Poverty and Spit! Poverty and Spit! THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (1981)

 Those of us who were punk rockers at some point in the 70s or 80s now feel old as fuck, clutching onto last ditch coke straws and first canes; our weary eyes are trapped within withered faces atop middle-aged, vice-tainted bodies, our tattoos gone to gray, the safety pin holes in our ears and cheeks long scarred over, livers shot are from Hep-C and whiskey, but hey hey hey! as the kid who sang for Black Flag (before Rollins - below left) would snarl...

 I was just a suburban poseur moping around the all-ages City Gardens shows in Trenton in the early 80s, smoking myself into a coma while standing in front of the stage, waiting, waiting, waiting... for one crappy opening punk act after another, to get it over with, so I could see the Replacements, Ramones, Iggy Pop, Replacements or X, and go home. Pogoing and slam-dancing (as it was called) around until the skinheads took over and turned the whole front half into a 'mosh pit' (far different scene than some friendly slam-dancing where you're just whirling around bumping into each other like pinballs rather than "helicoptering" your meaty fists). Coming back to our parents' houses exhausted, battered, and alive, triumphant, relieved it was over, we took our shoes off an watched NIGHT FLIGHT on the USA Network or my duped tapes of RUDE BOY, REPO MAN and GIMME SHELTER for the zillionth time while carefully marking the water lines on dad's liquor bottles, so we'd know just what we could reasonably get away with. We knew of--but never got a chance to see--THE DECLINE OF WESTERN CIVILIZATION (1981), Penelope Sheeris' ground-floor documentary about the early days of the LA punk scene. We heard it was far far tawdrier than any other concert film, so tawdry it had and has never been on DVD or tape.... until this week....

Finally America is ready. Spheeris' wrist-openingly grim post-op LA moldy-carpeted clang of a howl is here and man it lives up to its rep of sheer tawdriness. Onetwothree-GO! Our whole fucking life is a wreck! It seems we got so complacent, having no genuinely tawdry film live remotely close to our imaginations' now upscale, gated neighborhood, that now, when one finally busts in and pees on our mattress, we're at first so shocked we think it's raining. Dude, last time we were the ones peeing. Now somehow we're the ones holding the sheets? How'd that happen? Did Spheeris wait til we were too old to identify with these skeevy brats on purpose?

Darby, sings into 'the mic' 

Irregardless! The full skeevy glory of Ms. Spheeris's no-holds barred musical documentary can finally be seen and heard. Not only are music rights all aligned but the band's limpid corpses have grown so befouled from punk rock sell-out options no further degradation can e'er befoul them. From the apocalyptic audience-bashing and riot-starting of Fear's Lee Ving to Jon Doe giving out jailhouse tattoos, this grotty full-frame 16mm film is never going to look like Kubrick or smell like Delmonicos, but the sheer poverty-stricken messiness of the punk lifestyle is better experienced at arm's length anyway, from within that City Gardens nicotine coma. It was meant for those teenage Night Flight Saturdays, blurry from arial static and USA network watermarks, not Blu-ray.

I always needed to take an inch down my dad's Old Crow water line, and a Silkwood shower, after a trip to City Gardens. It wasn't a matter of punk rock energy but of feeling skeeved out. I'd forgotten about that ritual, til this 'film' came rushing up the televisual sleeve like a rough, unlubricated hand job. What a shitty bunch of human beings these punks are, after all! I, of course, presume they're putting on a bit of a show for Penelope's camera. After all, the real message of the film is to sell the anarchy and dirt of punk as a performance, as a kind of artistic anti-movement, to live up to the tawdry hype that so infected our early 80s poseur punk imagination.

Naturally, when disparaging the citizens on display in this film, I don't mean the artists from band X. To call them the most charismatic of the cast is to damage the word 'charisma' through comparison. Let's stay they are only the ones you'd want to rescue if the club was burning down. As for the rest, Slash writer Kickboy is the most coherent and 'forward-to-Goth'-looking, and Darby of the Germs is the most long-range offensive (just seeing his inward-twisting townie teeth near a plate of eggs is enough to send me windmilling out of the room in concentric spewing arcs). Perhaps fascinated by his sheer loathsome mania, Spheeris gives us what feels like six hours of a Germs show in what looks like a parent's basement where the carpet was has been subjected to at least one flood. The whole vibe seems to slow into a druggy time warp as Darby crawls atop speaker cabinets like Harpo Marx in the stateroom scene of NIGHT AT THE OPERA, his vocals dragging behind the 'rhythm' of the band like Angel behind the Generalissimo's automobile in THE WILD BUNCH. Too many film references? Jon Doe wouldn't think so. He references PERFORMANCE and GIMME SHELTER after a tussle breaks out in the similarly orange carpeted basement of Club 88. You think he gives a shit about how bad that carpet smells? If he does, he keeps it to himself. He's such a trouper. Even his teeth are straight, like a real gentlemen's.

