Fantasyland

I can do no better in conveying the gist of Kurt Andersen’s book, Fantasyland: How America Went Haywire (Random House 2017), than by quoting a long passage from its first chapter:

America was created by true believers and passionate dreamers, by hucksters and their suckers—which over the course of four centuries has made us susceptible to fantasy, as epitomized by everything from Salem hunting witches to Joseph Smith creating Mormonism, from PT Barnum to Henry David Thoreau to speaking in tongues, from Hollywood to Scientology to conspiracy theories, from Walt Disney to Billy Graham to Ronald Reagan to Oprah Winfrey to Donald Trump. In other words: mix epic individualism with extreme religion; mix show business with everything else; let all that steep and simmer for a few centuries; run it through the anything-goes 1960s and the Internet age; the result is the America we inhabit today, where reality and fantasy are weirdly and dangerously blurred and commingled (11).

That gets to a major portion of what Andersen has assembled to focus our attention on: the idea that Donald Trump and his believers are not aberrations so much as the fulfillment of our long national aspiration to do our own thing, no matter how nutty. Where we Americans like to think of ourselves as sensible inheritors of Enlightenment rationalism and realism and pragmatism, there is a very powerful strain in the national mythos and character that just as powerfully rejects reason and opts instead for belief—belief in whatever we feel to be true, regardless of facts or logic or consensus reality. This is why, for instance, the man who is now President of the United States can justify anything he says, no matter how fantastical (that he lost the popular vote because millions of ‘illegals’ voted for Clinton; or that his offices in Trump Tower were bugged by the Obama administration), by asserting, and having his aides assert as ‘proof’ that he “does believe that,” and “has believed that for a while.” And when asked by a national news anchor about such fantasies—“Do you think that talking about millions of illegal votes is dangerous to this country without presenting the evidence?”—he replies “No, not at all! Not at all—because many people feel the same way I do” (426-7). In Trumpworld, that is, belief trumps fact every time. What Kurt Andersen does is assemble the history that leads logically to this sorry situation.

            He begins, of course, with the nation’s founders, including the prospectors who were sure they would find gold in Virginia, the so-called “Pilgrims” for whom even the relaxed Protestantism of Holland was too constricting, and the Puritans of the Massachusetts Bay Colony, all of whom comprised highly radical wings of the not-very-old Protestant movement. These were people who could not stand any interference with their personal interpretation of the Bible. They felt that God himself had given them not just a new land where they could build their ‘theocracy,’ but essentially divine rights to the land over and above those who had lived there for millennia, the Natives. And they were quite clear that God had also given them the right to eliminate any who tried to block their settlement, as well as members of other less-pure sects like Quakers or Catholics. As Andersen notes, from 1675 through 1676, they did so with cold-blooded zeal, embarking on what he calls “the year of pitiless killing” (39) in their war against the ‘Satanic’ Indians. Believing devoutly that “Satan visibly and palpably reigns in America more than in any other known place of the world,” they were able to justify their slaughter as a religious war against “Satan’s soldiers” (38). And of course, in Salem, the outbreak of witchcraft was met with the well-known trials in which at least twenty witches and sorcerers were executed for alleged fealty to that same Satan. Yet the colonies survived and thrived, creating a place where the real opportunity, according to Andersen, was not so much economic as “the permission it gave to dream up new supernatural or otherwise untrue understandings of reality and believe them with passionate certainty” (42).

            That auspicious beginning continued literally to the present-day with new sects sprouting like weeds, each nuttier than the last. So America got at least two Great Spiritual Awakenings where participants shook and rattled and spoke in tongues and dedicated themselves to a personal relationship with the Lord as they understood him; and new sects entirely like Baptists and Methodists; and then Pentecostals and Seventh-Day Adventists and fundamentalists and evangelicals and charismatics;  and perhaps the craziest of all, Joseph Smith, who somehow convinced his Mormons that America really was the new Holy Land, literally visited by Jesus Christ as proved by the fact that Smith had met and talked with Him near Cleveland, OH. And millions believed him. Such willingness to believe whatever suits the believer made possible the Christian Science of a woman named Patterson who changed her name to Mary Baker Eddy and insisted in her book that neither pain nor disease were real: “there’s only belief in pain” and “what is termed disease does not exist” (79). It also enabled the founding of over one hundred utopian communities across America including one that Nathaniel Hawthorne toyed with, Brook Farm. As the discovery of gold in California in 1849 seemed to prove once and for all, America was the place where miracles actually happened.

