Today's Topics:
The aura of leadership
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Message-Id: <9201291611.AA26866@enet-gw.pa.dec.com>
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 92 08:11:13 PST
From: "Alan H. Martin 29-Jan-1992 1113" <amartin@tle.enet.dec.com>
To: subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Cc: amartin@tle.enet.dec.com
Subject:
We've got a lot of nodes here named after instructions:
ADD AND AOSG ARRAY ASCII ASH BLOCK BLT CAIL CAIN
CALL CAM CAMA CLEAR CLOSE CONS DATA DIV DIVI IRPC
MUL ORCA ORCAM ORCMI SKIP SOS SUB SUBI XOR EDIT
ENTER EXTEND FIX HALT HRROI IFDEF INIT INTERN JEN JFCL
LOOKUP MOVE OUTPUT MTAPE OPEN PAGE PHASE (POPJ1) PORTAL RADIX
RELEAS SEARCH STATUS TAPE TDC TLC TLON TRNN TRON TSC
UNIVER Z
But I never met anyone with enough Slack to use one for their own name:
>From: Ulf Lindback <uli@dublin.docs.uu.se>
...
> Resent-From: Klaus Zeuge D87 <sojge@London.DoCS.UU.SE>
^^^^^
/AHM
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Message-Id: <9201300046.AA23854@mahler>
To: subgenius@mc.lcs.mit.edu
Subject: The aura of leadership
Date: Wed, 29 Jan 92 19:46:10 -0500
From: Michael Travers <mt@media.mit.edu>
Why our president smiles a lot, mangles sentences, and projects an
aura of panicky confidence.
The following appeared in The New York Times on Wednesday, January 22, 1992.
Our Man in Nirvana
- by Benjamin J. Stein
- Bush takes a strong sedative. Too strong. -
(Malibu, Calif.) In the first weeks of August 1974, when I was a speechwriter
for President Richard Nixon, I walked into the office of the White House
physician, next door to the White House. As I asked for some allergy medicine,
I noticed a surgical-steel tray laden with filled syringes, their needles
dripping. Next to them was a vial of a potent chlorpromazine tranquilizer.
I knew the corpsman who was loading the tray and I asked him what it was all
about. He said is was for someone "over there," jerking his thumb toward the
White House. He would not tell me who was getting shots of tranquilizers in
those final days of the Administration. He said only that it was "someone who
needs to have his head clear, and won't."
This all comes to mind with the news that President Bush has been taking
powerful benzodiazepene sedation in the form of the prescription drug Halcion
when he travels. It was also revealed over a year ago that the Secretary of
State, James A. Baker, had taken Halcion when he went to conferences overseas.
These are scary tidings. Halcion is the most terrifying drug I have ever used,
and its effects are incalculably more frightening when they are at work on the
President. I have been taking prescription tranquilizers sine 1966. I have
used almost every kind imaginable: phenothiazines, chlorpromazines and others
I cannot recall. But Halcion, a chemical first-cousin to the tranquilizer
Xanax, is in a class by itself for mind-altering side effects. It is not a
classic sedative, which basically just slow things down. No, benzodiazepenes
are described by Halcon's maker, the Upjohn Company, as "anxiolytics," meaning
they literally cut the anxiety in your brain.
When Halcion hits you, it's as if an angel of the Lord appears in your bedroom
and tells you that nothing is important, that everything you were worried about
is happening on Mars and that nirvana, Lethe and the warm arms of mother are
all waiting for you. People who have used heroin tell me Halcion is better
than heroin for making bad thoughts simply disappear.
The flip side is that in my experience, as in the cases of many men and women
I talk with every day in a program that helps people get off drugs, Halcion
took up residence in my head. It does not just do its magic and then disappear.
Without it, sleep is almost impossible. I felt depressed and often suicidal
for days after taking it and more or less permanently depressed if I took it
continuously.
It clouds judgment and forecloses careful analysis. It makes the user
alternately supremely confident and then panicky with as unnameable dread.
It causes intense, truly terrifying forgetfulness, as well as a serene bliss
about that forgetfulness.
A friend of mine took a small dose of Halcion - less than what the President
is reported to take - and then carried a gun through a metal detector at an
airport. He had forgotten not only that he had a gun with him but also that
guns are illegal at airports. Another friend, a lawyer, repeatedly failed to
show up at her own depositions when she had taken Halcion the night before.
Halcion is serious medicine. When the President takes it, it's not just a
matter between a civil servant and his physician. It's questionable whether
the physician should even prescribe it, considering that it is banned in
England and is the subject of major litigation and controversy over its side-
effects in the U.S. and around the world.
A President with a chemical between himself and reality is the last thing
America needs. It's the plot of a suspense novel, not the stewardship that
real life and real problems need.
Wake up, Mr. President, we need you on the job. And if you need the drug to
sleep when you travel, maybe you should just stay home.
- (Benjamin J. Stein is a lawyer, writer and actor.) -
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