Obama: I Drank the Bong Water!

The NYT has the goods on Obama. I suppose there are a lot of crotchety grandpas who try to curry favor with the kiddies by exaggerating the tales of deviltry from what may have been a pretty humdrum youth (moi, your honor?). But is Obama the first presidential candidate ever to squeeze himself into this ill-fitting suit? I can't think of another, but here's the headline: Old Friends Say Drugs Played Bit Part in Obama's Young Life (link).

Eeuw--but it’s a difficult call. A few years ago, I sat on some committees to screen candidates for judgeships. We used to have to ask them if they ever did drugs. A few would say—Drugs? Nope, sorry, end of story. A good many would say—Um, well, but that was a long time ago and never very much blah blah. Once in a while, you’d get the guy who would say—You kidding? I drank the bong water! That last response was novel enough to be refreshing, but you did suspect that some of them were prevaricating as much as the minimizers.

I see that Obama does, however, have at least on guilty secret to live down: he read Nietzsche. No, no, I tend not to regard a youthful flirtation with Nietzsche as a disqualification from high office, any more than I would an adolescent fling with Ayn Rand (you should stop sometime, though). Kind of touching, actually—all those sober- and pimply-faced infants with black overcoats and a little wisp of grey on the upper lip, packing a battered Vintage paperback edition of the Gay Science:

Horizon: infinity.—We have left the land and taken to our ship! We have burned our bridges—more, we have burned our land behind us! Now, little ship, take care! The ocean lies all around you; true, it is not always roaring, and sometimes it lies there as if it were silken and golden and a gentle favorable dream. But there wil be times when you will know that it is infinite and that there is nothing more terrible than infinity…Alas, if homesickness for land should assail you, as if there were more freedom there—and there is no longer any “land!”

—Friedrich Nietzsche, Gay Science 124 (Vintage Paperback ed. 19--)

Come to think of it, I’ll bet there is a good chance that Hillary Clinton read the same stuff.