Monday, January 25, 2010

Exploitive? Disgusting? Salacious? Pornographic? What? It's the "new" drug.

Some cultural warriors now think that "drugs" have replaced "sin," "evil," "exploitation," "degradation," "obscenity," "pornography," etc.

So to fight pornography, they've created a campaign and website "Fight the New Drug" to recruit "fighters" against pornography.

Drugs are no longer dangerous chemicals; in some quarters they are now a compelling metaphor for evil and debauchery.

"The war on drugs" once was a metaphor for a national commitment to prevent and treat drug abuse. Then the compassionate aspect of this commitment was subsumed to the extirpation of drug traffickers by mobilizing that national security and intelligence components to assist the criminal justice and punishment agencies. Now drugs themselves are the metaphor.

It is as though adjectives like "obscene" or "pornographic" have lost their meaning and their power to condemn. To mobilize a protest, to provoke an action, to galvanize a fund raising campaign, cultural warriors are now invoking the nuclear bomb of shame, "drugs!"

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