Ana Marie Cox, slut shames Hunter Biden in scathing Atlantic piece. Read the article here.
Ana Marie Cox is a writer and culture critic of respectable repute. She has some interesting things to say and she is smart. All of that left when she penned a piece in the Atlantic about Hunter Biden. Cox treated her reader to a rote refrain of “bad addict!” It’s all such a bore. The classic “I’m not judging but..” narrative that has created the culture in which we now live. The one that rests on a 3-5% success rate in a $50 billion industry and a trillion invested in a drug war that has done nothing to make any meaningful or measurable change. A game of three card Monty in the Bronx has better odds than success at rehab.
Cox pontificates from on high, her recovery version of slut shaming, all the things that Hunter Biden has done wrong is his recovery. The most egregious sin seems to be that Biden’s recovery doesn’t look much like Cox’s. The coded insinuation is clear, that Biden shouldn’t be driven around by the secret service and attending Yale, he should be working at Home Depot or some other such comeuppance that would give Cox the satisfaction she craves. Cox comes off like the church lady of 12 step virtue doing her proud superior dance. Does this matter? The short answer is “kind of”.
In the grande scheme of things, Cox is just one person though she does have 1.1 million Twitter followers. She is hardly the first person to comment on recovery culture with a randomized sampling of 1 (herself). One of the biggest issues with reframing the idea of recovery is that it is steeped in 1930s folklore and Christian ethic, and then we’re told “it’s a disease”. Is it? So diabetics should pray and scrub floors? Apparently, Ana Marie Cox as surgeon general would implement such insane policy. Recovery is hard. It’s really hard. On its best day it’s a salmon swim and there are very few absolutes. It’s very person specific. Cox is a graduate of the academic meat grinder, University of Chicago, she understands reader h or at least she should. There is no correlation to success in recovery if those in bleachers feel self satisfied at watching the fall from grace.
Pretending in recovery doesn’t make much sense. If one is poor, it doesn’t make much sense to pretend to be a member of the private plane set. It also doesn’t make much sense to pretend the opposite. Honesty matters and working within the parameters of ones individual life matters. Cox’s finger-wagging smacks of jealousy: “He’s a crack smoker! I should be going to the White House for dinners, not him!” Such is life Ana Marie. We’d all like to sit in first class, we’d all like a town car at our disposal but most of us ride the subway.
This matters because Cox’s soap box is pretty high and this narrative of “learning your lesson” is a really bad treatment plan. Were Cox just an AA busybody (in many respects she is) it could be met with an eye roll and finding your seat to imbibe in the shitty coffee but her bull horn is louder than that.
The media is actually really irresponsible in their coverage of addiction and recovery and the people in it. For some reason, there is a familiar story which people like to tell about recovery and it represents almost nobody. The truth is recovery as such is actually so much larger than the myopic Atlantic piece. SAMHSA says there are “23 million Americans who identify as being ‘in recovery’”. AA boasts 3 million members globally. That means we’re ignoring millions and millions of stories about how people got better and how they addressed their issues with substances. We’re casting aside all of those opportunities for moralistic satisfaction. That’s more than a shame, it’s a crime. We’re literally dropping bodies daily, shouldn’t the dialogue be more comprehensive?
Cox and countless others in the media like her profess to be Father Serra, coming to make the savage natives love Jesus as they rightfully should. This year, America will lose 200k souls, likely more, to addiction. It’s going so well, why would we look at ways to improve those numbers? As a side note, the number of deaths from Cannabis holds steady at Zero. If Ana Marie Cox likes Hunter Biden’s recovery, she must love Demi Lovato’s. Someone please send Ms. Cox a draft of using cannabis as a recovery tool for her approval, clearly she missed the memo for her approval on Hunter Biden’s choices.
Is this too harsh on Cox? Sort of. She’s just the latest to publish this idea, it happens daily, not always from someone as prominent but unless we shift the paradigm from morality and judgment to public health practice, we will make no progress. Words matter, Ana Marie, read yours.