Parents who do drugs have kids who do drugs.

1) I learned it from watching you, Dad.
"People are always trying to convince themselves that their times are really important," she said. "But if you really, truly understood that you are going to die, and how many people there are now and how many people there have ever been, just beads in this never-ending string, how, then, do we live? How can you take yourself seriously? "

2) I learned it by watching you, Dad.
What if the dad just up and bitchslapped the kid, took all his coke, and said seventeen things that destroyed his son's self-esteem in seventeen million ways, before returning to his living room to watch reruns of All in the Family, snort the coke, and sit their sweating in his white t-shirt palpating his man boobs (if you don't recall the commercial, the man had a moustache and a hint of manboobs)? Wouldn't that have been equally effective message: don't let your parents know you are on drugs, or they might take what you have, beat you, and shove it in your face by smearing coke boogers all over the sink you share in your crappy, mold-ceilinged apartment.

3) But if you don't yourself at least a little seriously, what then?
Like, for instance, if I didn't take myself a little seriously, there would be two people in the world who did, and I would probably fall into habits (not showering, nocturnalism, chain smoking, occasional forays into delusional narcosis) that have proven to have limited staying power. Maybe not taking things seriously allows those who are wound a bit tight the opportunity to enjoy life for a change, but those who are wound a bit loose need to take some shit seriously or else they'll end up talking about cokehead dads and delineating unfunny narrative threads about what they're really like.

4) Is it time to take Iran seriously?
Is our foreign policy based on Chicago School of Economics? 'Cause if we pigeonhole Iran into some "rational actor" type shit, there's going to ramifications that obese people in Peoria won't be able to wrap their loose-skinned, chubby arms around. The revolution was televised, remember, and it involved Jimmy Carter nodding his head absent-mindedly and a bunch of hostages held up as the living embodiment of our national embarassment, which embarassment gave birth to reactionary politics and exceptionally theoretical NYC art. So stop it with the "the leaders of this country have intelligible goals which we overly patriotic bigoted politicians can understand" and the "Pre-emption does not always mean war every time because there is a way to do it diplomatically, in theory at least, there is, or so I'm told" qualifications. Disclosure: I haven't yet read the Seymour Hersh piece in the New Yorker, but I did see him once on the Daily Show and I'm about to leave work to go eat buffalo and read that mess. Also expect an uptick in vehemence and randomness. Papa's got a bone to pick.