Obama’s booby-traps

I read a New Yorker quote recently: ‘Obama has been playing the long game on pot’.

I have a habit of reading things wrong (I suppose some people might call this ‘not being very good at reading’), and recently started to read an article entitled: ‘My friends don’t know I’m a vegetarian’, which I was very interested in, because I read a book about intensive meat farming, and have been trying to secretly reduce the amount of meat I eat, which one might assume, as a fully-formed adult, was well within my capabilities, but which has instead led to quite wonderful conversations with my Mother: 

Mother: What are you going to order?

Me: I’m not sure. Maybe the salad?

Mother: Why?

Me: I’m trying to eat less meat.

Mother: (long pause) How about the lamb.

 I started the article, therefore, with the expectation that the author would finally explain how one manages this sneaky transition, only to be presented with an extremely boring tale of one girl’s virginity. ‘I really hope she stops talking about all the sex she’s not having soon,’ I thought. I had a fleeting panic that this was the warning part of the article: reduce meat at your peril. But I got to the very last word without her ever mentioning how to explain that lamb, too, is intensively farmed, and flicking back to the top of the piece realized that the title of the piece was actually: ‘My friends don’t know I’m a virgin.’

So when I saw the New Yorker pullout I made sure to re-read it, just to check. But no, there it was: Obama has been playing the long game on pot. Which startled me, somewhat, because my own experience of people who play ‘the long game’ (a game I myself would love to play, but can’t, because ‘being the type of person who plays the long game’ is yet another thing on a long list of things I am not, sitting comfortably alongside ‘being mysterious’ and ‘able to eat food without dropping it on self’) is that they play it for slightly more important things than marijuana. (Sex). So I was interested, naturally, and clicked on the article to read more.

‘Obama has been playing the long game on pot, much as he has on some other booby-trapped issues.’ ‘Aha,’ I thought to myself, equilibrium returned. ‘That’s why it pays to read things properly.’