            Andersen then shows how all these initial predilections were given a “quantum” boost by several inventions: the movies, then TV, and then the Internet. Andersen calls them “a powerful and unprecedented solvent of the mental barriers between real and unreal” (138). That is, moving images enwrap the viewer in such a powerful feeling of participation that people who watch TV (many almost constantly) begin to think that’s what reality is. Or can no longer tell the difference between what they’ve seen on screen and what has actually happened (Donald Trump seems to be one of these people). Add to this the burgeoning of another American fantasy—the nostalgia of living in suburbs that appear to be embodiments of a pastoral past we all dream of, or see on screen—and you have a nation of people bred on make-believe and brainwashed by commercials that feed even more into that make-believe. In this regard, Andersen makes the notable point that the word suburbia seems to be a conflation of suburb and utopia, the apotheosis of which is the Disney-built town of Celebration, in Florida near Disneyworld. It is total fantasy of a town, fake to the point that each evening in the Fall, every hour on the hour, “tissue-paper leaves fall in the town center,” while in December, “snowlike soap flakes drift from the sky” (405). No need for actual trees or clouds or cold weather here.

            There is more about Americans’ astonishing credulity in this key text, but you get the idea. From belief in UFO abductions to the fake hysteria over satanic abuse in the 1980s and 90s; from the craziness over the “right” to possess mass-murdering guns to the Republican Party’s paranoia over the UN’s Agenda 21 (a 1990 resolution about sustainable development that the GOP sees as a plan to coerce us all into a one-world order characterized by “socialist/communist redistribution of wealth”); from the Prosperity Gospel of Oral Robers and Ken Copeland and Joel Osteen, which says that praying to God can make you rich because Jesus himself was a millionaire and wants you to be rich; to the Hollywood TV Star Fantasy Camp where you can literally pretend to be a star with sets and star trailer etc. for only $10,000—what Andersen calls the fantasy-industrial complex keeps going into higher gear and seems set to get even more fantastic as the technology of virtual reality becomes ever more convincing. The net result, of course, is the increasing inability (or unwillingness) of Americans to distinguish between fact and fiction, fake and real. And what’s worse is that since the United States has become the world’s greatest exporter of fantasy and fantasy religion, our disease is spreading to the Third World where more than half a billion Christians, according to Andersen, now subscribe to Pentecostal or charismatic Christianity, speaking in tongues and “hearing personally from God” (289). Not to mention the numbers addicted to our films and video gaming.

And, of course, it has all come back to haunt us with the election of that most preposterous of salesmen for fantasyland, Donald Trump. Andersen calls him “a pure Fantasyland being, its apotheosis” (417). And it is true. He is the great white hope of fantasyland, the one who can, so he promised, bring Americans back to their imagined era of greatness (and whiteness). And while those of us in the “reality community” have a hard time understanding his appeal, Andersen’s history helps make sense of it. Indeed, it makes sense of what sometimes seems a contradiction—the combination, in Trump’s followers, of belief in the preposterous on the one hand, and cynical dismissal of things like science and facts on the other. Andersen quotes from Hannah Arendt’s masterwork, On Totalitarianism, here, and it is worth repeating part of that quote:

A mixture of gullibility and cynicism have been an outstanding characteristic of mob mentality before it became an everyday phenomenon of masses. In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and that nothing was true (436).

I think that very nearly describes Trump’s true believers, those supporters who seem deaf to his faults, his lies, his idiotic statements and retractions in almost the same breath (such as the one he recently made about having “misspoke” in his disastrous news conference in Helsinki). Completely unsettled and disoriented by the ‘incomprehensible world’ in which they find themselves, in which their jobs have vanished and their certainties have been upended, they take refuge, many of them, in preposterous beliefs about the bible, and in the obvious lies of a huckster who promises them relief, improbable though it may be, as well as in cynicism about ‘elites’ and science and global warming. They can thus think simultaneously that nothing the ‘elites’ say is true (it’s all fake news), and that everything Trump promises is both true and possible. And what Kurt Andersen shows us in Fantasyland is that they, this tribe of dreamers and believers, have been prepared for just this apotheosis by centuries of American training in and celebration of what can only be called a childlike way of being. Everything is possible. Nothing is true except what you believe. You can make anything come true simply by believing it. Intuitions are equal to facts. And, as Trump’s Witch of Endor said early on, there may be facts that contradict us, but there are also alternative facts that support us. The question is, are there enough Americans who care about the difference to save the ship before it sinks?