In fact, Doe's such a presence he keeps Darby from looking like some trainwreck intersection between Sid Vicious and pre-sobriety Iggy Pop by association, and Spheeris' kind use of subtitles for the lyrics, all cute in the iron-on decal style Cooper font of the period, makes up the rest. It's an unusual and welcome touch, especially considering the snarling incoherence of the shouted vocals.

Then again, the speed and downer mess of the Germs is like the frickin' Beatles compared to Slash Magazine writer Kickboy's godawful band 'Catholic Discipline" which we see play to an audience of around six bored people in a Chinese restaurant (deliver us, Generallissimo Tso!). The 'Discipline' do what feels like 23 songs that plod so monotonously through the middle of the film they make the Swans seem like Matmos. What? Too 'Other Music' for you? Fuck you! Onetwothree-FOUR! By the time you read this, Other Music has probably long gone (PS - 2/16 - it has). And anyway, Billy Zoom wouldn't think so. Billy, why are you so serene? Even in the midst of skinheads bashing one another inches from his amp old Billy never seems like he's anywhere but on a peaceful hayride in the country. Good old Billy! But then... you left, didn't you, Billy! And X released "See How We Are," still chasing that AOR rainbow. 

At any rate, the most disturbing bits come towards the end, from some cute young boys giving black and white talking head interviews, utterly terrifying in their calm discussion of punching out girls and breaking other kids' jaws with a tire chain. (Yet their own teeth are perfect --hmmm, are they just shining Penelope on?) and the vile gay-baiting rhetoric and unsubtle combative-for-the-sake-of-combativeness of Fear's Lee Ving. Looking/acting like the unwanted child of Travis Bickle and Sean Penn, Ving's hate speech might be just an act to get everyone's punk rage blood up for the camera. A girl declares herself a dyke and lunges at him, but it's never clear if she's just throwing down in the spirit of the thing, or is really gay and pissed).

That's the insidious thing about hate speech. Fox News, after all, uses it to sell air space. If they mean half of what they say, they'd probably be dead from the toxic fumes of their own vitriol. It's a show. If it's not, excuse me if I pretend it is so I don't die from the toxic fumes of my own vitriol. Whatever virtriol even means, it's a killer.

Fear ("You talkin' to them?")

But again (or for the first time) it's all worth the slog if you're a true X fan, for the on-again off-again marriage/romance between Jon Doe and Exene Cervenka is realy something to see. Even when they're at emotional odds, their music only flourishes from the friction. Singing as frankly and honestly as an entire Sam Shepherd play rolled into one playful glance and howled lyric, theirs is one of the great punk rock love stories of our time. Doe was the inspiration for me becoming a bassist. Aye, his bass guitar slid like a serpent across the dorm room and around my leg while the rest of the band was lamenting the loss of the band's old bassist during an all-night acid test. That very next night I was playing in front of more people than the goddamned 'Catholic Discipline' ever saw.

Even giving ratty jailhouse tattoos before the show, there's no doubt Jon Doe is destined for stardom, or at least a future side gig as a supporting actor; and Exene is like a relaxed Lady Macbeth whose target isn't King Duncan but the entirety of narrow-minded American adulthood. I remember seeing X at City Gardens in 1984, right up against the stage, Exene smiling beaming above me as the shoving whirl of slam dancers careened around, knocking me forward and back, then I was about to get clocked by this giant skinhead, I saw her watching as this other skinhead, even bigger, gently moved me away and shoved his fist right into the guy's face, showering me in the skinhead's nose blood instead of vice versa. The bouncer grabbed them both and shoved them out the door and there I was, bloody and OK, and I looked up and Exene was beaming down at me with a huge smile, like the punk rock virgin Mary at my punk baptism.  (PS - See my lovingly detailed X discography "See How They War") Punk. It was a big tent.

