The classic "Fear and" title is "Fear and Loathing," but somehow, in these days of loathing, we've got "Fear and Joy."

I'm so skeptical... as I'm reading "Fear and Joy in Chicago/The excitement that radiated through the Democratic National Convention was the other side of what had until recently been a deep despair" by Fintan O'Toole (NYRB).

[T]he Democrats in Chicago were singing a redemption song. It had three parts: valediction, malediction, and benediction....

Having taken a break to listen to "Redemption Song" (see below), I will concentrate on the malediction:

[B]ad-mouthing Trump at a Democratic convention is not that hard. Yet it too had its complications. Just as the Democrats had to navigate between loving Joe and giving him a jubilant cheerio, they had to figure out how to manage another contradictory feat: cutting Trump down to size while retaining a clear sense of the threat he poses to the very existence of the American republic...

They seemed — to O'Toole — to be trying "to reconfigure Trump as the Wizard of Oz, a little man who has conjured an illusion of MAGA magnitude." 

Even the renegade Republican Adam Kinzinger was entirely on message when he called Trump “a weak man pretending to be strong. He is a small man pretending to be big…. He puts on quite a show, but there is no real strength there.”

I add my favorite blog tag, "big and small." 

"A presidential candidate admitting to marijuana use is nothing new. That happened in 2004, 2008, and 2016."

"But I've never seen any presidential candidate other than Kamala Harris follow up that admission with this kind of argument for legalizing marijuana: 'I think that it gives a lot of people joy, and we need more joy.'"

Writes my son John, on his blog, linking to "Kamala Harris says she smoked marijuana in college, calls for legalization" (ABC News).

This reminds me of why I changed my mind about legalization in March 2015 as a result of reading something written by Paul Johnson about Henrik Ibsen:

There was one aspect of Ibsen’s vanity which verged on the ludicrous... He had a lifelong passion for medals and orders. In fact, he went to embarrassing lengths to get them...

[T]here is ample evidence for Ibsen’s passion since he insisted on displaying his growing galaxy of stars on every possible occasion. As early as 1878 he is reported to have worn all of them, including one like a dog-collar round his neck, at a club dinner. The Swedish painter Georg Pauli came across Ibsen sporting his medals (not the ribbons alone but the actual stars) in a Rome street. At times he seems to have put them on virtually every evening. He defended his practice by saying that, in the presence of ‘younger friends’, it ‘reminds me that I need to keep within certain limits.’ All the same, people who had invited him to dinner were always relieved when he arrived without them, as they attracted smiles and even open laughter as the wine circulated....

That's about alcohol, but it jogged my thinking. As I elaborated later:

I'm not a big marijuana legalization advocate, though I did change my position on the subject fairly recently, because I think substance-boosted disinhibition is important, though overdone.

When people didn't understand the connection to the passage about Ibsen, I said,

Here's a clue: freedom and democracy depend on our disinhibition; we need to be able to laugh at authority. 

Without the disinhibiting substance, Ibsen would have got away with his stupid pomposity.

I'm talking about something a bit different from "joy." I like joy too, but there's something with more edge that I'm interested in.

And speaking of edge, here's something else I found searching my blog archive for Ibsen and marijuana. From April 2016, "The perfect problem — when everything big and small and up-to-date and retrospective and cool and puritanical collides in one crowded intersection":

"Snapchat's new Bob Marley lens sparks 'blackface' outrage."

To acknowledge 4/20, known as "Weed Day," Snapchat created a special "lens" that morphed people's faces into Bob Marley, the late reggae icon. The lens added dreadlocks, a crochet slouch cap, changed the shape of eyes and noses, and darkened skin color.

People flooded Twitter with accusations that Snapchat had created a blackface filter....

And this is why we need marijuana.

But that was April 2016, and now it's the Era of That's Not Funny! And it's been the week of hammering it into everyone's head that blackface is always always offensive and never ever funny. Ibsen didn't think his medals were funny. Kamala Harris imagines marijuana bringing joy — just some nice elevated feelings. But what if we get started laughing and we can't stop? It's a slippery slope out of the Era of That's Not Funny.

"Because of Bob’s mixed blood, he was often teased as 'the little yellow boy' or 'the German boy.' He was described as shy, resourceful, and clever."