Lawrence DiStasi

           

Just Barely Tolerable

The news of the last week has put me in mind of a concept from Mayahana Buddhism (and indeed from the Judeo-Christian tradition as well) which holds that our earthly world in its present condition is “just barely tolerable” (I first heard this phase in a recent talk by Anbo Stuart Kutchins). The Buddhist term for this is “Saha world,” and it is a key element in the Buddhist understanding of suffering in human life. I will address this below, but for now, I am simply interested in the concept—that the world as we know it is “just barely tolerable.” An Italian writer named Mario Brelich has referred to a similar idea in a kind of novelized essay called The Holy Embrace. There, he writes about how humans, after being ejected by God from the bliss of Eden, had to live in another world that would be “just barely tolerable,” so long as they submitted to the divine will, that is. Whether or not Brelich knew of or had access to Buddhist philosophy is not clear, but since he wrote his book in 1972, it certainly seems possible. No matter. The takeaway here is the notion of our human world as one which is “just barely tolerable.” Anyone who has lived long enough and reflected deeply enough (Nietzsche apparently had a similar idea of his world) must surely agree that the world and life as we know it is almost, but not quite, insufferable. Intolerable. Almost, but not quite. 

            The way I think of this is that, considering the news of last week, those who usually thrive and rule in our world often seem bent on making the world intolerable for everyone else, especially the thinking person, the half-way compassionate person. Take the child abuse inflicted on Central American migrants seeking asylum in the United States. These are people who have suffered untold misery in their home countries (El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras) from both corrupt authorities (usually enabled and supported by the United States) and out-of-control gangs. Indeed, it has been a truism for centuries that no one abandons home, relatives, neighbors, language and everything else that makes life worth living without enormous pressure either from violence or economic deprivation. So it is with people fleeing gangs in El Salvador or right-wing death squads and narco-traffickers in Guatemala or Honduras. To have even reached the Mexico/U.S. border requires an amazing odyssey that has subjected them to untold abuses. And yet, when they finally reach that dreamed-of border nearly mad with anxiety, these parents are met with the most unimaginable outrage of all: separation from their children. It is an obscenity that is all the more obscene because it is unnecessary: these are not criminals; they are refugees, asylum seekers. They want nothing more than safety for themselves and their young children. And yet, Trump and his Administration, almost gleefully (especially in describing the policy to their rabid supporters), have imposed criminal charges against them, charges of illegal entry for which they must answer in court. And this has necessitated their separation from their children. Now thousands of these children are caged and held separated without any indication of when, or whether they can ever be reunited with their parents, some of whom have already been deported. On its own, this is simply intolerable. 

            Then came the Supreme Court decision of June 26, which upheld the Trump administration’s third try at a travel ban against Muslims trying to immigrate. Through a transparent sleight of hand, the administration cosmeticized the original ban to include two countries that are notmajority Muslim—North Korea and Venezuela—so as to be able to claim innocence where religious animus is concerned, so as to be able to claim national security as its aim. And the conservative majority on the Supreme Court actually fell for this, or rather, has been slowly built over years to approve of such chicanery. And so they did, ruling that the President of the United States has near-unlimited authority to protect national security, though at the same time retroactively condemning the similar presidential order incarcerating Japanese Americans during WWII. It was a bravura performance of hypocrisy that would have pleased the 1857 court that wrote the Dredd-Scott decision. 

            But not satisfied with that, the Supremes followed that decision with two more decisions that put an exclamation mark upon their 2018 season: one reversing a Texas court’s ruling banning obviously racist gerrymandering, thus allowing racism to flourish in our voting system once again; and another granting a government-employed claimant the ‘right’ not to pay union dues, even though he benefits from union actions. This will bankrupt unions of much of the funding they need not only to protect their workers in the future, but also to help fund democratic candidates—the real point of the conservative decision. As if this were not enough, Justice Anthony Kennedy thereupon announced his retirement, thus paving the way for old Hog-Belly to nominate yet another hyper-conservative justice, this time to pollute the court for a generation, and probably dooming Roe v. Wade in the process. The triumph of vulgarity and stupidity and cruelty could not be more complete. Intolerable. 

            But we are assured that our world is “just barely tolerable.” Is there anything, in the face of all this horror, that makes it so? We can all count the ways. There are flowers that bloom, regardless of the hostility emanating from human poisons. There are also vegetables and trees and fish (barely holding on, it is true) and deer and rabbits and bear and mice and foxes (I  just saw one scratching in my yard) and sharks and whales and hawks and coyotes that appear periodically to assure us that nature cannot be so easily suppressed, no matter how much glyphosate or fossil fuel we spray on it and over it and through it. Or how much carbon and plastic we inject into its air and oceans. And we know in our bones that once the human stain is gone from this earth, the natural world will rebound with unalloyed joy. Salmon will again thicken rivers and bears will feast on them as they journey upstream to spawn past rejuvenated forests and meadows and purefied air. Then there are our grandchildren, eager and beautiful and energetic in their innocent anticipation of growing up so they can taste the world that seems so appealing to them if only they could be adult and free. And as we watch, we can only hope that there will still be a world, “barely tolerable” though it might be, for them to fill out as we did. And then there are those courageous types everywhere who refuse to be threatened or deterred, who let their compassion and their fire drive them to relieve the suffering of those at the border or those under the boot or those fleeing global warming or those attempting to find a way to live on the streets. They are there, they are many, and they are models and inspiration for us all. 