That was a real moment - but there are moments in the footage when we wonder just how much Spheeris is being put on by these clowns about the words, lingo and culture of the punk scene. Claude "Kickboy" (harumph!) Bessy especially seems to consider himself some kind of spokesperson for the punk movement. His sneering hatred of everything and everyone provides the entirety of the punk movement with its voice, soul, and spine--he thinks. But there's the feeling too that he's performing this iconoclast routine for Spheeris' cameras. When someone's a real brawler, they look like Mickey Rourke, or a toothless Glasgow soccer hooligan. They're certainly not all pretty and unmussed like these lads, at least not for long. So is this just say, 80% bullshit, just like most suburban punks themselves (i.e. me, in the early 80s) were?

X marks ze Monster

I dropped punk-poseur look from my repertoire in 1986 when I found out all my 'Cure-Smiths-Siouxee' fan friends were gay and hadn't told me because they didn't know if my jammed gaydar was a result of being just naive, closeted, or legitimately homophobic. Thus I peeled out in search of acid and hippies. When I windmilled back into City Gardens over breaks. Slam-dancing and pogoing had become moshing. By then I was old enough for a wristband, so I drank in the back... sticking my head out only now and again to see what was going on. Eventually my band even played there, opening for the Spin Doctors. But that was the early 90s. Punk had split into a dozen warring factions by then and white boy punk-funk was the pre-grunge rage.

Well, either way in the early 80s I was too mellow to go full thrash, too uptight to be a squatter, too hetero to be what today would be called goth or emo, and too louche to be straight-edge. Without the black nail polish and eyeliner (as one used to wear) punk was just being British. Now hardcore was called 'thrash' and then grunge splintered it still further, and today the kind of vitriol spewed by the likes of Fear would be considered deeply problematic. "Let's have a war / so you can go die! / Let's have a war! We need the money! / Let's have a war: We need the space!" is just one hair away from Skrewdriver or Prussian Blue, which is an insider Vice magazine way of saying white supremacist.

Then again, hearing of all these boys' preference for rough masculine contact and their general aversion to girls, it's not a stretch to peg the whole punk thing as stemming from a kind of Jenner-esque macho burlesque, the safety of punching over the terror of embracing, or as Florence of the Machines sings (and BRONSON suggests), "A kiss with a fist is better than none."

Florence and the Machines, incidentally, would have been classified punk in 1981, as was Patti Smith, Television, and REM and, believe it or not, Bob Marley (thanks to UK bands like The Clash).

That's so punky: Eugene decries the violence of his scene before confessing he's punched out everyone he knows

I haven't pored through all the extras but already think the end shouldn't have been Fear's gay-bashing rhetoric but the 'X signing their Slash contract' a super 8mm extra wherein we finally get a glimpse of Penelope Spheeris herself, with new wave punk-approved but-soon-to-be-New-Wave-only oversize suit jacket and panic-blonde hair and the righteous sense that a lot of the pointless steam-vent fight club anarchy of the film we had just seen might be at least a little bit just semi-insecure throat pouch puffery done by insecure teenager and at any rate you can't keep both your street cred AND a record contract, so let the worthless one former go. Street cred? Shit cred, mate. What matters is a seven figure hit count; DIY has never been more alive than now, even if the 'alive' part is mostly virtual. The sell-outs are enshrined and the hold-outs are dust in the wind. If that's all they wanted, bra-fuckin-vo.

Spheeris, still smokin'

Times have gone moldy as that punk show basement carpet but it's not just us or that long-tossed shag who've aged, it's the vampire celluloid of the film. These vampire forever-youth reverse Dorian Grays-- throwing their coiled squatter angst upon the pyre that destroys nothing--seem younger than I ever was when I was their age. To think I once looked up in awe at the 'adults' Cervenka and Doe as they passed Budweisers out into that all-ages throng like proud parents at some kind of unholy graduation. Spheeris' 1981 film takes place four years earlier and they're like any other fresh-faced kids. Artistic, drug-addicted, boozed-up, bisexual or semi-insane, not getting enough sunshine or sleep, playing their hearts out under florescent lighting in community hall basements, giving themselves terrible home tattoos --they were playing every lousy gig like was the last show on earth--but boy were they wrong. OnetoothreeFour!

