The Stupid Decade: Back in the '70s there were a lot of great movies released. I have only come to appreciate them as I've gotten older. From Annie Hall, to The Godfather, to Patton, to Monty Python and the Holy Grail - a killer decade. Of course, that's about all the '70s had going for them, as a viewing of any episode of I Love the '70s on VH1 will quickly demonstrate. I used to wonder whether my hatred of the '70s stemmed not from their inherent abject stupidity, but from my personal memories of my awkward, pathetic adolescent years. Nope, they were stupid. Profoundly, existentially stupid. And not just stupid, they were UGLY -- the hairstyles, the clothes, the music. Worse, there was the pervasive ignorance to how thoroughly stupid they were being.

And then there was the whole drug thing. Nowadays you have a decent stratification of drugs. There are the good-time, happy feeling drugs like Ecstasy, or Prozac for that matter. There are the grimey, slow-suicide drugs, like Heroin and Crack. And of course there's Pot for the folks who never quite made it out of their parent's basement. Civilized people now know what drug is appropriate for how they want to mess themselves up. (In my case, Maker's Mark Bourbon is my drug of choice.) But back in the '70s it didn’t matter -- if there was a drug placed in front of you, you used it. Otherwise reasonable people felt it was appropriate to behave like raging crackheads.

If anything, VH1 missed the enduring lesson of the '70s: Given the proper pharmaceuticals, people will do just about anything.