Columnists Get Very, Very High

Famed New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd recently traveled to Colorado to try out some edible marijuana.

She discovered that weed is not just an innocuous party drug:

For an hour, I felt nothing. I figured I’d order dinner from room service and return to my more mundane drugs of choice, chardonnay and mediocre-movies-on-demand.

But then I felt a scary shudder go through my body and brain. I barely made it from the desk to the bed, where I lay curled up in a hallucinatory state for the next eight hours. I was thirsty but couldn’t move to get water. Or even turn off the lights. I was panting and paranoid, sure that when the room-service waiter knocked and I didn’t answer, he’d call the police and have me arrested for being unable to handle my candy.

I strained to remember where I was or even what I was wearing, touching my green corduroy jeans and staring at the exposed-brick wall. As my paranoia deepened, I became convinced that I had died and no one was telling me.

Evidently, the question of how to dose marijuana remains open.

In the meantime, the Guardian’s Sarah Jeong responded to the Dowd column by imagining what other columnists might have written if they had gotten stoned.

She chose several Times columnists—Tom Friedman, Paul Krugman, Gail Collins, Ross Douthat-- and added Malcolm Gladwell for taste.

To offer a sample, I will present two of her best parodies, one of a columnist on the left, another of a columnist on the right.

For obvious reasons, Tom Friedman is the easiest to parody. Here are what he might have written after eating weed brownies with his daughter’s roommate at Yale:

Reminds me of the last time I visited Thailand. What a country! What a place! Full of life, and moisture, like this brownie. Kids these days don't eat brownies like we used to in the old days. The brownies of our time were unicycles. These brownies are tricycles. But tricycles are obsolete. Or are they?

One thing I've learned from my many travels is that obsolete is the new cutting edge. Countries with McDonald's don't go to war with other countries with McDonald's! Until they did. I sure could use some McDonald's right now!

The world is flat. Everything is flat. The floor is flat. The walls are flat. I am flat. Please stop looking at me.

Silicon Valley is like an upside-down-reverse Venezuela and it won't stop watching me from the shadows.

I wish I could stop falling through this couch. It can't be helped. If there's a lesson we should all take away, it's this: China.

In the interest of being fair and balanced, here’s what Ross Douthat might have written if, having taken psilocybin mushrooms, he had seen a photo of a barely clothed Rihanna:

Our permissive society – rather than inculcating virtue and responsibility – wallows in the mire of libidinousness. Are we to be a nation of shameless libertines? And can someone tell me what that noise is?

When a country loses its moral compass, an unbearable vertigo plagues our every step. Can you feel that? The newspapers and television stations remain fixated on the tawdry, glittering spectacle of this Rihanna – a songstress who has likely never even heard of St Augustine – even as the gravitational pull of the universe warps around me like a pulsating cocoon entirely absent of light.

I do not like Rihanna; I do not approve of the way her eyes glow purple-cyan-pink. Why is she looking at me like that?

What is "fashion" anyways, but a celebration of vanity and frivolousness? We should pursue higher truths: let us shed the falseness of apparel, together, and writhe naked on this carpet.

Hats off to Sarah Jeong.