            Which brings me back to the start of this essay. The Saha world is a concept made vivid in the branch of Buddhism known as Mahayana. And what it points out is that, though there are said to be other wonderful realms with names like the Pure Land or the Perfume Universe where everything is perfectly lovely (akin to Christian Heaven, perhaps), the Saha world is really best for us humans not just because it’s what we’ve got, but more precisely because of the struggle and hardship we find here. Struggle and hardship are beneficial for us, we are told; or rather, they are beneficial for those who adopt the ideal of the “bodhisattva”—the being who vows to eschew the personal liberation that he or she might obtain in favor of waiting until all beings are liberated. No thank you, says the bodhisattva when his own personal liberation is at hand; I prefer to remain here and help others. For such an ideal being, in short, the struggles and hardships and sufferings endemic to the Saha world are precisely what is needed for her development; development of the great compassion that keeps her here in the thick of things helping all others. In other words, the world just as it is seems perfectly designed for the development of that which the world itself needs to, eventually, wake up. And it becomes plain to such a being that no one, not even the most advanced of beings, can actually wake up alone. No one. Waking up is exactly that which is done together with all beings. 

            So, though in our more desperate moments (like now), we would, if we could, wipe out all the troubles and problems of the world by whatever means necessary to try to bring about some utopia or other, in our more comprehensive, our wiser moments, perhaps, we realize that the “just barely tolerable” world we have, doing its deluded thing as always, provides us with the right combination of horror and solace to keep us honest, and human, and, we hope, compassionate enough to never turn our backs on its “slings and arrows.” Because it is precisely those slings and arrows, along with a little bit of proper nourishment, that make us who and what we are. 

Lawrence DiStasi 

The Post, the Past, and Now

I recently watched the new Spielberg film, The Post, starring Tom Hanks as Ben Bradlee and Meryl Streep as Katherine Graham. While I wouldn’t say the film was award caliber, it was definitely enjoyable and did its best to engender some suspense over whether Graham, the Post’s owner, would defy the Nixon Administration’s injunction against publication of Daniel Ellsberg’s Pentagon Papers. Anyone who lived through this, as I did, knew that Graham would publish, but the film nonetheless succeeds in building the tension over her decision—which involved not only the possible insolvency of her paper, but possible jail time for her as the owner, and of editor Bradlee and writer Bagdikian as well. What the film mainly recaptured for me, though, was the joy that prevailed, particularly among anti-war activists, when that edition of the Postcontaining the Pentagon Papers piled off the presses; to then be followed by a delirious Tom Hanks dropping on Katherine Graham’s desk copies of a dozen other newspapers across the country that had similarly defied the Attorney General’s injunction against publication. That meant that the strength of all those papers challenging the government and asserting their freedom-of-the-press rights would influence the subsequent Supreme Court decision that agreed with their assertion of those rights. The power of Nixon’s imperial presidency was broken right then and there—which the film makes clear by closing with a night watchman, about a year later, noticing an opened door at Democratic National Headquarters in the Watergate office building. The initial reporting about this break-in by Nixon’s so-called “plumbers” (who had earlier broken into the office of Daniel Ellsberg’s psychiatrist) would lead inexorably to Nixon’s resignation. The Vietnam War would ignominiously end soon thereafter. 

            Given our current dire situation, the film could not help but bring up my hope that something like the miracle of the Pentagon Papers would happen again to bring to ruin the alleged presidency of the Drumpf. Our situation in 1972 was actually similar to what we are experiencing now. Nixon’s grip on the presidency seemed unassailable; despite his 1971 loss regarding the Pentagon Papers, he won a landslide victory over a rather hapless George McGovern in the 1972 election and seemed well on his way to controlling the nation for years to come. But so outraged was he by the Pentagon Papers leak that he set up the “plumbers’ operation,” Watergate became their signature caper, and Nixon was disgraced, humiliated, and forced to resign rather than face inevitable impeachment. Could it happen again? Who knows? But there are forces in motion that could do the same to our wannabe King. 

            We all know what those forces are. To begin with, Donald Trump’s criminality, not just as president but throughout his long career, makes the lawlessness of Nixon’s burglars seem akin to high-school pranks. And it appears that Robert Mueller’s investigation is focused pretty heavily on that lawlessness—the years of real estate scams culminating in the 1990s sale of scores of properties to Russian thugs and oligarchs to launder their money. Paul Manafort, once Trump’s campaign chief, has already been charged with such money laundering, and there are suspicions that Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner have been and still are up to their eyeballs in the same skulduggery. And it is skullduggery. As 18 U.S. code from 1957 says: 

Whoever, in any of the circumstances set forth in subsection (d), knowingly engages or attempts to engage in a monetary transaction in criminally derived property of a value greater than $10,000 and is derived from specified unlawful activity,shall be punished as provided in subsection (b). 