Can I please have a doll now? BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS

Like a pendulum rocking between extremes of repressive conservative 'decency' and louche Dionysian abandon, America swings, baby, from the repressive 1950s and swinger 1970s, then back into the slasher repression of AIDS 80s. Knowing this, one should always be aware of what academic social studies classes don't want you to know: mass social change isn't brought about by education and activism but by drugs, sex, and rock-and-roll. You want to see how deep the wormhole goes? Take this pill, man. Five dollars.

LSD changed the face of the world, or at least left it looking melted in the mirror through dilating pupils. Back in 1986, I had to look very hard before I could get my hands on 'doses' -at least outside of a Dead show. It was a dangerous mission and my freshmen coterie were scared to death of me once I'd 'broken through.' But back in 1967 (I hear) you could get dosed just by accepting a handful of free samples from Owsley's bucket brigade at the entrance of the latest love-in. It's so typically human--American even--that what is casual, cool and even sanctioned by the middle class one year is considered a monstrous crime the next, and the masses are way too hypnotized to think twice about it. Before it was cool, now it's evil, end of discussion. And soon even the kids you thought were cool might run when the ultimate tab flips their way.  (1)

Sex and music are well chronicled in our cultural history, but drugs, too often, become demonized rather than eulogized and enshrined as they're expanded and replaced in an ever tightening gyre of vertical integration. Thus the hangover-comedown of LSD (60s) begets Valium (70s), and then cocaine (80s) because you're sluggish from the Valium, and then coke makes you depressed the next day, so you need to cheer up --it's the 90s (ecstasy). And then, in the 00s, you sober up and get high on God and fellowship via AA because none of that other shit works anymore. And then! In the 10's, because God thinks you're ready: Salvia Divinorum.

Harsh green reptilian gatekeepers debating whether to eat you alive or admit you to their tender garden, Salvia's gatekeepers wont keep the gate unlocked for long; even now attention-seeking senators who know nothing whatsoever about the plant are striving to make it illegal, solely based on a video with Miley Cyrus.

But, let's backtrack and add the music to the equation: Jimi Hendrix defined the 60s.. and acid, we've covered that already, man. But in the 1970s, was there 'Valium music' the way there was acid rock?

Yes, it was called the Carpenters. In the 1970s, Valium music could be found on something called 'variety shows' - day-glo family-friendly mixtures of corny old Vaudeville jokes and the old soft shoe, powder-blue leisure suits and bland musical numbers done in crazy feathered costumes. The stars/hosts were generally a boy and a girl together, sometimes married (Shields and Yarnell, The Captain and Tenille; Sonny and Cher; Tony Orlando and Dawn) sometimes siblings (Donnie and Marie Osmond), sometimes Pink Lady and Jeff. If these options were all too extreme, there was Lawrence Welk. It was a time when kids shows were druggy and drug shows kiddy. Thanks to Rosie Greer and Marlo Thomas in a little thing called Free to Be You and Me, it was all right to cry, and even boys could have dolls. I'd love a doll right now, in fact.

In case you think it's just a name for actual dolls like Raggedy Ann, or babes in mini-skirts, let me hep you that a doll is whatever benzo/diazapam derivations--roofies, downers, yellowjackets, blues, Xanax---you happen to have in your purse, and may I have one? Free to be's William ain't the only bitch wants a doll. The other half of the entendre is that these are babes we're talking about and, like all good things, they come in packs of three (See also: Charlie's Angels and Three on a Match). In all three definitions--women, pills, children's toys--dolls calm us down, the way the presence of our giant mom calmed us down the morning after the terrifying gulf of her nightly absence.

An unofficial 'sequel' to THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS (left), the adaptation of Jacqueline Suzanne's inexplicably popular junk novel, BEYOND is redeemed by three things - 1) the naive squarete' of the two guys behind the script (Roger Ebert and Russ Meyer) who clearly have no inkling of the life they're depicting; 2) the absolute gonzo coolness of the actors, particularly Z-Man (John Lazar) and Lance Rock (the late, great Michael Blodgett), and 3) the hotness and deadpan comic delivery of the girls, both in the band and without--especially Cynthia Meyers, Dolly Read, and--most importantly--Edy Williams as Ashley St. Ives. There's also a triangle with black band member Marcia McBroom (always present, but segregated, partner-wise), and a romance with Charles "That's Jim Pembrey, Goddamnit" Napier as one of the 'good ones.' There's budding lesbian outing, drag kings, and a Nazi butler/bartender ("We could have used you at the Russian Front!" he exclaims after Blodgett punches out snotty punter Harris). Put it all together and you have something bound to offend everyone, sooner or later, even strung-out critics like myself. It's like one of those "Funny or Die" videos where the rantings of a drunk child are lip-synced and acted out by an all-star adult cast. In this case it's cool, hip beautiful young actors mouthing dialogue written by naive lecherous squares.

