A Column by John Sinclair
If all goes well, by the time you
read this column I’ll have completed my 5-month residency at the New Orleans
Institute for the Imagination and be back in Amsterdam to start the summer.
I’ve had a great time in the crescent City, spending many quality hours and
days with my daughter Celia and my hosts Frenchy the Painter (uptown by Oak
Street) and Jimmy Cass (downtown in the 9th Ward), playing some gigs
with Tom Worrell and with Carlo Ditta, sitting in with Henry Butler and Glen
David Andrews, and smoking consistently excellent illegal weed provided by one
of my oldest and dearest pals.
Sad to say, despite its almost
endless cultural riches that bubble up from the streets without relent,
Louisiana has some of the most ridiculous and oppressive marijuana laws in
these United States. Possession remains a felony with a two-year prison
sentence and/or a $5,000 fine, and additional convictions may result in
increasingly draconian prison terms.
Like Michigan, Louisiana is ruled
by a right-wing Republican governor supported by both houses of the
Republican-controlled Legislature and a like-minded Supreme Court, so there’s
not much hope of relief. A recent attempt to cut the prison sentences and fines
for marijuana possession just failed to pass a vote in the legislature, with
the usual drivel offered as an excuse to maintain the ugly status quo.
My readers will be aware that I’ve
always considered Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette as sort of a
modern-day Attila The Hun with respect to his stance on the medical marijuana
act and its implementation, but I was presently surprised to read that he has
come out dead against the sale of any of the artworks held by the Detroit Institute
of Arts as a means of meeting the city’s massive debt obligations under any
plan instituted by the city’s current Emergency Manager.
It’s surprising to find this
degree of support for art in the philistine precincts of the current state administration
where the main intent seems to be to cut the heart out of public policy at
every available opportunity and sell out every possible thing for more cash
money to be added to the overflowing coffers of the rich people.
Art and culture be damned! Later for
social welfare and universal health care! Death to the unions! Kill the
benefits and rob the workers of their pensions! Take the weed out of the hands
of the patients and put the recreational tokers in jail!
This is an ugly world they’ve constructed
for us, and we need art in our lives now more than ever. It’s a public treasure
that belongs to all the people, a belief that was underlined in recent years
when voters in metropolitan Detroit communities voted sufficient tax money to
support the Detroit Institute of Arts so that the public could enjoy its
artworks without an admission charge.
While it’s essential to maintain
an appropriate level of support for our arts institutions and make sure that
their collections remain intact and accessible to the public, it’s even more
important that we continue to create and produce art of all kinds and increase
our exposure to great music, great poetry and writings, great paintings and
other visual arts.
By making art we not only invent
and create forms that can give expression to our unique thoughts and feelings
as human beings struggling to survive and grow and express ourselves in a
hostile environment, but we also bring beauty and inspiration to our fellow
citizens and point out ways and means they may adapt in their own efforts to
make sense out of our world.
Art may be collected and displayed
and performed in major arts institutions, but it doesn’t begin there—it just
ends up there. Art begins with the individual and with small collectives of
individual artists. Anyone can make art. There are no boundaries to the
creation of art except perhaps for the difficulty in sometimes obtaining the
necessary materials to realize the artist’s conceptions. But we can make art
out of whatever materials we have to work with—mental, emotional and
material—and nobody can stop us.
In terms of making and
appreciating art, in my experience, nothing is more conducive to the full
experience of art and creativity than the careful application of cannabis. Weed
helps open our minds, our eyes, our ears and our hearts to the experience of
art at its highest. At the same time, nothing is better suited to the
experience of getting high than digging some high-quality art in a convivial
atmosphere where the senses may be fully trained on the thoughts, feelings, and
expressions presented by the occasion.
Instead of reducing our
intelligence and emotional capacity as the seemingly inescapable products of
consumer culture are carefully designed to do, high art helps expand our
consciousness and our powers of receptivity like nothing else in life. That’s
why they keep it from us and threaten to sell off our public art treasures and
refuse to expose us to the great music and art of America and the world unless
we are somehow inspired to seek out and obtain for ourselves the myriad forms
that are presently barred from public consciousness.
The purpose of consumer culture is
to simplify and degrade the consumer as well as the product, as William
Burroughs put it more than half a century ago—to make us buy whatever they want
us to buy and pay as much as they want us to pay for it, over and over again.
The more simple-minded and degraded the product, the more simple-minded and
degraded is the consumer of that product. That’s why our popular entertainment
has been relentlessly reduced to its present idiotic forms, and why it’s so
hard to gain knowledge of and access to the real thing in the face of the
non-stop assault of low-grade popular culture.
Exposure to great art and the
process of creating it is our only defense against the mindless onslaught of
popular imagery, pop music, television programs, movies, games and other forms
of reductive culture. We must have our art, just as we must have our weed. And
we can get it, we can make it, we can experience and appreciate it for
ourselves, whether the dominant culture wants us to or not. That’s up to us.
One last little thread before I run out of space:
NORML.org recently reported that the black arrest rate for marijuana offenses
is four times that of whites, according to an ACLU study of 945 counties across
the country. "We found
that in virtually every county in the country, police have … enforc[ed]
marijuana laws in a racially biased manner," said Ezekiel Edwards, the
director of the ACLU's Criminal Law Reform Project and the lead author of the
report.
The report
also estimated that states in 2010 spent
an estimated $3.6 billion enforcing marijuana possession laws, a 30 percent
increase from ten years earlier. This total included $1,747,157,206 in police
time, $1,371,200,815 to adjudicate marijuana possession cases, and $495,611,826
to incarcerate individuals for marijuana possession. In 2010, the report said, police
made nearly 854,000 arrests for marijuana violations.
In the words of the New York Times lead editorial of Sunday,
June 16, 2013: “The costly, ill-advised ‘war on marijuana’ might fairly be
described as a tool of racial oppression.”
Well, duh.
—New Orleans Institute for the Imagination
June 18-20, 2013
© 2013 John Sinclair. All Rights Reserved.
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