In layman’s terms, laundering money through real estate is a crime—one that involves using criminally-derived money to buy properties and then selling them. Thereby, the income from the sale will have been “laundered” through property to look legal. Even according to Trump Jr., much of the money that poured into the Trump organization since the 1990s to bail out the then-bankrupt Trump came from Russian sources seeking to launder their loot. These, and a lifetime of other shady deals, not excluding presidential violations of the emoluments clause (whereby foreign visitors to Washington DC, for example, are induced to spend huge amounts of money at the Trump Hotel in that city, or in Florida at his Mar-a-Lago property benefiting the president directly), would be used to indict the president himself. 

The problem would be pinning something on Trump or any of his henchmen in today’s ethical climate. Indeed, if we look back to the Nixon-era 1970s, we can see that the issue of a Trump presidency would never have arisen in the first place. No one with Trump’s record of misstatements, corrupt business dealing, outright lying, and sexual outrages could have even been considered for, much less won the nomination of either of the two parties. Yes, Richard Nixon was a crook and a racist, but he covered it with practiced and well-accepted coded language: the ‘southern strategy’ was kept more or less secret from the mainstream, while the ‘moral majority’ did not obviously signify white supremacists but right-thinking Americans in the suburbs. With Trump, though, the racism, the goatish behavior, the contempt for government itself, the scapegoating of the press, the open nepotism with his daughter, and a whole galaxy of attitudes and practices going on quietly to cripple government for decades, are all out in the open. And what is astonishing is not only that Republican politicians seem deaf to these ethical breaches (making impeachment a distant dream), so does what is accurately called his “base” (the people from the basement, the people who are truly basein the worst sense of that word). An incredible instance of that baseness made the news on June 22, when an actual pimp owner of several whorehouses in Nevada named Dennis Hof won the Republican primary for a seat in the Nevada assembly! Explaining his rather surprising support among those highly ‘moral’ Christian evangelicals, Hof, owner of the Moonlite Bunny Ranch, told Reuters, “People will set aside for a moment their moral beliefs, their religious beliefs, to get somebody that is honest in office. Trump is the trailblazer, he is the Christopher Columbus of honest politics” (“In age of Trump, evangelicals back self-styled top U.S. pimp,” by Tim Reid, www.reuters.com, 6.22.18). The Christopher Columbus of honest politics—you just can’t make this stuff up. But it is clearly what Trump’s supporters, including his evangelical ones, seem to think and feel. We heard it repeatedly during the election: “He tells it like it is.” Which is to say, he’ll insult anyone, especially the “elites” that the great unwashed envy and hate, without dressing up his language. That most of what he says is pure fabrication, outright lies, or worse, seems not to matter. That he takes damn fool actions, like the recent ones against asylum-seekers at the border that amount to child abuse, doesn’t matter. That he is a billionaire who is making money that will never reach his impoverished supporters, whose policies will only impoverish them further, doesn’t seem to matter. He is sticking his thumb in the eye of the hated “coastal elites” whom they blame for their troubles, and that’s enough for them. 

And yet, those of us who watch with horror as this happens, can’t help thinking that sooner or later, logic will catch up, truth will catch up, facts and common sense will catch up. And we comb history for parallels (Hitler, Mussolini, Huey Long, etc.) to see if we can understand how this could happen. For me, this comes down to a simple question: how can people believe this known liar? I keep thinking of the song from the 1951 musical (and later film), Royal Wedding: “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Love you?” the second line of which is, “When you know I’ve been a liar all my life?” That’s it precisely. We all know, they all know that Trump is a serial, a compulsive, a habitual liar. And yet they believe. Why?

