To: Ken H.
From: Dr. Chavez
Subject: You Got What You Deserved, Hon

Dear Ken,

I thought I was beyond astonishment at the extent to which the ACLU, NORML, and other such organizations would go, but seeing a forgotten letter of mine to Senator Hatch on the Internet, linked to an hysterically anti-Straight web-site, has instructed me once again on the extraordinary misguided hostility of these forces. I don't suppose I can do anything in the legal realm to have that letter removed from a use I oppose, nor do I consider legal action a desirable route to take in any case. I will register my protest here, however.

And I will limit myself to saying this: the only thing about the situation that bears any real comparison with Communist nations such as The People's Republic of China and the ex-Soviet Union is precisely the campaign by innuendo and smear that NORML et al. have brought to bear on the whole anti-drug movement. What distinguishes the "rap sessions" at Straight from brainwashing is that they were always underpinned by the age-old moral system of western civilization, found in the Ethics of Aristotle, in the Ten Commandments, and for that matter universally even in the East, in the Analects of Confucius for example, and grounded in a common-sense structure of order in the family and in society as a whole. As opposed to this, the Communist system was erected on the basis of Marxist conceptions of human nature as infinitely malleable; it represented an attempt to mold a "new Socialist man" which was an impossibility. The real horror of the last thirty-odd years, on the watch of my generation of baby-boomers, has been the attempt to unleash mere desire as a self-validating substitute for the moral inheritance. My own children, and the others who became enmeshed in the drug culture, unbeknownst to themselves, were truly breaking ranks with the entire heritage of our culture. The intellectual and media elite to this day have failed to grasp the depth and extent of this decadence. Straight, for all its faults--and I am far from agreeing with each and every individual measure--on balance was (and I guess still is, assuming it still exists) the only program grounded in a suffficiently serious understanding of the crisis of civilization represented by the willingness of mere children to act as these children have acted, towards their own parents, towards society as a whole.

That is why my wife and I will never participate in an movement to "get" Straight. We are not "activists" of any sort, although twenty years ago, at the on-set of the crisis, we did what we could, and continue to stand by anything we said at that time.

You are indulging one of the most destructive of human impulses, the sense of indignation at being "victimized." The ultimate responsibility for your situation lies with a body of bad ideas, germinating for centuries since the "enlightenment," risen to a critical point during the "60's," and in your generation exploding down and out to the very children of our society. If you wish to improve what we have before us, the work must be done on yourself, and the family you raise. Attacking Straight will only fuel the fire of your anger. And as Zeami, the great Japanese playwright of the 15th century wisely put it, "The flame of anger consumes only itself."

Best wishes,

Jonathan Chaves

Professor of Chinese, Chairman, Department of East Asian
Languages & Literatures, Rome 468
The George Washington University
Washington, DC 20052

202--994-6474; fax 202--994-1512; cell phone 703-472-3204

email: jchaves@gwu.edu

http://www.gwu.edu/~eall/faculty/chaves.htm