All that's missing is any sense of restraint or human decency. Indeed there's a lot I don't like about this film, such as the boilerplate homophobe misogyny of the finale, wherein the lesbians are slaughtered without a shred of concern for justice - "Theirs wasn't an evil love, but evil did come from it" - What the fuck is that about, Roger? How did evil come from being gay? One 'hopes' that Ebert is making fun of misogyny and homophobia, but it's still a little too much to have the lesbian get a gun shoved in her mouth and to suggest it's somehow brought upon her for daring to deign the cock. Considering how judgmental and alarmed Meyer got about I SPIT ON YOUR GRAVE (see my Ebert-GRAVE piece here), it's odd that Ebert should have written such a strangely misogynist and sexophobic film (DOLLS is far more misogynist than SPIT in my opinion). Yet there are redemptive moments: Lance Rock, pausing in his thrashing of dopey Harris (David Gurian) to greet a cool black athlete named Randy (James Iglhart). They're the only two cool, real people in the room, and though they're both encroaching on the girls of the 'sweet, sensitive guys' like Emerson (Harrison Page) and Harris, it's okay, buxom beauties best be served by real men, not wusses. You heard me! G'head on Rock 'n Randy.

Let's just time Lancelot as he comes charging to the rescue!

The original VALLEY's highlight was Patty Duke screaming for "dolls" in a back alley as the camera panned slowly up and away on an elaborate crane shot, like her guardian angel had finally had enough of her whining and was heading home right as she was finally realizing God was there the whole time. Some bitchy drag queens may think that's hilarious (which is fine) but drug-addled divas on their way down are awfully easy targets for lampooning. Even with overacting and tone-deaf emotional registration you feel bad about sneering at the original VALLEY... the eerie echoes of meta self-reflexiveness are all over the film: gorgeous Sharon Tate killing herself to escape her controlling, greedy stage mom and then dying in real-time at the hands of the Mansons shortly after; drug-addicted former child actor Patty Duke playing a drug-addicted adult actor too fucked up to even play herself in a Broadway show; the sad Andre and Dory Previn theme song, which was supposed to have been sung by poor Judy Garland but--for reasons likely mirrored in Duke's doll-loving arc--wasn't. Dionne Warwick took over and does a fine job, but she can't capture the rainbow at-the-end-of-the-Kansas crucifixion cruise like Judy, and the result is like being at your wit's end and visiting a new psychiatrist who smiles but has no insight into your woes and makes you feel even more lonely than if you were just plain alone, and what's worse, refuses to refill your prescription, which was the only reason you went in to see her in the first place! She's worried you're becoming addicted. Hah! "Becoming"...that's a laugh.

BEYOND THE VALLEY OF THE DOLLS comes in after all this meta-horror and plays up the intentional comedy underlying the venomous 'reality' of Hollywood in the swinging sixties much more than the original ever dared, so overly concerned was it with soapy gloss, its men all perfect specimens of the sort that look flawless in the showroom and then fall apart and dissolve your bank accounts within a few years or months of marriage and/or abortions. That's all gone with BEYOND: Aside from taking place in 'the Valley' where Valley-yum runs wild and free, and the overall 'three professional girls living together and being romanced up the ladder' structure, there's not a whit to compare them. But what BEYOND has that leaves Robson's film in the dust, is Russ Meyer's short attention span direction and the dancers who trade Wildean quips as they frug (the kind of thing that was all the rage at the time because of LAUGH-IN, seen also in THE STUD, etc), and the countless situations where the degenerates prove to have more integrity than their square suit-tie job equivalents, but just barely.