There’s a mountain of research on the true roots of belief, but most theories come down to a simple equation: people believe what they want to believe. This is generally called “motivated reasoning.” What that means is that we all have fears, or ideologies, or vested interests, or identity needs that influence what we’re willing to believe and what we’re prone to reject, in today’s term, as “fake news.” So, if we’re fearful about something, we’re much more prone to believe even a wildly improbable promise from a known liar like Donald Trump. If we’re anxious about maintaining our group identity, we’re driven by that to believe what accords with the group, especially if they’re all wildly cheering for the same Donald Trump. And the problem with such belief is that it’s not easily dislodged, least of all by introspection or conscious effort or even opposing facts. All of these motivations are discussed in a May 2017 article by Kristen Weir in Monitor on Psychology, “Why we believe alternative facts.” And what we learn is precisely how powerful motivated reasoning can be, how “our wishes, hopes, fears and motivations often tip the scales to make us more likely to accept something as true if it supports what we want to believe.” This is especially true given the media landscape we all live with these days—with fewer investigative reporters as failing newspapers struggle to maintain even skeleton crews; and with the proliferation of ‘echo chambers’ on the internet that reinforce every wacko bias—all of which makes it ever harder for real facts to win out over wishful thinking. And even when vetted facts can be marshaled for an argument against obvious lies coming from the top, believers can retreat into the accusation of “fake news.” In other words, anything that challenges my beliefs can credibly be attributed to “fake news.” Because after all, that’s what the president says all the time, isn’t it? Anything he doesn’t like is “fake news.” Anything that disputes his truth is “fake news.” And he should know: he’s the all-time champion dispenser of “fake news.” 

There is probably one more (or a million more) element here as well. A 2017 book by Kevin Young looks at the endless variety of bullshitters in American history. It’s titled Bunk: The Rise of Hoaxes, Humbug, Plagiarists, Phonies, Post-Facts, and Fake News, and starts with P.T. Barnum (sideshow mogul born in my hometown of Bridgeport, CT) and ends with Donald Trump. And while there’s much to admire in the book, for me the most salient point is simple: it’s not only that the public, as Barnum proved, is eager to be taken in by hoaxes and ‘bunk,’ there is an element of awareness in its attitude which the bunco artist and con man seem to understand. That is, not only is it the case that we are “motivated” believers (Young says at one point about some fake memorabilia of Hitler, “the forgery is believed not because it alters history, but because we wishhistory were otherwise” p. 276), but also that, on some level, we knowthat we are being taken in, and enjoy or at least need the game. We wantto be fooled, perhaps because the made-up reality is better than the one we are trapped in. Young links this to the “confession” as the dominant form (usually in the form of memoir) in what he calls our ‘Age of Euphemism.’ Here is what he says:

Now the hoax, married to confession, caught in the narrative crisis [where we no longer can tell truth from falsehood, memoir from fiction, ed.], has replaced drink as our national addiction, and substituted loss for feeling lost (439).

In other words, we are, many of us, willing participants, willful believers, junkies ever more addicted to the deception that has become commonplace in our national life. We no longer seem to mind being taken advantage of by internet hucksters, political and financial scammers, bunco artists, and fake presidents. Many of us actually court the hoax, the lie, the gross exaggeration as a kind of entertainment—witness the huge profits being made by media companies that promote scripted ‘reality’ shows and every fart uttered by the Hoaxer-in-Chief.  Of course, these same media companies pretend to be outraged by his “mis-speakings,” but almost all bend over backwards to employ euphemisms rather than calling a lie a lie. They seem reluctant, that is, to kill the goose laying the golden eggs—fake eggs though they may be—that have so many of us mesmerized. 

            And as long as this is so, we are caught, trapped in the need to amuse ourselves, no matter what the cost to our once-vibrant democracy. And it will be considerable.  

Lawrence DiStasi

Drumpf Backs Out

After weeks of braggadocio from the American “president,” including coy acknowledgments that he might get a Nobel Prize for his agreement to a summit with North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, Drumpf late Wednesday announced publicly that he was withdrawing from the already-agreed-upon meeting in Singapore on June 12. The ostensible reason given by the White House was that North Korea had been lagging in its response to planning meetings, had even canceled one, and was expressing “tremendous anger and open hostility” towards its benefactor, the United States. An unnamed White House official said that “the White House did not want an embarrassing situation of ‘losing the upper hand’” (Washington Post, “Trump Cancels Nuclear Summit” 5/24/18.) This seems like precisely what caused the “great deal-maker” to cancel: he and others in his war-mongers circle felt clearly that Kim Jong Un’s tough language in recent days was giving the North Korean leader the “upper hand.” Why? Because if Kim canceled first, then that would leave the “deal-maker” like a bride left at the altar. And that is intolerable. This is why Trump and his spokespeople all along, but especially in recent days, have kept repeating their line that a deal would be “wonderful and historic and enriching” for North Korea, but if it didn’t happen, well that was ok too. This seems to be a pattern for Trump: this will be the greatest event in world history, but it doesn’t really matter to me if it happens or not. Reminds one of nothing so much as teenagers maneuvering for a date. “I don’t care.” “Well I don’t care either.” “Nyah nyah!” This is what passes for diplomacy in the age of Trump. 

