Sophia’s Choice
To sell or not to sell, that is the question. If the former, then for how much? If the latter, then resignation that one has to relegate oneself to living in a home worth only $17.99 million. Oh! The humanity. What will Sophia ultimately choose, to sell her Beverly Hills gilded home or to stay there and suffer the indignity brought on by the vicissitudes of real estate? *
But then, who could live on a mere half acre in a home with only seven bedrooms, seven full bathrooms, three powder rooms, a theater, pool, hot tub, and a three-car garage? And all that gilded stuff! Almost sounds like some tin-roofed hut on the outskirts of Barranquilla, Colombia.
Say it ain’t so, Joe (Manganiello). You had to relist the home at a discounted price (down from $19.6 million). Sophia Vergara, beautiful model and wonderful Emmy-award-winning comedic actress of Modern Family fame and Colombian by birth, must be disappointed. But, her upcoming Netflix role as the late Griselda Blanco, Black Widow husband-killer and cartel queen, should serve as a distraction during the slow real estate market. Pushing a mansion is tougher than pushing drugs.
And That, My Friends, Brings Me to the Subjects of Drugs, Glamour, and Human Nature
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Blanco ran the Miami cartel responsible for a number of murders and shootings. Her cocaine industry spawned a number of TV shows like Miami Vice, Cocaine Godmother, the related Queen of the South, and the upcoming Vergara portrayal of Blanco. After serving time in prison, Griselda was deported to Colombia, Sophia’s homeland, where she was shot by a motorcyclist outside a butchershop.
Unaware, or Only Slightly Aware
While we lived in Miami in 1980 during my sabbatical leave to study oceanography, we saw about once a week a nighttime sweep by police helicopter searchlight for someone or some group attempting to flee police. And not more than a block away from the new complex of condos where we lived in Kendall, there was even a shootout late one night between occupants of two speeding cars. At a school bus stop one morning, two of my daughter’s elementary school friends told her they had just walked past a man standing by an open car trunk filled with guns. Unbeknownst to me because I was otherwise occupied with research and a young family, I was living in the Miami of Griselda Blanco.
And that was the nature of the illegal drug world of Griselda Blanco. It was both enveloping yet insidiously underground. I knew from the Miami Herald that South Florida was a seat of drug activity, so much so that even some money carried unknowingly by the Catholic Bishop tested for cocaine. Yes, it was as ubiquitous as a dusting of fall snow back in Pennsylvania. No doubt just about everyone in Miami probably carried dollars that could have tested positive. They were probably mixed among my own bills.
Griselda’s Legacy
So what’s changed? Not much except in the deadliness of the drugs. As everyone knows, fentanyl has undone the lives of tens of thousands of Americans in a single year. Here’s what the CDC posts:
“Rates of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone, which includes fentanyl and fentanyl analogs, increased over 56% from 2019 to 2020. The number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids in 2020 was more than 18 times the number in 2013. More than 56,000 people died from overdoses involving synthetic opioids in 2020.” **
We know that that number has increased dramatically over the past three years, especially under the de facto open-border policy of the Biden Administration.
Boiling Frogs
And that brings me to the nature of our nature. We tend to move from accepting little to accepting more, I suppose exemplified by Clark Gable’s surprising, “Frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a damn”—shocking audiences at the ending in Gone with the Wind—to just about every film’s inclusion of f-bombs. We are the proverbial frogs in the ever increasing water temperatures of a pot on the stove. Since the decades of Griselda’s murderous control and drug distribution network, the degree of decimation by more potent drugs has increased. Lives have been both upset and lost. Families have been tragically affected. In the same period of about a half century since Griselda began spreading addiction and death across America, news about drug overdoses has become so common that we hardly notice unless we are personally affected. It’s our nature to ignore the ever-increasing temperatures in the pot of water.
And the not-so-funny thing about the insidious nature of drug culture is that comedians have for all of those fifty years or so gotten laughs and claps over drug jokes or mere references to being “high.” They either knowingly or unknowingly increased the water’s heat. When comedy can center on self-destruction, self-destruction becomes inevitable. The culture begins to accept a fatalism, an inevitability. The burgeoning of deaths by fentanyl is ineluctable. It will cease only as a “new drug” replaces the goto drugs of the present, just as marijuana led to cocaine that led to crack that led to …and now the new threat comes from Isotonitazene and xylazine. Were you aware? Like fentanyl, they might become the next kudzu of addiction and harbinger of death.