"In 1957, Marley and his mother moved to Kingston, settling in a dense, ramshackle neighborhood referred to as Trench Town. Marley fell in with a crowd that dreamed of making music. He formed a group with Neville (Bunny Wailer) Livingston, Peter Tosh, Beverley Kelso, and Junior Braithwaite. They eventually called themselves the Wailers, and their sound fused American-style soul harmonies with the island’s jumpy ska rhythms. Under the guidance of Joe Higgs, a singer and producer, the Wailers were a local sensation by the mid-sixties. But island stardom brought little financial security. After moving briefly to Wilmington, Delaware, where his mother had relocated, Marley returned to the Wailers in 1969, just in time for a revolution in Jamaican music: the jolting, horn-inflected styles of ska and rocksteady were slowing down. Reggae was the new craze."

From "Manufacturing Bob Marley/A new oral history shows just how much of his story is up for grabs," an article in The New Yorker (about this book, "So Much Things to Say: The Oral History of Bob Marley").

There are many interesting things in that article, but the most interesting thing to me was that Bob Marley lived in Wilmington, Delaware in the 1960s. I look up his address — 2312 Tatnall Street — and find it in Google Street View:



Google calculates how far that was from where I lived — 5.5 miles. I left in 1964, and he didn't arrive until 1965.

The perfect problem — when everything big and small and up-to-date and retrospective and cool and puritanical collides in one crowded intersection.

"Snapchat's new Bob Marley lens sparks 'blackface' outrage."

To acknowledge 4/20, known as "Weed Day," Snapchat created a special "lens" that morphed people's faces into Bob Marley, the late reggae icon. The lens added dreadlocks, a crochet slouch cap, changed the shape of eyes and noses, and darkened skin color.

People flooded Twitter with accusations that Snapchat had created a blackface filter....

And this is why we need marijuana.

If that last remark is hard to understand, I refer you to my March 24, 2015 post, where I revealed that "In the last couple days, my position on the legalization of marijuana has changed."

Oddly enough, it's because of something I read about Ibsen! I don't have the time right now to explain my train of thought, but I can give you the passage — from Paul Johnson's "Intellectuals" — that got me started on it:

There was one aspect of Ibsen’s vanity which verged on the ludicrous... He had a lifelong passion for medals and orders. In fact, he went to embarrassing lengths to get them...

[T]here is ample evidence for Ibsen’s passion since he insisted on displaying his growing galaxy of stars on every possible occasion. As early as 1878 he is reported to have worn all of them, including one like a dog-collar round his neck, at a club dinner. The Swedish painter Georg Pauli came across Ibsen sporting his medals (not the ribbons alone but the actual stars) in a Rome street. At times he seems to have put them on virtually every evening. He defended his practice by saying that, in the presence of ‘younger friends’, it ‘reminds me that I need to keep within certain limits.’ All the same, people who had invited him to dinner were always relieved when he arrived without them, as they attracted smiles and even open laughter as the wine circulated....

What struck me and changed my mind on the subject was the realization — as I put it in the comments — that "freedom and democracy depend on our disinhibition; we need to be able to laugh at authority."

"This one here is the original sinsemilla, Bob Marley's favorite. And this one here is the chocolate skunk. It's special for the ladies."

Pot tourism in Jamaica, modeled on those wine tours people do in northern California.

Here, in Jamaica's verdant central mountains, dreadlocked men escort curious visitors to a farm where deep-green marijuana plants grow out of the reddish soil. Similar tours are offered just outside the western resort town of Negril, where a marijuana mystique has drawn weed-smoking vacationers for decades...

"I can get stronger stuff at home, but there's something really special about smoking marijuana in Jamaica. I mean, this is the marijuana that inspired Bob Marley," said a 26-year-old tourist from Minnesota who only identified herself as Angie as she crumbled some pot into rolling paper.

I have a problem generally with traveling to foreign countries. Is this what they mean by broadening the mind? Isn't it mind-expanding enough to consume the powerful Minnesota marijuana while playing Bob Marley records and contemplating the man who no longer lives anywhere in his natural habitat? Do people from Jamaica journey to Minnesota to think about Prince? (And he's still around. You might entertain the hope of actually seeing him.)