            What also passes, and it has characterized previous administrations as well, is the notion that when the U.S. agrees to deal with a ‘lesser’ nation (and all nations are lesser in the eyes of most Americans), why that agreement to even meet should be seen by the little dog as the bestowal of unmerited grace. That is the supine posture the North Korean leader has seemed unwilling to adopt. Instead, he has had the temerity to object to the ham-handed and openly insulting behavior of attack dogs like John Bolton (now National Security Adviser), who recently proclaimed that the model for the upcoming summit should be Libya and its abandonment of its nuclear program. As if that weren’t clear enough, that other ham hand, VP Mike Pence, made the same reference to Libya’s downfall in a Monday television interview. Are these people crazy? What do they expect from North Korea when their model is openly stated to be the surrender by Moammar Gaddafi of his nuclear arsenal, followed shortly by his murder and ugly violation in 2011 by the Western nations that invaded him, as his reward? Is this supposed to encourage Kim Jong Un to follow in the murdered leader’s footsteps? It clearly did not; one of Kim’s aides, in fact, publicly labeled the Vice President a “political dummy” for his remarks. That same appellation could be applied to the entire Trump Administration, from top to bottom. They took a golden opportunity handed to them on a silver platter by South Korean President Moon Jae-in, and turned it into a fiasco. As is his wont, Trump thought he could just “wing it,” dispensing with most of the diplomacy that normally precedes and prepares the ground for a huge summit between leaders, casually implying that when Kim Jong Un entered the room with the great American deal-maker, he’d be so awed he’d agree to anything. Especially the rape of his own power. The dismantling of the nuclear capability he’d spent so much treasure to develop. The very nuclear power that had led to the proposed summit (contrasted with the denuclearization that dropped both Gaddafi and Saddam Hussein into the grave), and that now his adversaries in the United States were assuming he’d simply toss into the garbage. You’ve got to be pretty myopic to believe in your own infallibility to that extent. 

            But of course, that is what American leaders, especially Trump and his gang of merry bunglers, do believe. They think they can simply wave America’s military might (which they have been doing at this very time when North Korea is looking for signs of sincerity, carrying on the hated war games with South Korea that Kim Jong Un wants most of all to end), and all will be solved instantly. What they have now found out, or at least got an inkling of, is that the world has changed. Even an impoverished nation of 24 million like North Korea is not willing to be bullied into giving up the only security it has for the vacant promises of the great hegemon. Because the great hegemon has been demonstrating, even in recent weeks, that its word to “little dogs” is worthless. Less than worthless. Trump’s recent withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal is another case in point. Worked out over years, the flame-haired wonder trashed that in a few minutes—at the very time he and his administration were trying to persuade North Korea that the word of this very U.S. leader, in any upcoming nuclear deal, would be honored. Again, are these people crazy? Do they think everyone is as dense as they are? As the idiot Americans who voted for them? Apparently, they do. 

            So they’re still expressing optimism in an eventual summit one of these days. When North Korea will come to its senses and give up its nuclear weapons entirely. Because that’s what “denuclearization” has meant to these ahistorical idiots. 'Our tough stance has worked. Kim Jong Un has blinked. He’s willing to give up his weapons, for nothing in return.' 

            Nope. As I’ve written in a previous post (see “Kim, the Trumpster, and Denuclearization” Mar. 10, 2018), if “denuclearization” means anything to the North Korean leader, it means ending the nuclear threat from the United States and South Korea at the same time as the North ends its threat. Maybe. Many observers think that even that is a long shot. Think that Kim would never give up what he’s won at such great cost. But of course, observers don’t have the overweening arrogance of the Drumpster. Which is really the problem here, and everywhere. The overweening arrogance of the Empire. Which, as history has shown again and again, is the prelude to its downfall. But don’t tell the great flame-thrower. He might cry; or cry havoc. And bring us all down with him. 

Lawrence DiStasi

That Old Devil Sugar

It is surely no secret that the United States, and, increasingly, the rest of the world, is wallowing in an epidemic of diabetes (the CDC says that one of every four American teenagers has type 2 diabetes, with the expectation that by 2040, it will one in three.Teenagers!), and that many doctors and other healthcare providers consider sugar to be at least one culprit. It is therefore somewhat surprising that Gary Taubes, in his latest book, The Case Against Sugar(Knopf: 2016), takes the position that there is a serious debate, if not a war, raging about this, and that he must therefore prosecute sugar as responsible for just about every major ill we have, including cancer and Alzheimer’s. For my purposes, though, I’d just like to see agreement that sugar is clearly responsible for a few: diabetes, metabolic syndrome, heart disease, and hypertension (high blood pressure). That’s because I have been diagnosed late in life with two of those at least: type 2 diabetes, and high blood pressure. I have both more or less under control, but anything that can bring clarity to what causes either or both is welcome. 

