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
