Republicans and Drugs

 

As Liddle Marco gets Trumpier and Trumpier, I get angrier and angrier:

Why do you assume only racial minority communities use smoking methods to take drugs?

— Against Yastronomical Odds (@Yastreblyansky) February 8, 2022

I guess it should be clear that he does not in fact assume anything of the sort—he knows perfectly well that methamphetamine users are typically white (in proportions ranging from 54 percent in San Jose to 94 percent in Portland), with Latin users constituting a majority in Los Angeles and a substantial second place elsewhere, and crystal meth smokers, with the characteristic "meth mouth", are very much among those who can transmit diseases like hepatitis by sharing pipes and would benefit, along with the general public health, from a program distributing clean pipes. 

Literary Corner: This Is Your President on Drugs

"Frodo Smokes Crack", by Sikojensika/DeviantArt. 

Listening to some BBC expert solemnly explaining that while ultraviolet light and Lysol both can kill coronaviruses on surfaces, President Trump is wrong to suppose that either could be used as injection treatments for Covid-19 patients, and in fact injecting a liquid disinfectant would kill the patient before the virus did. Hey, we knew that, and for all we know Trump does too. They're missing the point.

Like a critic acknowledging that Alph is indeed a sacred river, personified by the Peloponnese river god Alpheus, but Mr. Coleridge errs when he claims that it runs through caverns, measureless or otherwise, and empties into a sunless sea; actually, it empties into the Ionian Sea, where the sky is generally quite bright.

Really, Mr. Coleridge is not doing geography! He's doing something else!

Here's the poem:

Bring the Light Inside the Body

by Donald J.Trump

For the Record: Quinine

Image via Wikipedia: "The quinine content of tonic water causes it to fluoresce under black light."

Dustup on me criticizing the First Pharmacologist in the White House:

Why would it be important to broadcast what he says? He has no useful information. He's been consistently out of the loop and out of his depth, often spouting dangerous falsehoods that have even killed people (like his nonsense about choroquine).

— Leaves of Yas (@Yastreblyansky) April 1, 2020

Literary Corner: Big Fan

Emperor Trump holding forth on the State Department—"I call it the Deep State Department"—causes Dr. Fauci to show an emotion. No idea who I should credit the clip to, it's been all over Twitter. 

Chloroquine: A Meditation

by Donald J. Trump

We’re going to know,
so we’re going to know soon,
including safety, but, you know,
when you get that safety this has been
prescribed for many years
for people to combat malaria,
which was a big problem,
and it’s very effective.

It’s a strong – it’s a strong
drug, so we’ll see. I will say
that I am a man that comes
from a very positive school
when it comes to, in particular,
one of these drugs, and we’ll
see how it works out.

Without seeing too much,
I'm probably more of a fan
of that than maybe anybody,
but I'm a big fan, and
we'll see what happens.

We all understand what the doctor said
is 100 percent correct: It’s early.
But I have seen things
that are impressive and we’ll see.

That’s all it is. Just a feeling.
I’m a smart guy. We only disagree
a little bit. It may work
and it may not work.
And I agree with the doctor
when he said it may work,
may not work. I feel good about it.

It's totally, it's just a feeling.
You know, I’m a smart guy.
I feel good about it. And
we're going to see, you're
going to see soon enough.

Let’s see if it works.
It might and it might not.
I happen to feel good about it,
but who knows? I’ve been right
a lot. Let’s see what happens.

Turn on, tune in, drip out

Image via Reddit.

Local Man Who Believed Saddam Hussein Had an Advanced Nuclear Weapons Program and Still Thinks Lincoln Unified the United States and If We Show Respect to Rightwingers It Will End School Shootings Among Other Things Complains that Under Trump America Is Descending Into Fantasy

In "Donald Trump's Magical Fantasy World", New York Times, 24 May 2018,  and with reference to the recent deaths of the writers Tom Wolfe and Philip Roth:

I’d say the crucial pivot was in the early 1960s. Hugh Hefner created a fantasy version of masculinity. Ken Kesey created a fantasy image of an acid-dripping New Age.

The two great writers who died this month tracked the explosion of fantastical thinking. In 1961 Philip Roth wrote an essay for Commentary called “Writing American Fiction,” in which he endorsed Benjamin DeMott’s observation that America was then experiencing a “universal descent into unreality.” Roth would go on to make the most of it. “Making fake biography, false history, concocting a half imaginary existence out of the actual drama of my life is my life,” he told The Paris Review.

I'd say if it happened in the early 1960s you probably shouldn't be blaming it on Trump. I never expected to be defending Trump against the vicious assaults of David Brooks, but fair is fair.

"Acid-dripping" is superb, though. If you figure out what it means drop me a note.  Or drip me a note.

And perhaps what he really meant was to blame it on Roth, caught in that quote deliberately confusing himself with the non-existent Nathan Zuckerman, who in turn confuses himself with "Philip Roth", and literally profiting from his imposture. Don't speak ill of the dead, but maybe Roth, alongside Ken Kesey, Hugh Hefner, and Tom Wolfe, was the key agent in creating the conditions in which the rise of Trump, a glamorous international businessman/jewel thief who disguises himself as president in order to insinuate himself into the company of his fabulously wealthy but gullible marks, was virtually inevitable.

