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Meghan Daum and Rob Walker

the breakfast table
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from: Meghan Daum

What Mardi Gras and Drug Legalization Have in Common

Posted Thursday, March 1, 2001, at 2:16 PM ET

Rob,

Yeah, I caught a wire story similar to the one you cited about the Mardis Gras-induced lawlessness in other cities and, not yet being hip to the Theory of No Opinion, tried to form an opinion and then gave up. It does seem to me, though, that your city's code of responsible mayhem might serve as a useful analogy for drug legalization. In New Orleans, where, I presume, just about everyone takes the day off for revelry and has a certain amount of respect for the tradition, no one gets too out of hand. In Austin or Fresno, where Mardis Gras is regarded as a rather fringe event whose celebratory rites are open to interpretation, you get rock throwing and the knocking over of portable toilets. Same with drugs. Legalize them and everyone knows what they're dealing with. Enforce a taboo and you have nothing but uncontrollable trafficking and customs lines held up because of Whitney Houston.

And I held that opinion before the movie Traffic came out. I probably even held it before Indecent Proposal, which, incidentally, starred Robert Redford along with Demi Moore.

In more pressing matters, I like your multigenre approach to the new Survivor element. And to up the fictional ante and capitalize on the viewing public's predilection for "crossover television" I might also suggest putting a fictional character from another prime-time series on the island to see how he or she fares given the constraints of that character. In other words, throw Ally McBeal on Survivor, and see if she ends up counseling the other players about their love lives and moral dilemmas when she's not having spazzy hallucinations that a palm tree (or a Wilson basketball) is Barry White. Not only would this test the depth of character development on our favorite shows, it would make the Tarantino-esque demises doubly satisfying. Imagine Drew Carey met with a cascade of bullets, Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman forced to play Russian roulette. (I don't think that's on anymore, but still.) Hopefully, someone from Fox is reading this, and you and I are gonna get a big option check next week.

Speaking of promoting ourselves, yes, I do have a book coming out. How nice of you to mention that it's called My Misspent Youth and that it can be ordered by clicking on the title! Yes, it is a collection of essays (not about Nebraska), and yes, most of them (but not all) are personal, and yes I do get people e-mailing me from time to time and saying things like "I feel I know you." Most of the people are extremely nice, and I'm always touched that anyone would bother. On the other hand, I am sometimes referred to as "confessional," which I find somewhat reductive because I never sit down to write unless I think I can get at a larger topic than just myself. I use myself as a tool to talk about various cultural and social phenomena (and sometimes for pure satire), but I think contemporary readers have been so saturated by the memoir market that we think anything in the first person is tantamount to a diary entry. I've never really kept a journal and, if I did, would never think of publishing it because it would about as interesting as my Toyota owner's manual. My pig Loretta, however, has written a memoir, and we're currently shopping for an agent. It deals with issues of weight, although unlike most books of that ilk, it's a chronicle of weight gain rather than loss. It should revolutionize the market.

Meghan

the breakfast table
entries
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from: Meghan Daum

What Mardi Gras and Drug Legalization Have in Common

Posted Thursday, March 1, 2001, at 2:16 PM ET
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Meghan Daum's essay collection, My Misspent Youth, will be published in March. Rob Walker, a journalist living in New Orleans, writes Slate's "Moneybox" column.
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Reader Comment From The Fray:


I have a suggestion for some 'reality based' TV programs. How about Refugee Boat? We could take contestants and put them in a third world, war torn country and give them thirty days to figure out how to make a raft, find food and get set afloat before despotic soldiers order them to dig their own graves.

Or, how about Street Survival? In this one, the contestants must survive three months on the street with only the clothes on their backs and no identification. They would be required to jump trains, sleep outdoors in alleyways and in shelters, and generally try to survive their new found compatriots, welfare rolls and dumpster diving.

And, how about this beauty? Prison Guards would be a reality based show where one would become a prison guard in one of the most feared prisons in the United States. In this show contestants get thirty days training and then must work as a prison guard in the most violence-prone sectors of the prison for at least two months. Talk about ratings! I know that I would personally be glued to the screen.

Let's give vanity and greed a real price. Instead of paying people to play the mind games most of us have to wade through in our regular work week, let's up the ante a little. I can't wait until the spotlights burn and we get to see one of these numbnuts have to face a freight train's worth of trouble rushing headlong into them.

--Rogue

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