Grow Up, Cannabis

Last week I took my boys to see Despicable Me 4. The movie was good. A bit of a retrospective of the franchise but not monotonous to its source. The poop jokes are enjoyable for all ages. As we drove back I declared they may not be getting better, but they certainly have not gotten worse, and you can rank them by personal preference without declaring any of them bad.

My younger son gave his ranking some thought, and after naming a couple titles, he came to the original, Despicable Me. “When I was a kid,” he began to say–

“When you were a kid?” I smiled. He’s currently 13, but was 12 last month.

“Yeah, I really liked that movie when I was a kid.” Fair enough. He did like that first movie a lot when he was a kid. It’s jarring to think it came out 14 years ago, but my boys are 15 and 13, so it falls between them in age, and my youngest has never known a world where Gru did not exist.

Jack of All Trades, Master of Arts

One element that Gru’s animation studio, Illumination, does very well is caricature. I like to think it has something to do with the company’s French origins: the country has a tradition of illustrative exaggeration that dates back centuries and the French have no problem skewering American cuisine and the physique it produces. To look at those body types in an animated movie makes one want to crunch a set of sit ups, and that is the power of caricature: to exaggerate the obvious and reveal the truth.

America also has a long tradition of caricature, and when I was a kid I thought no one did it better than Thomas Nast. His pen was mightier than many political swords following the Civil War, and wielded more influence with the populace. But in general I was enamored with art, and cartoons, and drawing. I need not repeat my love of comic books, and you can even find my thoughts on Thomas Nast elsewhere on the internet.

None of that dissipated when I went for a Masters in Editorial Studies. I picked Mark Twain as a subject, in part because Twain employed some of the best illustrators of his era, and liked marrying word with image to make his impact. Twain was fastidious in his word selection. He once wrote:

“The difference between the almost right word & the right word is really a large matter–it’s the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning.”

It’s About Time

Mark Twain was the pen name of Sam Clemens. “Mark Twain” was the call a leadsman would yell indicating safe water on the Mississippi as a riverboat was safe in two fathoms, or 12 feet of water. Prior to becoming an author, Sam Clemens was a riverboat pilot, and that pen name could represent the liminal space between what was safe, and what was dangerous.

Looking back, all of my heroes cared about communication. George Carlin’s seven dirty words went to the Supreme Court because he cared about the weight of words and our ridiculousness over their use.

Another early influence was Garry Trudeau. Creator of Doonesbury, the political cartoonist has received praise and criticism for his point of view, but as a kid I consumed his anthologies from the 1970s and ’80s that garnered him a Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning. You can see my own hand replicate his style in the image above. That was me, drawing me into a panel with the cast of Doonesbury, back in 199…3?

Left to right: Mark Slackmeyer, Zonker Harris, B.D., Uncle Duke, and Mr Jay.

One of these characters is not like the others. Introduced in 1989 as a companion to Mr Butts–a walking, talking cigarette representing Big Tobacco–Mr Jay was a mascot without an industry at the time. Back then Trudeau was holding up a mirror to Joe Camel, and the pervasive collection of Marlboro Miles indirectly targetted at kids my age to exchange for cigarette-branded merchandise.

All that seems so innocent and completely amoral in retrospect, but that was the era. Baby Boomers were begrudgingly making room for later generations, and their past actions were generating questions. In December 1996, Time magazine ran a cover article featuring Mr Jay. Titled “Just Say What?” we see progressive Boomer Mike Doonesbury talking to his 8-year old Millennial daughter, Alex (Alexandra), with Mr Jay in the background. “You tried pot when you were young. Maybe even inhaled. So now what do you say to your kids?”

A Battle of Words

I say to my kids that it’s not called pot. Yes, it was called pot. It’s been called a lot of things: marijuana, dope, grass, weed, mary jane, doobie, the Devil’s lettuce. All very colorful. But I call it cannabis. And as an industry it needs to embrace this term over all others if it wants to be taken seriously.

I say this because the influence of those outside the industry is not to take it seriously. That 1996 issue of Time was the first of five cover stories for the magazine between 1996 and 2015 on the subject of cannabis. Four of the covers called it pot, and the other cover was titled “The United States of Amerijuana.” Clever.

Time recently released a special edition found in the checkout at your local grocer, and they got the name right. Well, at least on the cover. In its opening article “How the Conversation Has Changed,” Bill Syken still called it everything else. The five-page introduction referenced marijuana 24 times, pot 19 times (pot hawk another 8 times), joint twice, and weed twice. The scientific name cannabis was used three times (twice coming from the same quote from someone else).

Let me take you back. The first issue of Time magazine was March 3, 1923–three years into America’s Prohibition. Imagine a special issue published that year about the cultural significance of alcohol, but once past the cover the articles only called it booze, hooch, moonshine, and joy juice. Would you take it seriously? Or does it seem childish?

What we are discussing are registers of language. In sociolinguistics, a register is a variety of language used for a particular purpose or particular communicative situation. You use it every day. Cows and pigs are alive until they become beef and pork for your dinner. Why is that? Because hundreds of years ago, Anglo-Saxon farmers who spoke a form of German in England raised animals for their hungry Norman overlords who spoke a form of French. The working class knew the animals in one capacity, and the upper class knew them in another. If we only reference a subject in the register of slang, then how can it ever be known as anything else? More formal. More respected. More acceptable.

Sam Clemens: Drug Dealer

“If you want to be taken seriously, be consistent.” I’m not sure who said it, and good luck finding a source on the internet, but the advice is sound. If cannabis as an industry wants to be taken seriously then it needs to be consistent in its bearing. There are a lot of maxims attributed to Mark Twain; I can safely assert that he did not say this. But he did say, “Reputation is a hall-mark: it can remove doubt from pure silver, and it can also make the plated article pass for pure.”

Prior to becoming an author, Sam Clemens was a riverboat pilot. Prior to becoming a riverboat pilot, Sam Clemens was aiming to become something else. In his last work written for publication, Mark Twain looked back at young Sam Clemens, and was asked about the turning point in his life. Published February 1910 in Harper’s Bazar, Twain considered the 10,000 links in a long chain of turning points that made him Mark Twain. One of those early links might surprise you.

“Among the books that interested me in those days was one about the Amazon. The traveller told an alluring tale of his long voyage up the great river from Para to the sources of Madeira, through the heart of an enchanted land…he told an astonishing tale about coca, a vegetable product of miraculous powers: asserting that it was so nourishing and so strength-giving that the native of the mountains of the Madeira region would tramp up hill and down all day on a pinch of powdered coca and require no other sustenance.”

The image fired Sam Clemens’ avarice. He would get rich on coca. Clemens followed the Mississippi down to New Orleans, intending to take a ship to Para. But there was no ship to Para. And after a few days broke in New Orleans he made the acquaintance of a riverboat pilot, who was willing to teach him the trade and the river that would later inform the writing that labeled him the “Lincoln of our literature.”

The year was 1857. Coca-Cola would not be invented by Colonel John Pemberton for another 29 years. It’s been 28 years since California first legalized medical cannabis in 1996 with the passage of Proposition 215, and we seem on the threshold of cannabis being federally rescheduled. If you’re saving lives then make sure your critics know you matter. Grow up, Cannabis.

But first, let’s rank movies:

6) Minions ; 5) Despicable Me ; 4) Despicable Me 4 ; 3) Minions 2 ; 2) Despicable Me 3 ; 1) Despicable Me 2