My mind is already sufficiently expanded to contemplate Bob Marley solely by reading about him and remembering hearing his music, and it's also expanded enough to imagine how bad I would feel getting near criminal activity in a foreign country.

I picture: "He was a 20-year-old American boy, up against a system he didn't understand, spoken in a language he couldn't speak...." Can you handle your legal problems in the language of Jamaica?



Yes, of course marijuana is still illegal in Jamaica. Here's another quote from Breezy, the Jamaican pot farmer quoted in the post title:

"The government needs to free up marijuana soon, man, because it's a natural thing, a spiritual thing.... And the tourists love it."

Ah, but what sort of bland old rule-abiding travelers would clog up the place, ruining the ambiance, if it weren't a crime? What's marijuana without the transgressive edge?

"How to Be OK Pursuing Happiness as a Warm Friend To a Puppy Not of One's Own but By Borrowing Your Neighbor's Best Friend and Taking Him to Dog Parks Where He Can Make Lots of Friends of His Own."

The title of the book Meade says he would write if he "wanted to write a book motivated purely out of my love for humanity."

It's based on the clichés ("all true"): "If you want a friend, get a dog" and "If you want a friend, be a friend." Also, there were those self-help best sellers from the 60's and 70's "How To Be Your Own Best Friend" and "I'm OK - You're OK" plus, the classic Charles Schulz' "Happiness is a Warm Puppy."

What's stopping me from writing it is I just don't have that much love for humanity. I'd write it for caninity but of course canines don't read. And besides, they don't need self help — they need our help.

Bob Marley spoke some harsh but true truth when he said: “The truth is, everyone is going to hurt you. You just got to find the ones worth suffering for.”

And he was right!

That's from the comments thread about the cartoon "I Think I Am In Friend-Love With You," by Yumi Sakugawa, which I love. It's spurred a lot of conversation. For example, Meade and I got into a long conversation after he quoted commenter Skyler's remark that the cartoon was "pathetic." Wasn't it only that the character in the cartoon was pathetic — and why was that? — and not the cartoon itself as a work of art? Are comics art? Are comics comical? What is art? It's art because it made us have this conversation about it. Whatever happened to works of art that found their completion in all the many conversations they inspired?

ADDED: I just found 2 Yumi Sakugawa books on Amazon for $1.99: "There Is No Right Way To Meditate"  and "Special Message For You Hand-Delivered To You In The Universe." I read some of "There Is No Right Way" out loud to Meade:

10 Ways to Get Rid of Your Bad Mood

1. Have your doppelganger extract your bad mood from your chest so he/she can make fun sculptures with it.

2. Paint out your bad mood. When you're finished with your painting, set it on fire...

Meade said: "This is where Yoko Ono meets Chip Ahoy."

"Now that legal pot is here, will cigarette companies dust off their old plans for mass commercialization?"

NPR explores the coming of legal marijuana:

In the '70s... "there were high-level conversations about adding marijuana to tobacco, creating a line of marijuana cigarettes, and being ready to jump in and market this."

As recently as 1993, when it looked like France was poised to legalize marijuana, Philip Morris trademarked the name "Marley." But when the estate of Bob Marley complained, the company claimed it had nothing to do with the reggae singer.

"Philip Morris said, 'No no, it could be any kind of Marley,... like Jacob Marley, the cheap, cantankerous teetotaler from A Christmas Carol.'"...

Want legal marijuana? Write to the President:

Snoop Dogg is now Snoop Lion... and he's the reincarnation of Bob Marley.

The new music will be reggae, not rap. He's 40 years old now and he's "got to give something" that the children can listen to, because "That's what you do when you're wise."

He says he's "born again" — born again as a Rastafarian.

Snoop didn't explain why he was switching from "Dogg" to "Lion," but it's likely a reference to the Lion of Judah, a religious symbol popular in Rastafarian and Ethiopian culture....

He said that in Jamaica, where he stayed for 35 days, he grew closer to his wife....

PR/religion? Who knows? But the sense of growing older and needing to provide for the next generation.... And since Bob Marley's son Rohan is happy with all this leveraging on Bob Marley, sure, go ahead. It's for the children.

Via Throwing Things.

