It’s one of those hideous little episodes making minor headlines this week that will be forgotten by the media next week. 15-year-old Vada Vasquez of the Bronx is in a coma with a bullet in her brain, after being caught in the crossfire when a group of Bloods took aim at 19-year-old Tyrone Creighton (and succeeding; he’s in the hospital, too).

The Bloods went after Creighton at the behest of friends of a man in Rikers who suffered a beatdown by Creighton’s two brothers in Rikers with him. The shooter was allegedly little 16-year-old Carvett Gentles, “baby-faced” as the stories are terming him with the regularity of a Homeric epithet.

Tuesday night there was a vigil for Vasquez, the usual scene with the usual “Stop The Violence” placards. This is the kind of event about which wise heads regularly intone about how the problem is with family discipline, with inadequate schools, with inadequate community policing, with the availability of guns.

All true. But there is another primum mobile in this case, as is also usual: drugs. Creighton’s brothers are in for killing a Bronx man three years ago – and it is doubtful that they did it simply for sport because there were no deer around to shoot. Ghetto murders of this kind are typically connected with maintaining turf in the sale of drugs. Plus, the Bloods are not exactly uninvolved with selling drugs, and Gentles was the only one of his group without a criminal record. And Tyrone Creighton himself has been out on bail for attempted murder and drug charges.

There is good money to be made by selling drugs on the street, because they are illegal and prosecuted, driving up the profit margin. And that means that details aside, we can all agree that what happened in the Bronx on Monday would have been very different if there were no War on Drugs. In fact, it probably wouldn’t have happened at all.

It’s one more indication of what a tragedy this modern replay of the disaster of the Volstead Act currently is. The simple fact is that if there were no profit to be made in selling drugs on the street, no one would bother. For all of the “root causes” reasons so many young black and Latino men turn to this trade instead of seeking legal work, if there were no War on Drugs, they would seek other solutions to the obstacles that face them. And whatever those were, they would involve less murder, fewer crossfire injuries and killings of the kind that have likely ruined Ms. Vasquez’ life at 15, fewer men in prison for long periods, and fewer of their children growing up fatherless and on their way to repeating their father’s mistakes.

I am moved in the light of this by the recent policy paper by the Transform Drug Policy Foundation, carefully outlining what a world could be like without a War on Drugs, where instead, even hard drugs are treated as controlled substances.

Yes: heroin by prescription. It sounds weird and menacing now, but so, once, did injecting people with viruses as vaccines. To someone who was born in the teens or early twenties, it looked strangely libertine when the sale of alcohol was reinstated – they had never known anything else.

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Just as today, ever fewer of us have vivid memory of a time when selling drugs was not yet a common lifestyle choice among disadvantaged men, for the simple reason that there was no nationwide regime devoted to “stamping out” drug use and driving up the profit to be made in selling them underground.

The new report lays it down straight:

We recommend making drugs available in standard units, with the base unit for each drug carefully calculated on a case by case basis. The riskier the product, the more limited access should be. Illicit diversion into secondary markets could be mitigated through the use of microtaggants, ensuring full traceability of all drugs thus supplied.

Remember: the motivation here is not some kind of Timothy Leary-esque libertinism. The primary reason for trying this is to eliminate the incentive to sell drugs illegally, which, under current conditions, is a logical calculus despite the risks connected with it:

Illicit drug traders are strongly motivated by the huge profit margins available to them. Simultaneously undercutting their prices, and providing more reliable products, will have a substantial negative impact on the viability of their businesses as a whole.

What we need is a kind of imagination:

An injecting heroin user under a more stringent prohibition regime might be funding a “street” heroin habit with prostitution and property crime, using adulterated drugs in unsafe environments, supplied by a criminal trafficking/dealing infrastructure that can be traced back to illicit sources in Afghanistan. An equivalent user under a regulated regime would be using legally manufactured and prescribed heroin in a supervised clinical setting, thus obviating any need for, or support of, criminal behaviors or organizations.

The report is pure common sense. Any quibbles you have about advertising (there wouldn’t be any), use by minors (ditto), whether drugs should be sold near schools (guess!), whether the new regime would include rehabilitation (ditto), and what we would do about the loss of income to countries like Afghanistan dependent on illegal drug sales (NGOs and academics, get to work) are answered in it. Including: the program would be introduced in steps – pot first, check how that goes (and the chances it wouldn’t go just fine are minuscule), and then move on to the harder stuff.

In the future, the America of our times will look antediluvian for considering this a risky proposition. Jack Cole, head of Law Enforcement Against Prohibition who I blogged a bit about a little while back has an apt blurb for the book-length report: “In years to come we’ll look back at prohibition, and the only question we’ll ask is why it lasted so long.”

