Dear Marjorie,
I’m writing this from the spacious offices of the Weekly Standard, a division of News Corp. Which is another way of saying: You’re not going to bait me into a conversation about Wendi Deng Murdoch or her husband. But I agree that the Journal piece was fascinating, the most interesting thing I’ve read this week. And I’ll leave it at that.
I’m also going to pass on your implied question about whether I get a lot of nut mail. No reason to incite the lunatics who write it. Not that any of them read Slate.
Instead, let’s talk about something really upsetting. Did you see the full-page ad from the Partnership for a Drug Free America that ran in the New York Times yesterday? It was on C24 of the “Business” section. I was just balling it up to throw in the wood stove (I only read “Business” on Mondays, as I’ve admitted) when the headline grabbed me: “What To Do After Burying Your 10-Year-Old.”
The ad was meant (I guess) to alert parents to the dangers of inhalants, the “over 100 household products that can be inhaled to get high, like correction fluid, spray paint, or even gasoline.” Fair enough. Sniffing paint is dangerous (I worked as a house painter for part of a summer during college and haven’t been able to balance my checkbook since.), and parents ought to tell their kids not to do it.
So far, so sensible. But propagandists at Partnership for a Drug-Free America go way beyond that. The ad imagines what a parent says while standing at the grave of his 10-year-old who has died from using inhalants: “You tell her about the flowers you bought, and about the movie you saw last night. You tell her all the people who miss her–her brothers, her aunt. Tears stream down your cheeks as you tell her you miss her too. You hope she knows. You walk away from your child’s grave for the ninth time this week feeling emptier still.”
It goes on and gets worse, but I won’t repeat it. It’s too depressing. I felt emotional by the end of the second sentence. I guess that was the point.
I was offended by it. The ad is too much, too manipulative. I think it’s obscene, actually, the sort of thing that Bill Bennett and Joe Lieberman (and Al Gore, when he’s in his Anti-Filth Crusader mode) ought to be howling about. But they won’t howl about it. Because the ad is in the service of an idea we’re all, as good citizens, supposed to agree with. So the propagandists have got us: They wreck our breakfasts with a gratuitously morbid ad that uses the bond between parent and child to make what is in many ways a political point. And we’re not allowed to complain about it.
Well, I, for one, am complaining. Growl.
Best,
Tucker
