Steven Slater’s enablers enable and Castro displays tiny bit of ego-deflation.
Quotes of the month:
Steven Slater’s boyfriend Kenneth Rochelle, who called Slater a “lovely, classy, beautiful person,” and Slater’s ex-wife, Cynthia Susanne, who called him a consummate flight attendant who would always act in the most appropriate manner. “I can’t believe he murdered someone!” is a common remark about a “nice guy” committing homicide. Yup, nice guy, until he isn’t, due to brain damage stemming from alcoholism. As pointed out in the chapter on “Beauty, Brains & Success” in Alcoholism Myths and Realities: Removing the Stigma of Society’s Most Destructive Disease, being nice, successful, smart and charming are entirely consistent with alcoholism, except when Mr. Hyde rears his ugly head.
Fidel Castro, reported by Jeffrey Goldberg in The Atlantic as saying, “The Cuban model doesn’t work for us anymore.” Almost every despot in history whose personal life has been made public can be confirmed to be an alcohol or other-drug addict. Castro, who is known for being a light drinker, has been one of the few exceptions. However his daughter, Alina Fernandez in her book Castro’s Daughter: an Exile’s Memoir of Cuba, mentions the availability of amphetamines on the island as if it were candy (one of the few things apparently not in short supply—perhaps having something to do a surplus of sugar cane). Castro was known for giving seven-hour-long speeches. His brother Raul is a known alcoholic (and it hasn’t escaped me he could be Cuba’s Yeltsin—drunk but no longer interested in wielding totalitarian power). The addiction-aware might hypothesize that Castro’s long illness has forced him to get clean from amphetamine addiction. The clean and sober often gradually get honest, even without benefit of a 12-step program. Maybe, just maybe, longstanding amphetamine addiction explains Fidel Castro then—and now.