Wednesday, October 16, 2013

Junkie Logic

UNITY

An on-request repost of this from 2008:

Junkie logic.

The last lie a junkie tells himself isn't, "I’m not an addict."

The last lie a junkie tells himself is, "My being a addict doesn't matter."

And in the Conservative Crack House of Many Doors, Ronald Reagan was that first cocktail. The first line of coke. The first needle. The first "Holy Mother of God!” WOWGASM that shotguns right through the blood/brain barrier, reformats your entire ethical hard drive, and scrimshaws a brand new Prime Directive on the inside of your skull.

Listen to any aging wingnut sighing and jerking sadly off to a tattered photo of Saint Ronnie -- despite the fact that the catastrophes we are now reaping were sown by his ruinous ideology -- and you can hear every addict who ever lived pining for that first Perfect High. The one they spend the rest of their days chasing, regardless of the size of the debts they run up or the ruined lives they leave in their wake.

Clinton? Objectively, Clinton qualifies as the greatest Center/Right President in history, and with balanced budgets, GATT, welfare reform, NAFTA, DOMA, record surpluses, foreign and domestic terrorists brought to book, and an actual military victory, he arguably delivered to the wingnuts more of everything they ever said they wanted than anyone else.

And they hated him for it.

Why?

Because Clinton was mere addiction maintenance delivered in measured doses under adult supervision: all policy-wonk that wasn’t cut with that industrial-waste-grade bigoted, psychotic bloodlust that gives Conservatism its wild, freebasing edge. Clinton was methadone, and for the hardcore lifestyle junkie, that shit is for babies.

And Dubya? Dubya was meth with a ketamine chaser delivered hammer-and-anvil directly to the lizard brain.

Dubya was 40 million Pig People tired of the hard, fussy job of being a tolerant, powerful democracy finally once-and-for-all blowing America’s family inheritance on an eight-year, blood-drunk bender.

Dubya was the United States crawling through dumpsters at our national soul’s midnight, killing anything that moves, licking out the contents of random baggies, hoping the little white flakes clinging to the plastic is crank and not rat poison, and waking up the next day -- that horrible, horrible sun-also-rises morning after -- broke and twitchy, arguing over what more they can sell off to keep the party going and who they can blame for their gone-to-shit lives.

So what is the last lie a Conservative tells himself? The last lie that the junkies and their suppliers both fight like hell to keep alive and twitching?

That, whether or not their ideology is depraved or deluded, it doesn’t matter because:
“Both side are always equally wrong about everything all the time.”
Doesn’t matter the who or what. The when or how. Doesn’t matter who was driving the bus towards the cliff and who was waving the red flags, throwing their bodies in front of it, trying to make it stop. Doesn’t matter who was trying to douse the conflagration with hoses shredded by 20 year of Reaganism, and who was lobbing milk cartons full of jellied gasoline onto the bonfire.


It is the lie that David Fucking Brooks pushes in the pages of the New York Times.

It is the lie that made David Broder the “Dean” of the Villagers; the lie on which the quarterly profits of the entire Murdoch media empire now rests.

Because these people and thousands more like them are not journalists or “pundits” or expert who offer facts or interpretation or a philosophical framework for illuminating and contextualizing the events of the world.

They are pushers, selling that last, nihilistic lie to the junkies on the Right who will pay any price and cut any throat to escape the fact that they are personally and specifically responsible for the destruction of the country they claimed to love in the name of a God they claim to believe in.
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7 comments:

Anonymous said...

Paraphrasing The Wire, they fight on the lie.

Chucklenuts said...

Brilliant writing. Not sure how this analogy came to your keyboard, but it is the definition of hitting the nail on the head

Pete from Canada said...

The spiral of addiction only got worse when the pushers forgot that they were running a business, a con to fleece the rubes, and began sampling their own product. If there are commandments for pushers, then certainly the first must be: "DO NOT SAMPLE THE PRODUCT."

It's very difficult (read: totally impossible) to get the money men financing the gleeful conservative charge into oblivion when they've started buying into their own bullshit. Once upon a time it was possible to appeal, not to the better angels of their natures (such creatures, if they ever existed, were murdered and their feathers used to stuff some truly comfortable pillows long ago), but to their wallets; the threat of their stock portfolios tanking was enough to get the money men to jerk hard on their customers' collective choke-chain. Now? Now they're True Believers too. Not all of them, but enough.

And it's not possible to negotiate with True Believers. Especially if you're one of the filthy heretics they hate so.

Comradde PhysioProffe said...

Yeah, this is one of your best. The "scrimshaws" metaphor is fantastic.

Ufotofu9 said...

Love ya, but as a former junkie (literally a heroin addict) I can tell you that the lie we tell ourselves is, "this time will be awesome. This one will be like when I first started."

Don't tell me there is no political metaphor there.

But yes, saying that ""My being a addict doesn't matter" exists, but it's usually what we think after we have been clean for a while and what we think to justify a relapse.

dinthebeast said...

It's been my experience that very few people are cut out for the rigors of a life of illicit drug use. Far fewer, as is turns out, than I would have believed when I was younger.
That said, power would appear to be far more intoxicating and addictive than any of the mere chemicals I have so far encountered.
Just last night I was pondering the similarities in the damage caused by drug vs. power induced insanity, and today you go and make a post about it.
About this crop o' fools, though, and aside from the impaired judgement from the power-high, I'm seeing a lack of familiarity with the concept of not always getting one's way mixed in with a Dunning-Krugerish short sightedness towards what I tend to like to call "reality".

-Doug in Oakland

Cirze said...

Pulitzer stuff.

As always.

But we've known this.

Always.