I confess to a certain lack of awareness now, just as I wasn’t much aware in Miami in 1980. But I haven’t been totally naive about illegal drugs though in living among friends and neighbors who do not use illegal drugs, I just haven’t paid much attention to the next and upcoming threat to human life. The question I have to ask myself is whether or not I’m just not another frog in ever-hotter water.
Imagining Drug Deaths
It’s hard to imagine 330 million Americans. It’s not so hard to picture 56,000. I’ve seen football stadia filled with that many people. Those opioid deaths the CDC counts would translate to a stadium-full of dead Americans. Maybe I can picture that. Maybe I can imagine a stadium full of dead people, young and old, just out for a good time, but all lying in their stadium seats dead from overdosing. Against the background of an entire American population, 56,000 amounts to a mere 0.00016% of the country’s population. Such a small number doesn’t register as “many people,” but a stadium full of corpses does.
Maybe that’s the image we should paint for young people ready to experiment with their lives. Maybe we could add the stench of death to that image to immerse potential druggies into the full context of their choices. If the figures are what I think they are for the past two years, those annual corpses could fill larger stadia, say those like the “horseshoe” at Ohio State, or Penn State, or the University of Tennessee—100,000 corpses.
Even in her youth Griselda could not have been a model like Sophia who was “discovered” as she walked on a beach and soon after given a role in a Pepsi commercial. *** That she is played by beautiful Sophia Vergara is a bit of a cheat, much like the promise of drug dealers. It’s a way to glamorize the hotter and hotter water. By featuring Vergara as the lead character, the producers have chosen to lend her glamour to the life of Griselda. Yes, the godmother of cocaine did live in luxury homes—until she was caught and then eventually murdered after being deported to Colombia. I don’t know what her home or homes in the United States looked like, but I’m guessing they were every bit as palatial as the one that Sophia and Joe are attempting to sell at this time.
The Real Estate Brochure
As in some realtor’s commercial for a home, drug pushers and their many minions in entertainment, especially in comedy, advertise a mansion of pleasure with amenities too numerous to mention. But the realities of both home ownership and drug addiction are not what they seem from the outside. The mortgage for drug use is not only difficult to pay off, but it is also for some impossible to pay. And living in the home of addiction includes spiraling costs and the entropy of dilapidation. Once occupied, it is far more difficult to leave than an expensive Beverly Hills mansion.
Will a film using a glamorous comedic TV star to portray Griselda at the height of her reign send a message? Will it be subtly didactic though ostensibly ars gratia artis? Could a portrayal of cocaine’s godmother send a false message to the next generation of drug addicts, that is, to those teens and twenty-something-year-olds eager to laugh at the next comedian’s jokes about “getting high”? Will is entice some to become the next Griselda?
All topics are on the table when producers decide to fund a film for profit. That’s been the motivation behind dramatizations since Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Euripides penned their dramas. Art for the sake of art has its place in a culture of freedom. The house of drama has many rooms, so there’s one for a biography of a drug queen. Yet, given the seriousness of the current plague of fentanyl deaths, some common sense and sense of morality might be prudent. Ignoring the reality of a stadium filled with dead people means ignoring the reality of America’s drug problem. One doesn’t have to be preachy to present a realistic portrayal that might save lives.
Simply show today’s youth a pot of dead and rotting frogs. Show them a stadium of rotting corpses. Portray the realities of drug addiction in its most stomach-turning consequences. Show the back alleys of the destitute rather the mansions of the pushers. And let them know that no matter how much they spend on building a house of addiction, they will find that it will lose value. If loss of value seems to be the case for Sophia’s beautiful home in Beverly Hills, why would it be less so for a drug house?