Then again, you know what else happened in 1961. It's just possible that our genuine and severe problems derive from the fact that for the past 57 years we have all been perceived by David Brooks, and our connection to reality has become more and more tenuous as a result, day by day. That's so heavy, man.

Driftglass suggests "fantasy" may not be exactly the right word.

Franks on Drugs

Border fence between Nogales, Sonora and Nogales, Arizona, a few years ago. "Arizona Governor Janice... Brewer’s office had received complaints from Nogales residents that illegal activity is happening everyday at the border in plain view of both Americans and Mexicans. Initial investigation by the agents confirmed that Americans and Mexicans on either side of the border have been playing volleyball using the fence as their net. The activity has gained popularity in recent weeks and agents fear that it might spread to the rest of the entire Arizona–Mexico border. Agents dispatched to the scene are now on a 24-hour watch over the border to ensure that at the end of each game, the Mexican ball does not end up on U.S. soil, which would violate customs regulations." (The Adobo Chronicles, October 8 2013)

Via Josh Marshall—Trent Franks, the Arizona Congressman from the Metro Phoenix region (180 miles or so north of the border and some 79% white, which is coincidentally not much more than what Franks scored in the 2014 election, though he's fallen off a bit since then) with the comic porn star name, explaining what terrorists would do if they wanted to smuggle a nuclear weapon across the Mexican border (because it would be easy to get it from their weapons factory in Lebanon or wherever he thinks it might originate to Mexico):

This is your Brooks on drugs

Reweaving. Via Houston Culture Map.

Former New York Times columnist David Brooks tries his hand at Trump whispering ("Let's Go for a Win on Opioids"):

If we lived in a normal country our president would use the current moment to try to get a win — to try to pass something that would help people, demonstrate that Washington can function and rebuild his brand.

No no no, if we lived in a normal country we wouldn't be in the current moment, with a president exclusively interested in scoring wins and building his brand. As a matter of fact that is what he's doing, as far as anybody can tell, in between bouts of hanging out with his role models—

Poison waiting in the dregs

Shorter Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, "The Virtues of Reality", New York Times, August 21 2016:

These kids today and their internets! What's the world coming to? Instead of driving drunk, getting in bar fights, and having furtive unprotected sex they now stay home, play violent video games, and jerk off to electronic porn. I bet that's why they won't move out of their parents' houses and get jobs and wives. (It couldn't have anything to do with the economy, right?) It makes me so mad I could spit.

Ross is now in favor of hooliganism and hookup culture? He's a booster of that Caligulan Thrill that used to get him so hot and bothered back when he was a pious lad of 35, last year sometime? I guess what pisses him off today is that, in this fantasy world he's constructed for the pure pleasure of screaming at it, the young men (he says "people" but it's all about boys) are all avoiding God's just punishment for their irremediably sinful nature.

The funniest thing in the column, aside from including a link to an essay by his mother—no, back up, that's part of the funniest thing in the column, speaking of fantasy worlds:

Annals of derp: What goes up, etc.

James McNeill Whistler, Nocturne in Black and Gold: The Falling Rocket (1872-77). Via JSS Gallery.

It's world-famous penitentiarist David Brooks out to stop all this nonsense he sees in the presidential campaign about ending the drug war as a way to deal with the problem of prison overcrowding:

The drug war is not even close to being the primary driver behind the sharp rise in incarceration. About 90 percent of America’s prisoners are held in state institutions. Only 17 percent of these inmates are in for a drug-related offense, or less than one in five.

Moreover, the share of people imprisoned for drug offenses is dropping sharply, down by 22 percent between 2006 and 2011. Writing in Slate, Leon Neyfakh emphasized that if you released every drug offender from state prison today, you’d reduce the population only to 1.2 million from 1.5 million.

The war on drugs does not explain the rocketing rates of incarceration, and ending that war, wise or not, will not solve this problem.

I think that the main thing Brooks is missing here is that the incarceration rates are not, in point of fact, rocketing, unless you're thinking about the way typical rockets, the ones that don't escape into space, take a parabolic trajectory in which after going up they go down, because US state incarceration rates have been going down for the past five years, since the annual number of admissions started declining around 2006, which is a good thing. That's not the problem our Democratic candidates are addressing.

Reefer Dowdness

Dowd, on her bad THC chocolate trip in a Denver hotel room:

Sitting in my hotel room in Denver, I nibbled off the end and then, when nothing happened, nibbled some more....

Christie on partisanship

Governor Christie, quoted at ForwardProgressives:

“I don’t believe this is a conservative, or moderate, or liberal issue,” Christie concluded.  “I don’t believe this is a Republican or Democrat issue. Because, let me tell you, I know as many drug-addicted Republicans as I know drug-addicted Democrats.” 

OK, I'll let you tell me. But I want numbers.

From artsy tumblr ChrisChristieEats.