On last Friday’s Bill Maher show, New York Times columnist David Carr insulted the good people of Middle America by saying, “If it’s Kansas, Missouri, no big deal. You know, that’s the dance of the low-sloping foreheads. The middle places, right?”
To tell you the truth, we’d never heard of David Carr before this incident. We just assumed he was our moral and intellectual superior because he was (a) a guest on the Bill Maher show, and (b) a columnist for the New York Times.
Luckily, Ann Althouse disabused us of that notion by tracking down an autobiographical article Carr wrote for the Times Magazine:
Every addict is formed in the crucible of the memory of that first hit. Even as the available endorphins attenuate, the memory is right there. By 1985, I tried freebasing coke and its more prosaic sibling, crack.
“Crackhead” is an embarrassing line item to have on a résumé. If meth tweakers had not come along and made a grab for the crown — meth makes you crazy and toothless — crackheads would be at the bottom of the junkie org chart. In the beginning, smokable cocaine fills you with childlike wonder, a feeling that the carnival had come to town and chosen your cranium as the venue for its next show. There is only one thing that appeals after a hit of crack, and it is not a brisk walk around the block to clear one’s head. Most people who sample it get a sense of its lurid ambush and walk away.
Many years later, my pal Donald sat in a cabin in Newport, Minn., staring into a video camera I had brought and recalling the crackhead version of me.
Interesting, isn’t it, that someone who is both a crackpot and a crackhead should still be so secure in his own smug sense of superiority?
H/T: Ann Althouse
This post was last modified on July 5, 2011
View Comments (21)
Once you try crack, your never the same...Seen it a million times in my career as a cop....These people are always mentally unstable after "rehab" and it takes very little to jump back on the crackwagon...Looking at the photo I would say this guy propbably has a glass pipe and some brillo pads in his pocket.. Not only that look at his pupils, they seem to be a wee bit off from a normal person who gets a photo taken with a flash...Vrackheads don't react to light..Only the NYT would hire a crack head...Perhaps he and Bill shared some before the show...
BULLSHIT! I have 16 years clean and am not mentally unstable. I am living proof that your brain does remap neural pathways as I went to college after my addict years and got STRAIGHT A's and made dean's list. Don't blanket everyone with ignorant statements. Those that want a better life CAN have it but you have to want it. Yes I may be an exception to the rule but your post is ignorant. It was the "light" that pulled me back so for you to say that they don't see it is wrong.
Keith, I applaud you for staying clean, you are the exception not the rule when it comes to crackheads. I'm sure that there was no malice meant toward you, it's just tough to overcome life experience and take the word of someone you have only met on a discussion board. Don't be upset, just take it in stride.
"Once you try crack, your never the same." Right you are. I studied effects of drugs on people, took classes on drug recognition and effects, put together some drug presentations for the local PD, attended a 3 day seminar on drugs at a large rehab center, know more than a few druggies (current and so called former), etc etc. Still, many would say I am unqualified to make any comments, but f*ck them. My opinion is that with the possible exception of light use of weed, all the other crap screws one up PERMANENTLY in some degree or another. This includes booze. Especially LSD and now meth.
That the NYT, Bill Maher, and the people who read that a-wipe or watch that a-wipe's show would think this nut job has any credibility does not surprise me.
The NYT and the Bull Maher Show.... political crack for lefty crackheads.
The crack whore who will be hired by NYT next week was not available for comment.
paraphrasing the immortal Goldwater: cut off the eastern seaboard & let it sink into the atlantic
Just make sure you leave the Gulf Coast of Florida intact!
"paraphrasing the immortal Goldwater: cut off the eastern seaboard & let it sink into the atlantic"
Is that before or after Kalifornia is cut off and sinks into the Pacific?
Talk about 'low sloping forehead,' what the hell is that skislope he's got going on? Talk about pot calling kettle black!
Looking at his photo I have to ask,"Former crack addict?"
You lost me at Bill Maher....
Wait just a minute....Didn't the CIA bring crack to america(that's what rev wright says), to kill black people? What is this skinny honkey doing sucking the glass d**k?
Furthermore, all one needs to do is look at him, and one can see that he is not just a crackhead, but probably a child molester too.
Ahh the left.....providing glaring truth about all that's wrong with America since Andrew Jackson!
"...honkey..."
LMAO!!!! OMG! I haven't heard that in ages!
CLASS ACT all the way baby!
NOT!
I just LOVE it when liberals with disgusting and unapologetic pasts tell me how I don't matter or how I should live my life. Fantastic. How exactly did he think he earned this sense of superiority? Where are all these liberals getting this sense of superiority anyway?
And these are the kinds of people that Olivia and Mitch worship, while condemning those on the right for minor things in stark contrast. Here is a guy who thinks he is morally and intellectually superior to people who live in the Midwest simply because he lives in NY and has a position at the NYT as a writer. This is a guy who probably didn't bathe much when he was on a crack binge, maybe even slept in his own puke once or twice.
How dashing, how debonair. How classy.
We should all aspire to be more like Mr. Carr.