed about 350 people last year, and the number could be much higher (more than 200 homicides here last year involved Jamaicans). Now the word on the street is that the Pakistanis are moving into town, with an endless supply of heroin from home.