Oh, but Rohan is not Bob Marley's only child.

Judge Posner includes a photograph of Bob Marley in an opinion and sloughs off worries about copyright.

The case was about dreadlocks (and the prison officials who cut them off), and Posner said his use of the photo fit the "fair use" doctrine:

"It's not as if we're selling our opinions in competition with a photographer... Using the photo in a judicial opinion couldn't conceivably be hurting the copyright holder."

Posner did not give the photographer credit, though it's a commercial photographer who uses Getty Images to collect fees. But Posner just grabbed the photo from the internet. He says "With the Internet, it's extraordinarily easy to find photographs of anything," so there's a good chance he encountered the photograph on a website that didn't name the photographer.

Posner seems to think it's quite fun to toss photographs into judicial opinions. It reminds me of the way some judges like to quote song lyrics or lines from movies. Blogging, I always feel that it's more questionable to use an image that someone else created than it is to cut and paste a block of text, but why should that be? I quote blocks of text all the time, but I remember, when I started blogging, worrying quite a bit about whether it was acceptable to copy that much text, so I'm relieved to hear a judge take a broad view of fair use and set an example.

Here's an opinion where Posner includes a picture of an ostrich with its head in the sand and a picture of (presumably) a lawyer with his head in the sand as he criticizes a lawyer who failed to cite a case that should have been cited. The lawyer filed a grievance against Posner for funning with him like that. The grievance was dismissed, and Posner offers the classic nonapology "I'm sorry he was upset by it."

There's more going on here than copyright. There's also the idea that judges are supposed to be neutral and sober. They wield power against real individuals, and it's a power that's supposed to come solely from law, not from any will of the judge's own. In that light, when the judge displays that he's enjoying the experience or playing to the crowd, entertaining the audience, we may fear that he's doing something wrong. This is why most judicial opinions are so godawful tedious, as the judges all sound alike and phrase everything in the dullest possible way. And there are no pictures!

This reminds me. We lawprofs have to make students read these texts, and we use casebooks that have edited the tediously verbose writings down, but the casebooks are still ponderous — in more ways that one. I'd like to take iBooks Author — an amusing new app — throw all the cases I assign into it. (All the judicial opinions are in the public domain, so there's no copyright issue at all.) Edit the cases down, summarize some things, and embed some pictures in a Posneresque way.

For example, take Griswold v. Connecticut (the old birth control case that flummoxed Mitt Romney in the debate the other day). There's a point in Justice Harlan's concurring opinion where he writes:

The Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment stands, in my opinion, on its own bottom.

That's just begging for a photograph grabbed from the internet.

Should Althouse use iBooks Author to write a Posneresquely amusing Constitutional Law casebook?
	No. It would be undignified and unserious and thus not usable in a real law school class.
	Yes. Students (and other readers) will love it.
	No. It won't be that good. It might be annoying. And Althouse has better things to spend time on.
	Yes. I'd like to see Althouse's creative energy drained away in this idiotic project.
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IN THE COMMENTS: Freeman Hunt said:

Posner is The Crack Emcee of judicial opinions?

There's no music in the politics... and no politics in the music.

Ziggy Marley bemoans the separation of politics and music.

“In the ’60s and ’70s, there was plenty of music for peaceful revolutions,” Marley said. “Where are these songs now? Who is writing them? From Occupy Wall Street to revolution in Egypt, I wonder where the music is.”...

And as for the music these days:

“I use the analogy of circus with music,” he said. “You have clowns, tightrope walkers, the man that puts his head in the lion’s mouth. But now the circus is all clowns trying to keep us laughing. The tightrope walker is still in the back, but no one’s watching him. People just want entertainment. There’s more to music than entertainment.”

Funny to think of the music without politics as a circus that's all clowns. I tend to think of politics as the clowns. If music came into our politics, it would bring more gravity, not more foolery. That's what I think. I keep seeing commentary saying the Occupy [Your City] movement needs its Bob Dylan, but if you think he would entertain and encourage you — ease you and cool you and cease the pain — you don't know your Bob Dylan. To point out the obvious:

You never turned around to see the frowns on the jugglers and the clowns
When they all come down and did tricks for you
You never understood that it ain’t no good
You shouldn’t let other people get your kicks for you