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Tuesday, 26 July 2011
Amy Winehouse: Why is there so little understanding of addiction?
Amy Winehouse is dead and any useful understanding of the mental illness that killed her seems far away. Already the portrait is painted and flat-packed, smelted and ready to become myth.
There is tiny Amy with the swaying beehive hair and the frightened eyes, tormented by her talent and the chaos it brought, famous at 21, dead at 27, now a member of the repulsively named "27 Club" of musicians who were also addicts and died at 27 – Joplin, Hendrix, Morrison, Cobain. All dead, all revered, as if it was their illness that made them interesting. The initial, rushed obituaries made much of Winehouse "making it" into the 27 Club. Would she make it to 28 and be shut out? No, she got in, with 54 days to spare.
Why do we give so much energy to the thrilling pantomime of an alcoholic dying in the public eye, and so little to understanding the illness that took her there? It was obvious years ago that Winehouse sick was more grotesquely interesting than Winehouse sober; as she temporarily dried out, so did the press coverage. But she relapsed, and came home to fame.
When an addict self-annihilates, stalked by paparazzi, it is easy to imagine the story belongs to us all. We all had a stake in Amy Winehouse, you might believe; her fall, and the redemption that will never come now, had a universal meaning. But it didn't. Winehouse didn't belong to us; she belonged to no one, not even herself. But you can forget that. Creative addicts – particularly female creative addicts – are always clutched to the cold global breast, even as the corpse is carried out.
Take Judy Garland, little Dorothy on Benzedrine, who kicked off her ruby slippers. She was a legend even before she was pulled off the toilet she died on in Chelsea in 1969; even this year there was a play in the West End about her collapse. I saw it and could only smell yet more exploitation of a woman who always exploited herself. Sing us a song, Judy, even though you're dead!
There is no meaning here, no wider parable about the relationship between addiction and talent, and I think that is junk too, a straw man that burns easily. Winehouse was simply an alcoholic and drug addict who had no idea of her own worth or how to cure herself. She died at 27 not because she was the magical mystical twin of Janis Joplin, but because 27 is a normal age for the body of a compulsive user of hard drugs and hard alcohol to give out.
Thousands like Winehouse die every year, and they are not venerated, or even pitied. We will not educate ourselves about the disease, or reform drug laws that plunge addicts into a shadow-world of criminality and dependence on criminals. Winehouse got away with too much said one copper, after a tape of her using was released. Did she? Did she really? Winehouse walked barefoot through the streets because that is where the drugs were, and even as her bewildered face splatters across the front pages, drug support charities are closing, expendable in this era of thrift.
Recovery rests on the edge of the self-harming knife, because no one yet knows what causes addiction, or how to cure it. The disease is impenetrable to outsiders because it is anathema to our all-conquering species that a person can be genetically predisposed to poison themselves. Addiction is still uniformly called "a self-inflicted disease" and only the most enlightened doctors will recommend Alcoholics Anonymous or Narcotics Anonymous, self-help groups that sometimes get results, although no one knows why. A Harley Street psychiatrist once told me that I should try and "limit" my drug use; he obviously knew nothing, even as he charged £275 for 15 minutes.
She was in the Priory this summer. I was in the Priory 11 years ago,where I was "treated" for addiction, and based on my own experience it's is not the sort of place where people always get better. (I await the letter of complaint from their ever-vigilant marketing department). When I was there they offered en-suite rooms and in-room TVs, not the knowledge that a flicker of the reality of my predicament was essential to staying alive. Of course, it may have changed since my day. And she died for nothing because she thought she was nothing.
Not that we will learn; the beehive was too high, the eyes too photogenically tormented, the voice too beautiful. Her new album will be released and it will sell 10 million copies, maybe more. And there, reader, is your meaning. The addict is dead. Long live the myth.
Tanya Gold @'The Guardian'
Could Neuroscience Have Helped Amy Winehouse?
Bit concerned that in first para it refers to:
a death reportedly due to abuse of alcohol and ecstacy, complicated by symptoms of emphysema associated with smoking cigarettes and crack...and yet NO toxicology reports have been released yet?
REUTERSFLASH ReutersBreakingNews
Norwegian court declines to elaborate on gunman's claim of '2 more cells' in his organization
Monday, 25 July 2011
Hmmm!
amities ɥɔıʇsäʇuáʌı
Shooters gun down children, call actions 'regrettable' but justifiable in war against terror http://ow.ly/1uXYUZ #Afghanistan
John Yoo Makes Tortured Defense Of Corporations Secretly Buying Elections
The proposed executive order making disclosure of political giving history a condition to being awarded a federal contract makes some of the Nixon-era “dirty tricks” look almost quaint by comparison. [...] As the Supreme Court has made clear, anonymous political speech enjoys “an honorable tradition of advocacy and of dissent,” and anonymity serves as a shield “against the tyranny of the majority.” Any president who seeks to undo this centuries-old American constitutional right by the fiat of an executive order would be prudent to reflect on the ultimate outcome when Richard Nixon and John Dean tried, using their infamous enemies list, to accomplish that precise objective.If there is anyone in the universe who should think twice before criticizing a government lawyer for enabling a president to break the law, it is John Yoo. And while Yoo certainly spares no adjective in arguing that preserving the integrity of American democracy is an impeachable offense, he might also want to consider actually reading what the Supreme Court has to say about disclosure laws before drafting articles of impeachment against President Obama.
In an obscure case called Citizens United v. FEC, the Supreme Court held that “disclosure could be justified based on a governmental interest in ‘provid[ing] the electorate with information’ about the sources of election-related spending.” President Obama’s proposed executive order provides the electorate with information about the sources of election-related spending. So Yoo’s entire argument can be rebutted in exactly two sentences.
Elsewhere in his essay, Yoo comes to the defense of poor, innocent corporations that may lose their ability to deceive their customers and investors:
After disclosure of a contribution by the retailer Target to MN Forward, a conservative Minnesota political group that supported a gubernatorial candidate who was opposed to gay marriage, proponents demanded that Target also support pro-gay candidates. Target refused. MoveOn organized a widespread boycott and flash mobs appeared at Target stores; the retailer countered by suing protesters. In the seconds it took for a Facebook video of the boycott to go viral, Target’s established reputation as a gay-friendly company was shredded. After institutional investors protested the “misalignment” between Target’s Minnesota political spending and its professed corporate values, Target announced that future political contributions would require the approval of an internal policy committee.In other words, Target misled the public by calling itself a gay-friendly corporation, when it actually was secretly funding an anti-gay effort. Yet, because of disclosure, it was no longer able to maintain this charade and forced to end its two-faced practices. In Yoo’s twisted understanding of the world, this is a great tragedy and not a compelling argument for why disclosure laws are necessary.
Given Yoo’s role in the Bush administration’s torture policy, asking him to express a legal opinion is a bit like asking Don Draper for advice on marital fidelity. Even so, Yoo’s defense of corporate America’s power to secretly buy elections is weak even by his own tragically incompetent standards.
John Millhiser @'ThinkProgress'
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