Or, never mind the future: our “War on Drugs” is beginning to be yet one more way we look antediluvian to other countries. Portugal stopped prosecuting drug possession in 2001, and since then there has been no increase in use – and an increase in those seeking rehab. Spain, Italy, the Czech Republic, Estonia, Latvia, and parts of Germany and Switzerland have also stopped prosecuting for possession – and the sky isn’t falling yet.

Is it that employment opportunities for poor minority men are so very sparse that selling drugs is their only choice? On that, I have always been struck by a weak spot in Katherine Newman’s diligent minor classic No Shame in My Game, in which she tries to make that kind of point but has to acknowledge that within families, there are people who go the wrong way but others who do okay. “We have no compelling explanations of why the same family produces such divergent pathways in life,” she writes – but the thing is, this does happen, and constantly. One guy sells drugs and goes to jail while his brother is a security guard and his cousin installs cable.

Negative role modelling is clearly a major issue. Tyrone Creighton’s life path so far, for example, likely has something to do with what he grew up seeing his older brothers now in Rikers doing – it’s all he knew. In a context where quick money is available selling drugs, a Zeitgeist even sets in that legal work is a vanilla, submissive copout, “chump change” -- Newman describes ghetto teens mocking peers for working:

To go there and work for Burger Barn, that was one of those real cloak-and-dagger kinds of things. You’ll be coming out – “Yo, where you going?” You be, “I’m going, don’t worry about where I’m going.” And you see your friends coming and see you working there and now you be, “No, the whole Project gonna know I work in Burger Barn.” It’s not something I personally proclaim with pride and stuff.

Or, think about the scene in The Wire when Stringer Bell, head of the Barksdale gang, wants to smoke out a snitch. His strategy is to hold back payments for a while and see which person doesn’t complain – because that person must be getting cash from some other source for informing. As to the others, “What are they gonna do, go get a job???” he asks in jocular fashion. But crucially, Stringer doesn’t mean that they couldn’t – as we see when in a late episode in the series Poot leaves gangbanging and gets a job selling shoes. Not glamorous but it’s something – a start.

Tyrone Creighton’s brothers would have done the same kind of thing in a world where a crazy and futile War on Drugs didn’t present them with a reasonable alternative, with an air of normalcy in a neighborhood where they grow up watching peers make the same choice.

The Congressional Black Caucus of late have decided to concentrate on health care and employment in their advocacy for the black community, which is all well and good, but it would seem that young black men would be best poised to take full advantage of the latter in an America in which there was no shady but tempting alternate choice of work ever looming.

And between that and the endless procession of scenes like the recent one in the Bronx – lately, several in Chicago, for example, including ones (gang-related) over the past few days – I find myself wishing the Obama Administration would take yet one more thing on its plate as an urgent mission in a new America, the War on Drugs.

Not now, I know. Drug policy czar Gil Kerlikowske has harrumphed: “It is not something the President and I discuss; it isn’t even on the agenda.” He goes on that “legalized, regulated drugs are not a panacea – pharmaceutical drugs are tightly regulated and government controlled, yet we know they cause untold damage to those who abuse them.”

Surely this isn’t what Kerlikowske or Obama think in private, turning a blind eye to the larger harms that the War on Drugs creates. Clearly, they have decided the nation has other priorities at present, and the brutal truth is that they are right. As hideous as what happened to Vada Vasquez is – as well as to Tyrone Creighton, not only in the bullet he took but in the kind of occupation he drank in as a norm rather than as a fate to be avoided like kryptonite -- perhaps the unemployment crisis, the real estate crisis, the health care crisis, and even global warming are more urgent matters in the grand scheme of things just now.

Now, that is. However, how about in 2014, when Obama has just two years to go and other things are presumably taken care of to the extent that they can be (and assuming that John Thune, Tim Pawlenty and Sarah Palin will not turn out to be the GOP’s secret weapons three years from now)? By then Obama will not be facing re-election, nor will he likely be mired in a sex scandal to distract him from real work.

For now, maybe we have to face things like what happened in the Bronx Monday as a weekly kind of event. But what kind of a nation are we to treat episodes like that one as business as usual? The War on Drugs stands as an obstacle to people becoming the best that they can be. It is, in its way, un-American.

And how can we consider ourselves a country of any serious intellectual or moral advancement to suppose that a constructive response is to settle for idle recitations about “stopping the violence,” utopian notions that we could keep guns out of the hands of people whose livelihoods depend on them, and empty calls for strong parenting?

You never know which ones of your pieces are going to get around. Last week World Affairs published an essay I wrote exploring whether it would necessarily be such a horrible thing if only one language were spoken in the world.

