WE'RE THE GREATER FOOL

The stock market tells us something about people.

The much-heralded volatility on Wall Street reminds us of another paradigm:
the greater fool theory.

There is always a greater fool to make a very bad investment. The greatest
fool is the one who hears only what he wants to hear. That is what we do
when we expurgate history to accommodate our comfort zone.

That is what San Joaquin County supervisors find palatable when they choose
to expurgate the coolie caricature from the courthouse mural.

It would be better to consign the mural and all related lithos to the
Haggin Museum. I am reminded of the furor that Diego Rivera's work elicited
at Rockefeller Center. Dario Marenco's notion as what is proper for public
places smacks of the distaste that Maplethorpe's photos brought to
Cincinnati. The greater obscenity comes from the number of drug-related
cases that fill the halls of the courthouse. Part of the legacy of 19th
century Chinese in California comes from our approach to the
criminalization of drug use. The series "Hooked: Illegal Drugs and How They
Got That Way"on the History Channel made a point that relates directly to
our local desire to expunge and forget: the first law to specifically ban
drug use was enacted to allay public fears that Chinese were using opium to
take advantage of women.

The Opium Wars forced Indian opium onto the Chinese populace as part of
England's solution to its trade-imbalance problems with China, and
culminated in the Boxer Rebellion. Our drug laws and the policies that
followed have not shown greater insight or success.

Our courthouse can attest to that. We should tackle a bigger mural in the
halls and in our own backyards. That mural is our failed drug policies,
which have destabilized our hemisphere and created a captive market
enriched by enormous profit and misplaced resources. We should cease being
the greater fool.

Louie R. Lee, Stockton