Yet even as far as cult items go, DOLLS is an 'outside, looking in' film, showing the relative lack of LA decadence-experience for screenwriters Russ Meyer and Roger Ebert. Meyer was a desert rat: much better at salt flat timing trials, rural gas station squares, and horny super-vixens who drive up wanting more than their tank filled. And Meyer was a Chicago movie critics. The groovy craziness of the LA elite is way beyond their ken. It's clear that neither ever did any drugs nor got invited to Cyro's, or wherever the jet-set and young trippers danced and screwed. Without the amazingness of Z-man and Lance--two fine study actors who breathe the rarefied air of the genuinely cool--the film would be adrift in Greg Brady's attic bedroom hippie love den denial. Blodgett and Lazar do such a fine job--even when forced to manically utter whole pages of nonsensical madness, written with no attention for how people really speak--they bring it through the veil into 'high' art.

But the 1970s wasn't just about acid, coke, downers and free love and cool guys with happenings that freaked them out. It was about innocence living comfortably next to decadence via pop culture and a unified love field that included sex but then flooded past its tawdry borders so that genuine brotherly cross-generational non-sex love proffered too, right there in the popular culture. We in Middle America may not have known, or wanted to know that the Village People were gay or that disco was synonymous with cocaine, or what was making Karen Carpenter so skinny. But we could love them for what we saw and heard. We were clueless but free, ignorant in our bliss, bonded by the lack of options on aerial-antennae television.

In the theaters, R-rated movies meant serious business, and the no-kids-admitted-without-parent thing was strictly enforced the way cigarette age restrictions are now. So they kept adult things from us more easily. The R-rated films of the 1970s were about tawdry NYC nightlife or Italian (or Italian-American) slashers -- or--more usually-- both. NYC in the 1970s was a cesspool with an oasis of Broadway shows surrounded by grimy XXX-rated deathtraps. But on TV, the innocent variety show ruled by default - appealing to no demographic in particular and therefore suitable for all. TV shows had a Zen quality wherein old timers from 30s B-movies could find a whole second life as sitcom neighbors or Hollywood Square swingers, while teen idols re-enacted 50s teen delinquent plot lines in hip hugger flares and wild afros. It didn't matter the shit was corny- no one was paying attention anyway --we were talking and eating popcorn and bouncing off the walls. It was grand.

In other words, it was a time before niche demarcations. The stoner had to lie down with the clueless duffer; you could be weird but you couldn't curse. So you had Greg Brady (left) donning a fringe vest and getting a lava lamp, only to learn such things didn't make him cool; and you had ultra-square film nerd Roger Ebert writing faux hipster LA dialogue for a bunch of actual L.A. hipsters because he once wrote nice things about a war correspondent-cum-softcore brüstemann. Nothing made sense. The result--which kicked Russ Meyer back to the minors--was rated-X at the time but seems almost suitable for children today, it's a stoner film for your grandparents, a misogynist homophobic countercultural f-you to the man and to the hep cat. Like those variety shows gone very wrong, BEYOND has the frilly glitz but then deep trouble right below, it offends everybody, sooner or later, but not enough to make it not a classic of its sort.

While today, our copious late night cable channels demonstrate how painful it is watching normal people try to be weird. BEYOND THE VALLEY gives you weird people trying to measure up to a square's idea of weird --and you can feel the deranged energy spilling forth from their gonzo refractions. Whether in the first or thousandth viewing, you're bound to find new reasons to both love and hate it. Maybe that's because BEYOND never had a time of its own so it's never grown dated. It was too square for late 60s but too wild for the early 70s. It was too violent for the free-love crowd and too free-love for the violent crowd. It's too high for low art and too low for an art high. In short, it's cult. I may not know what cult actually means, but I know what I love, and I know what I hate, and in BEYOND everything I love and hate is rolled into one dark, twisted snapshot of the whole goddamned whizzbang red white and blue hooplah that is a Chicago film nerd's idea of Tinseltown.  BANG! BANG! What is that sound I hear? Father dear father, come home with me now, and bring either this, or CANDY (1968) or MYRA BRECKINRIDGE (1971) to your next gay or straight movie night, and never be invited again.

1. other evidences of drug hysteria having no correlation whatever to actual danger: At the turn of the century cocaine was in Coca-Cola, heroin was OTC, but aspirin was prescription only, and planes had smoking sections.What was all-pervasive and legal yesterday can become demonized as hell tomorrow, and no one thinks twice about it! Soylent Green is people! And YOU'RE NEXT!