I write that within a context: of the 6000 languages on earth, it is estimated that only about 600 will exist a hundred years from now. The big languages are edging the tiny ones, and even the medium-sized ones, out. In recent centuries, this has been first because of active extermination--Native Americans were often forbidden to speak their home languages in school--and later because of “globalization”: children raised in a city by migrant parents are unlikely to learn the language their parents spoke back in the village.

Meanwhile, there are efforts of revive languages that are no longer spoken or are in danger of being no longer spoken, such as Irish Gaelic, Welsh, and Maori (Mark Abley’s book Spoken Here is a nice introduction, journalism-style, to such programs).

However, in these cases what seems to be happening is more that the languages are living as what I have called elsewhere “taught languages,” spoken by almost no one from the cradle, mainly used as second languages by a dedicated set but hardly an entire country of people. Even this is great. Yet in 2009 the simple fact is that there is a single example of a language brought alive from the page and now used as a native language by a massive population of users: Hebrew, and that was a very unusual story driven by a unique confluence of religious commitment, a sudden mixture of people speaking many different languages, and arrangements such as children early in the experiment that became modern Israel being removed from their parents and raised on kibbutzes where only Hebrew was spoken. This kind of thing can’t ever happen in, say, Ireland.

Many address this issue as a threat to linguistic “diversity”--a diversity which I have revelled in avocationally my entire life and vocationally for most of it. However, given current realities, I ask in the essay whether this diversity is essentially an aesthetic issue, that we could approach largely with a dedicated commitment to documenting languages before they are no longer spoken. Along those lines, I also ask whether it would really be, in itself, such a horrible thing if all humans spoke one language.

Opinions will differ, but I worry that in the publicity the piece is getting, I am going to be thought to have said, or “implied,” three things which I did not mean to.

First: Contrary to the Times’ innocent sum-up of my point Sunday as “It doesn’t make sense to try to save dying languages,” I do think they should be saved, on paper and in recordings, diligently and copiously. This is much of what linguistics is about, and I have even contributed in writing a grammar (to appear) of a minority language (although it is not in immediate danger of death). I just question whether we can maintain them as spoken languages. I outline all of this in my The Power of Babel, where it is clear that I am not among those who simply shrug at the thought of indigenous languages dying. Linguists who teach sometimes encounter a cheeky undergrad who, when you do a lecture on language death, raises his hand and says “Why should we care?” That question from “that guy” chills me a bit just as it does other linguists.

Second: The sentence that seems to be excerpted most from my essay is “At the end of the day, language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together.” And it is--but I make that statement late in the piece, in the wake of assorted other points made sequentially. In isolation I would put it that:

“At the end of the day, despite the tragic--yet irreversible--horrors of aggression, dislocation and cultural extermination, the diminution in the number of the world’s languages is ironically a symptom of unity.”

The sentence getting around the web in isolation can be taken as implying that I see, for example, Wounded Knee as people “coming together.” I do not. It’s just that once a language is no longer spoken, it is so very, very difficult to make it a spoken language again--in which case new questions must be asked.

Third: Finally, I hope the piece does not give any sense that I think of English as somehow “better” than other languages. I do write that if it ends up being the last one, we could do worse than one that is relatively easy to learn the basics of--no gender, few conjugational endings, etc. However, in my other writings I think it is clear that I have no interest in the idea that English is uniquely “subtle” because of its mixed-heritage vocabulary, and have widely argued that grammatically, in many ways English is a rather coarse tongue because of aspects of its history (my Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue from last year explains much of this). My entire career as a linguist is founded, ultimately, on envying people speaking other languages and finding my own faintly homely. My statements in the essay about English are not advocational, but descriptive.

What drove me to write the essay was, genuinely, what I mention at the end: let’s imagine what it would be like if we spoke one language. Whether it’s English is beside the point; imagine it being, say, an African “click” language, Thai, or Navajo. The question--one I see as worthy of posing amidst a debate that will take in a great deal else--is, as I write: “whether there is some urgent benefit to humanity from the fact that some people speak click languages, while others speak Ket or thousands of others, instead of everyone speaking in a universal tongue.”

To strike a note I generally avoid, I am offended. And by a cartoon. Has anybody noticed what a patronizing mess Seth MacFarlane’s new The Cleveland Show is?

Cleveland is the pudgy, mild-mannered drawling pal of Family Guy’s Peter Griffin, who now has, in the parlance of the grand old days of the seventies television spinoff, “his own show.” And indeed, the whole notion of the show is in quotation marks in a sense. The premise, for example, is willfully as hokey as those of the old-time spinoffs (“Mary’s friend Phyliss moves to San Francisco to live with her ex-husband’s parents ...”).

While this year has become best known as the fortieth anniversary of Woodstock, it was also forty years ago that the first African-American Studies department was established, at San Francisco State University.