*https://nypost.com/2023/06/06/sofia-vergara-joe-manganiello-relist-beverly-hills-mansion/
**https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/basics/fentanyl.html
***https://www.bing.com/search?q=Pic%20oif%20griselda%20blanco&FORM=ARPSEC&PC=ARPL&PTAG=5330
To sell or not to sell, that is the question. If the former, then for how much? If the latter, then resignation that one has to relegate oneself to living in a home worth only $17.99 million. Oh! The humanity. What will Sophia ultimately choose, to sell her Beverly Hills gilded home or to stay there and suffer the indignity brought on by the vicissitudes of real estate? *
But then, who could live on a mere half acre in a home with only seven bedrooms, seven full bathrooms, three powder rooms, a theater, pool, hot tub, and a three-car garage? And all that gilded stuff! Almost sounds like some tin-roofed hut on the outskirts of Barranquilla, Colombia.
Say it ain’t so, Joe (Manganiello). You had to relist the home at a discounted price (down from $19.6 million). Sophia Vergara, beautiful model and wonderful Emmy-award-winning comedic actress of Modern Family fame and Colombian by birth, must be disappointed. But, her upcoming Netflix role as the late Griselda Blanco, Black Widow husband-killer and cartel queen, should serve as a distraction during the slow real estate market. Pushing a mansion is tougher than pushing drugs.
And That, My Friends, Brings Me to the Subjects of Drugs, Glamour, and Human Nature
During the late 1970s and early 1980s, Blanco ran the Miami cartel responsible for a number of murders and shootings. Her cocaine industry spawned a number of TV shows like Miami Vice, Cocaine Godmother, the related Queen of the South, and the upcoming Vergara portrayal of Blanco. After serving time in prison, Griselda was deported to Colombia, Sophia’s homeland, where she was shot by a motorcyclist outside a butchershop.
Unaware, or Only Slightly Aware
While we lived in Miami in 1980 during my sabbatical leave to study oceanography, we saw about once a week a nighttime sweep by police helicopter searchlight for someone or some group attempting to flee police. And not more than a block away from the new complex of condos where we lived in Kendall, there was even a shootout late one night between occupants of two speeding cars. At a school bus stop one morning, two of my daughter’s elementary school friends told her they had just walked past a man standing by an open car trunk filled with guns. Unbeknownst to me because I was otherwise occupied with research and a young family, I was living in the Miami of Griselda Blanco.
And that was the nature of the illegal drug world of Griselda Blanco. It was both enveloping yet insidiously underground. I knew from the Miami Herald that South Florida was a seat of drug activity, so much so that even some money carried unknowingly by the Catholic Bishop tested for cocaine. Yes, it was as ubiquitous as a dusting of fall snow back in Pennsylvania. No doubt just about everyone in Miami probably carried dollars that could have tested positive. They were probably mixed among my own bills.
Griselda’s Legacy
So what’s changed? Not much except in the deadliness of the drugs. As everyone knows, fentanyl has undone the lives of tens of thousands of Americans in a single year. Here’s what the CDC posts:
“Rates of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids other than methadone, which includes fentanyl and fentanyl analogs, increased over 56% from 2019 to 2020. The number of overdose deaths involving synthetic opioids in 2020 was more than 18 times the number in 2013. More than 56,000 people died from overdoses involving synthetic opioids in 2020.” **
We know that that number has increased dramatically over the past three years, especially under the de facto open-border policy of the Biden Administration.
Boiling Frogs
And that brings me to the nature of our nature. We tend to move from accepting little to accepting more, I suppose exemplified by Clark Gable’s surprising, “Frankly, Scarlet, I don’t give a damn”—shocking audiences at the ending in Gone with the Wind—to just about every film’s inclusion of f-bombs. We are the proverbial frogs in the ever increasing water temperatures of a pot on the stove. Since the decades of Griselda’s murderous control and drug distribution network, the degree of decimation by more potent drugs has increased. Lives have been both upset and lost. Families have been tragically affected. In the same period of about a half century since Griselda began spreading addiction and death across America, news about drug overdoses has become so common that we hardly notice unless we are personally affected. It’s our nature to ignore the ever-increasing temperatures in the pot of water.
And the not-so-funny thing about the insidious nature of drug culture is that comedians have for all of those fifty years or so gotten laughs and claps over drug jokes or mere references to being “high.” They either knowingly or unknowingly increased the water’s heat. When comedy can center on self-destruction, self-destruction becomes inevitable. The culture begins to accept a fatalism, an inevitability. The burgeoning of deaths by fentanyl is ineluctable. It will cease only as a “new drug” replaces the goto drugs of the present, just as marijuana led to cocaine that led to crack that led to …and now the new threat comes from Isotonitazene and xylazine. Were you aware? Like fentanyl, they might become the next kudzu of addiction and harbinger of death.
