Dream Log: Getting High With Mel Brooks

A personal note before I begin: it's been decades since I smoked pot. (And I've never met Mel Brooks.) (And I have no idea whether Mel Brooks has ever smoked pot.) (And movie stars again.) I think pot should be legalized, not just decriminalized and not just legalized for medical use, but completely legalized. Not because I think that pot is so great, but because I think that putting someone in prison for using drugs is much worse than drug use. I know, allegedly these days from the perspective of law enforcement it's less about the user than about the big dealers. Allegedly. We're all supposed to be very, very afraid of the Mexican cartels. But that just makes drug prohibition even more of a crock. If governments actually wanted to hurt big drug dealers, the worst thing they could do to them is make drug use legal. That would take all of the money out of it. It costs about as much to grow a pound of pot as it costs to grow a pound of tomatoes. The rest of the money in the weed business makes dealers and crooked cops rich, and buys a lot of guns for both sides and gets a lot of people killed.

And everybody knows all of this. Legalize it.

Alright. And now with the actual dream log:

I dreamed that I was being held prisoner with several other people in an old, small, 2-story 1-family house by gangsters from eastern Europe. We were being forced to work for them, operating a furnace which was melting down gold and casting it into large ingots. The ingots must have weighed 50 or 75 lbs or so each. They were far from uniform in size or shape. They all came from the same mold, but the mold wasn't filled to the same point every time.

We decided that we had to break out of there -- so we did. The escaping was such a short and simple process that it seemed to be over all at once. We took the gangsters' revolvers, called the cops and the journalists and left the house.

A lone police cruiser pulled up to the house as we ex-prisoners were leaving. I said to the others that I was suspicious of these two cops: they might be working for the gangsters, and intending to immediately enslave us again. I called out to them that we had called the cops and the news and told them everything. Upon hearing this, they did exactly what I would've expected cops who were working for the gangsters to do in that situation: they didn't rush to our aid, they didn't rush to apprehend the gangsters in the house. They just sat there, listening to the sirens of other police cars getting closer.

But it seemed that the sirens weren't coming fast enough, so we had to run for it. We hid out in an abandoned building next to a truck stop. The 18-wheelers on the highway went by with that low-pitched zing that big trucks make at high speed. We had the gangsters' revolvers in case we had to defend ourselves, but fortunately it didn't come to that, and we were freed.

I didn't see what happened to the gangsters or to the cops who were working for them. The next thing I knew, we 4 or 5 former captives, plus some people we knew, were in the living room of a house that some people would call cozy and lived-in and other people would call a dump, splitting up a big bag of very powerful pot, a couple of pounds of it, and rolling up some joints to celebrate our freedom. Mel Brooks dropped by, among other well-wishers, and he and I shared a big doobie and talked about show-business stereotypes of Eastern European gangsters: a character in an action-adventure TV show or movie just mentions "----- gangsters" or "the ----- mafia," fill in the blank with an Eastern-European adjective: "Russian" or "Ukrainian" or "Armenian" or "Albanian" -- and everybody's blood is supposed to go cold, as if these are super-gangsters, new and terrifying genetically-modified gangsters which make mere Italian or Irish gangsters from traditional fictional crime stories seem like a Swedish massage. Mel pointed out that in a way, this was insulting both to Eastern Europeans, and also to Italians and Irish, as if they were wimps. I told Mel I couldn't agree more.

The weed was very powerful. I was hazy on where we had gotten the weed, whether we had taken it from the genetically-modified Eastern European super-gangsters, or if we had obtained it in some other way. Very soon I had gotten about as high as I was going to get, and from there on I just got more fucked-up, which made me sad.

Which, in real life, is one of the reason I haven't smoked weed in decades, and why I don't drink a lot any more either.

Understanding Nietzsche -- It's Not For Everybody Who Claims To

Mel Brooks, in a 2013 Q&A with Judd Apatow, talking about making Blazing Saddles back in the early 70's and worrying about whether he was going too far:

Brooks recalled asking John Calley, then head of production at Warner Bros., "'Can we beat the s--- out of a little old lady? Can we punch a horse?' He said to me, 'If you're going to go up to the bell, ring it. He told me that early in my career, and I never forgot it. I had cavemen masturbating [in History of the World, Part 1]. I rang it." (Emphasis mine.)

A few years ago I was listening to Brooks' voice-over commentary on a DVD of Blazing Saddles, and he mentioned Calley giving him that advice, and I've never forgotten it, although I can't claim that I've lived up to it as well as Brooks has. (And by the way, doesn't it sound from this anecdote as if Calley was a wonderful guy for directors to work for?)

Mel Brooks knows his Nietzsche, unlike many people who speak and write about Nietzsche, including some philosophy professors who do so for a living.

Why do so many people insist upon saying such nonsense about Nietzsche? Does it have a lot to do with his own sister having grossly distorted his work, first before he lost his mind, and then much more so afterwards, when she was appointed the worst-possible executrix of his estate and writings? Did Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche found a tradition of nonsense about Nietzsche which has been running parallel for 140 years to the tradition actually based upon his philosophy? Do we need to separate the students of Nietzsche into those of Friedrich and those of Elisabeth?

That actually would explain quite a lot.

And just a heads-up to you discliples of Elisabeth, those of you who simply will not stop making stuff up and then claiming that Nietzsche said it -- I'm coming after you. And when I come up to that bell, I'm going to ring it. Those of you who make a metaphysical mountain out of the molehill of aphorism 295 in Jenseits, for example, squeezing out of that mention of Dionysus the assertion that Nietzsche was a practitioner of ancient Greek polytheism. Do you also claim that Nietzsche said that dragons are real and that they and lions can talk? Objectively, if you can get away with using Jenseits to argue that Nietzsche was not an atheist -- nevermind that he said that he was atheist, about as emphatically as anyone ever could (Ecce Homo, "Warum ich zu klug bin," 1st paragraph) -- then you ought to be able to convince people, based on Zarathustra's speech "Von den drei Verwandlungen" (p. 22 in the Goldmann edition of Also sprach Zarathustra, ISBN 3442075262), that dragons and lions talk to each other.

Obviously, objectivity and making sense have little to do with the aims of the Elisabeth Förster-Nietzschians. Indeed, they seem positively allergic to good common sense. Something they have in common with theologians. And like theologians, they love to claim that Nietzsche really was religious after all. If you actually read Nietzsche, you'll come across countless passages in which he says that he loathes theologians -- and who can blame him? him above all?

I think I know how Schopenhauer felt about Hegel.