Forty-one fall semesters later, there are hundreds of such departments. Has what they teach evolved with the march of time?

At a Christmas party in 2004, a cousin asked me "Do you like Medea?" For a minute I was a confused, since it didn’t seem to be the occasion for sharing our impressions of Greek mythology. But it turned out she was talking about Madea, the massive, loudmouthed, pistol-packing black grandmother who Tyler Perry performs as in drag in a series of "chitlin' circuit" touring shows.

Perry sells DVDs of the shows on line, and ten minutes after my cousin put one on I was hooked. I’m not alone. Madea was the biggest new phenom in black America until Obamamania. The new film I Can Do Bad All By Myself is the seventh in a series of films getting across the Tyler Perry message, most of them based on the plays, and making more money than anyone expected when plans for the first one, Diary of a Mad Black Woman (2005), were announced.

I used to try to read every book that came over the transom. That didn’t last long, but there are always those amidst the flow that grab my attention, and among them, a few that really stick with me. Lately I have been struck by three.

Marcus LiBrizzi exhumes the story of the tiny Atusville community on the outskirts of a small town in Maine (Lost Atusville: A Black Settlement from the American Revolution). Atusville was a black district – but not one of the grand old bustling commercial black meccas that thrived in most large American cities until the fifties like Chicago’s Bronzeville. It consisted of a few dozen people from a small collection of families, with a surprising number of interracial marriages that seem not to have attracted particular notice, from the community’s founding couple in the 1700s to the parents of the last resident, after whose death in 1965 the community ceased to exist.

With the Obama Administration letting Green Jobs czar Van Jones resign, questions as to whether these people have any spine are becoming sadly legitimate. What, precisely, would have been wrong with letting Glenn Beck and the others keep screaming their heads off about Jones’ purported radical intentions? Why not do a Glinda and dismiss this nonsense with a breezy “You have no power here”?

After all, we are faced here not with serious charges. There are no modern-day Whittaker Chambers in this crowd. The Republican smears against Obama of late are nonsense, pure and simple.

Last Sunday’s third episode of this season’s Mad Men was one of the best in the series on many levels, which was why for me, a frequent little problem with the show stood out more than ever. Namely, the show’s depiction of how people speak is less accurate than the loving exactitude with attire, cocktails, product labels, and the like.

The most glaring example in this episode was what seems to have gone down as a memorable line from Peggy Olson, erstwhile secretary who is slowly climbing the corporate ladder. “I’m in a good place right now,” she says, which is dramatically compelling – it makes Peggy seem “cool,” a proto-feminist on her way to our modern reality, in contrast to what a dowdy little twinkie she seemed to be when we first met her. But would that woman use that expression in 1963?

Jan Freeman’s column Sunday, subbing for William Safire, on what Ambrose Bierce--along with others--considered “bad language” a hundred years ago was a delight. Ever been self-conscious about the difference between various and several? Did you know that talented is a “vile and barbarous vocable” because there is no verb to talent?

The drifting changes in the links between cultural alignments and political ones over time are always interesting, such as the fact that Republicans were once more interested in black rights than Democrats. It’s equally true in black history. Culturally, Booker T. Washington was much more of what is currently recognized as “culturally black” than W.E.B. DuBois, as were the legions of sharecroppers and urban poor moved by Washington’s example more than DuBois’ (DuBois’ picture rarely hung on walls).

Another resonant example of how contingent the connections between cultural and political alignments always are is author Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960). Celebrated today for her documentation of rural black folklore and her explorations of the black female condition in, especially, her tour de force novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Hurston the actual person would be as much at home on Fox News as on National Public Radio.

So they had their beer. Teachable Moment. What have we learned?

Something--but not what I sense will get much press in the aftermath.

Directly from The Beer--not much. Gates and Crowley had an “exchange,” although about what we are not to know. And they intend to have more such exchange. Of some sort. All very civil.

Gates has said he’ll be putting together a documentary about the profiling issue. Which means that a year or so from now it will air and get briefish, genuflective reviews from people like Virginia Heffernan and then be forgotten as quickly as CNN’s Black in America specials, or that Black.White thing a few years ago. Remember the one where whites made up as black and blacks made up as whites and fun ensued? What lessons are we now carrying from that “teachable” occasion?

Gates-gate is the culmination of one of those occasional spates of race-related events that occur and flow into one another over a month or so. These spates are, in fact, precisely the “conversation” on race that Attorney General Eric Holder claims does not happen in America.

What, after all, has all of this talk been from the Ricci decision through to the uproar over what happened on Henry Louis Gates’ front porch? If this hasn’t been conversation, of a thoroughly vital nature, then there is a fundamental disagreement as to what conversation is.