I confess to a certain lack of awareness now, just as I wasn’t much aware in Miami in 1980. But I haven’t been totally naive about illegal drugs though in living among friends and neighbors who do not use illegal drugs, I just haven’t paid much attention to the next and upcoming threat to human life. The question I have to ask myself is whether or not I’m just not another frog in ever-hotter water.
Imagining Drug Deaths
It’s hard to imagine 330 million Americans. It’s not so hard to picture 56,000. I’ve seen football stadia filled with that many people. Those opioid deaths the CDC counts would translate to a stadium-full of dead Americans. Maybe I can picture that. Maybe I can imagine a stadium full of dead people, young and old, just out for a good time, but all lying in their stadium seats dead from overdosing. Against the background of an entire American population, 56,000 amounts to a mere 0.00016% of the country’s population. Such a small number doesn’t register as “many people,” but a stadium full of corpses does.
Maybe that’s the image we should paint for young people ready to experiment with their lives. Maybe we could add the stench of death to that image to immerse potential druggies into the full context of their choices. If the figures are what I think they are for the past two years, those annual corpses could fill larger stadia, say those like the “horseshoe” at Ohio State, or Penn State, or the University of Tennessee—100,000 corpses.
Even in her youth Griselda could not have been a model like Sophia who was “discovered” as she walked on a beach and soon after given a role in a Pepsi commercial. *** That she is played by beautiful Sophia Vergara is a bit of a cheat, much like the promise of drug dealers. It’s a way to glamorize the hotter and hotter water. By featuring Vergara as the lead character, the producers have chosen to lend her glamour to the life of Griselda. Yes, the godmother of cocaine did live in luxury homes—until she was caught and then eventually murdered after being deported to Colombia. I don’t know what her home or homes in the United States looked like, but I’m guessing they were every bit as palatial as the one that Sophia and Joe are attempting to sell at this time.
The Real Estate Brochure
As in some realtor’s commercial for a home, drug pushers and their many minions in entertainment, especially in comedy, advertise a mansion of pleasure with amenities too numerous to mention. But the realities of both home ownership and drug addiction are not what they seem from the outside. The mortgage for drug use is not only difficult to pay off, but it is also for some impossible to pay. And living in the home of addiction includes spiraling costs and the entropy of dilapidation. Once occupied, it is far more difficult to leave than an expensive Beverly Hills mansion.
Will a film using a glamorous comedic TV star to portray Griselda at the height of her reign send a message? Will it be subtly didactic though ostensibly ars gratia artis? Could a portrayal of cocaine’s godmother send a false message to the next generation of drug addicts, that is, to those teens and twenty-something-year-olds eager to laugh at the next comedian’s jokes about “getting high”? Will is entice some to become the next Griselda?
All topics are on the table when producers decide to fund a film for profit. That’s been the motivation behind dramatizations since Aristophanes, Sophocles, and Euripides penned their dramas. Art for the sake of art has its place in a culture of freedom. The house of drama has many rooms, so there’s one for a biography of a drug queen. Yet, given the seriousness of the current plague of fentanyl deaths, some common sense and sense of morality might be prudent. Ignoring the reality of a stadium filled with dead people means ignoring the reality of America’s drug problem. One doesn’t have to be preachy to present a realistic portrayal that might save lives.
Simply show today’s youth a pot of dead and rotting frogs. Show them a stadium of rotting corpses. Portray the realities of drug addiction in its most stomach-turning consequences. Show the back alleys of the destitute rather the mansions of the pushers. And let them know that no matter how much they spend on building a house of addiction, they will find that it will lose value. If loss of value seems to be the case for Sophia’s beautiful home in Beverly Hills, why would it be less so for a drug house?
*https://nypost.com/2023/06/06/sofia-vergara-joe-manganiello-relist-beverly-hills-mansion/
**https://www.cdc.gov/opioids/basics/fentanyl.html
***https://www.bing.com/search?q=Pic%20oif%20griselda%20blanco&FORM=ARPSEC&PC=ARPL&PTAG=5330
RSS Feed