| Popis: |
In 2009, Eden Robinson and Dr. Gabor Mate participated in a panel entitled "Mean Streets" at the Denman Island Readers and Writers Festival. The event's organizers probably paired Robinson with Mate because the authors had recently published works set in Vancouver's infamous Downtown Eastside: Mate's In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts: Close Encounters with Addiction and Robinson's novel Blood Sports, a sequel to her short story "Contact Sports." Mate's non-fictional work recounts his experiences working for the Portland Hotel Society, a non-profit organization that provides accommodation, living assistance, and medical help to severely addicted clients who hve in the Downtown Eastside. Robinson's short story and novel feature Tom Bauer, a young man who, in spite of good intentions and a strong work ethic, cannot escape the poverty of his upbringing in the Downtown Eastside or his involvement in drugs and gang violence. Although writing in different genres, Mate and Robinson share an interest in the lives of arguably the most dispossessed denizens of Vancouver: those who suffer from addiction or who, though not addicts themselves, are caught in the web of addiction through adverse circumstances or family ties. In telling these individuals' stories, whether through documented real- life examples or in fiction, both authors' works employ the concept of moral luck to condemn the War on Drugs and its favourite slogan, Just Say No. As Donna Dickenson writes, "the paradox of moral luck concerns the simultaneous requirements that we should be held responsible only for what we can control, and that we should realize people often cannot control very much" (160). The War on Drugs, on the other hand, assumes that addicts have power over the circumstances of their addictions and that strict anti-drug legislation and severe penalties will prevent individuals from selling or taking drugs. As Mate puts it, "a core assumption in the War on Drugs is that the addict is free to make the choice not to be addicted and that harsh social or legal measures will deter him from pursuing his habit. It is not that easy" (284, emph. Mate's). Mate attacks the United States'--and the Canadian government's--War on Drugs by arguing that the judgment and censure inherent in this "war" demonize the addict, focus resources on fighting global drug cartels rather than on helping individuals, and harshly penalize some of the most vulnerable people in society. Robinson's fiction is more oblique in its treatment of the War on Drugs but, as this essay will argue, "Contact Sports" and Blood Sports also draw attention to the excessive surveillance necessary to make war on drugs, the hypocrisy inherent in which addictions are acceptable to society and which are not, and the excessive social and personal costs exacted when illegal drugs lead to theft, violence, and gang warfare. Although the protagonist in Robinson's works, Tom Bauer, consistently says "no" to his sociopathic cousin Jeremy, who represents the world of drugs and gang violence in the two works, he ends up more tied to Jeremy than ever. Tom thinks to himself of his relationship with Jeremy, "Just my luck. The only person who really gives a shit if I five or die is a whacked-out drug addict who likes playing God" ("Contact" 144). By showing Tom's inability to escape his cousin, Robinson, like Mate, draws attention to the War on Drugs' simplistic assumption that people can Just Say No. Neither Robinson nor Mate explicitly uses the term "moral luck," but the critiques of the War on Drugs and Just Say No found in their works can be understood through the lens of this theory, as originally described by Bernard Williams and Thomas Nagel. Nagel writes, "where a significant aspect of what someone does depends on factors beyond his control, yet we continue to treat him in that respect as an object of moral judgment, it can be called moral luck. [...] The things for which people are morally judged are determined in more ways than we at first realize by what is beyond their control" (574). … |