            For Taubes, the case is crystal clear. The culprit is sugar, especially the refined sugar called sucrose (half glucose, half fructose) andthe ingredient that seems to be in just about every prepared food one buys these days, high-fructose corn syrup(55% fructose, 45% glucose). These are the empty calories that Americans and inhabitants of all advanced industrial countries have been consuming in ever greater amounts for a few hundred years (Americans in 1999 were consuming an average of 158 pounds of sugar per year). And according to several studies that Taubes cites, it is this major dietary change that accounts for the damage wrought to our bodies. Humans have simply not had time to evolve fast enough for our bodies and organs (particularly the liver and pancreas) to handle the huge increase in refined sugars we now consume. This evolutionary argument is one of the best Taubes makes. For example, he notes that yearly per capita consumption of sugar “more than quadrupled in England in the eighteenth century, from four pounds to eighteen pounds, and then more than quadrupled again in the nineteenth,” while in the United States “sugar consumption increased sixteen-fold over that same century” (42). But the real argument comes in studies done more recently on indigenous populations like American Indians and Africans who have changed to Western-style living more recently and more rapidly. Among the Indians of Arizona, for example, the Pima, along with other Native Americans, have seen diabetes rates explode from almost nothing when eating their native diet to over 50% and more now, after changing to a Western diet laced with sugar and immense quantities of soda. Another major study, Western Diseases(1981) by Denis Burkitt and Hugh Trowell on indigenous populations in Africa, saw tooth decay, gout, obesity, diabetes, and hypertension skyrocket with Westernization (229). Another study of natives from Tokenau, an island near New Zealand, saw the same phenomenon: from a diet of coconut, fish, pork, chicken, and breadfruit (a high-fat diet, Taubes notes), the Tokenau people shifted to western ways in the 1970s. Some migrated to the big island of New Zealand, while some simply stayed on Tokenau, but both adopted western ways and foods. Diabetes shot up to engulf almost 20% of the women and 11% of the men, with corresponding increases in hypertension, heart disease, and obesity. To sum up, Taubes quotes one of his heroes, John Yudkin, a University of London nutritionist, who wrote in 1963: “We now eat in two weeks the amount of sugar our ancestors of two-hundred years ago ate in a whole year” (154). 

            But many of us have heard these stories and statistics before. What is surprising and even shocking in Taubes’s arguments are the supportive and historical facts. As one might guess from his argumentative title, not everyone agrees with Taubes. In fact, for the major arbiters of American eating policy like the FDA and the NIH (National Institutes of Health), sugar has remained a kind of untouchable, on the list of GRAS (generally recognized as safe) foods until virtually the present day (a quick Google search revealed that the latest FDA recommendations concerning sugar only warn that sugar can cause tooth decay!). This contrasts with FDA decisions on the sugar substitutes saccharin and cyclamates, which, with urging from scientists sponsored by the sugar industry, have been listed as possibly carcinogenic. But the major thrust of the scientists like Ancel Keys of the University of Minnesota and Fred Stare of Harvard (both funded handsomely by the sugar industry, Taubes points out) has been twofold: first, that it is the fats in our diets that kill us prematurely in the West, via heart disease and diabetes; and second, that “we get obese or overweight because we take in more calories than we expend or excrete” (107-9). Taubes calls this “the gift that keeps on giving,” because it essentially exonerates sugar from any role in obesity or diabetes or the host of other diseases plaguing Western societies. It doesn’t make any difference what you eat, goes this mantra, because “a calorie is a calorie.” Eat too much food (too many calories), and exercise too little, and you get fat, which causes you to get diabetes and die early. Period. End of discussion. Forget about the impact of refined foods (white flour, white sugar) on one’s metabolism. 

            Taubes goes into most of the studies and white papers that chart this, to him, massive fraud, but it’s not necessary to repeat that here. Suffice it to say that the sugar industry has used its massive profits and political clout to pretty much cloud the issue of sugar’s deadly effects in much the same way the tobacco industry clouded, for years, the dangers of tobacco smoke. Indeed, one of the really surprising roles of the sugar devil is in flavoring tobacco. Yes, that’s right. Tobacco growers and cigarette makers learned around the turn of the twentieth century that tobacco in cigars and pipes wasn’t really selling enough product (getting enough people hooked). So, in 1914, R.J. Reynolds introduced Camels, “the first brand of cigarettes made of multiple tobacco types (basically flue-cured Virginia, and Burley tobacco) blended together” (64). Sugar entered in two ways. First, flue-curing the Virginia tobacco turned a natural sugar content of about 3% to one of 22% sugar. That higher sugar content makes the tobacco more inhalable, because the smoke becomes acidic, not alkaline (alkaline smoke irritates the mucous membranes and stimulates coughing, which is why pipe smokers rarely inhale). Second, the nicotine-rich Burley tobacco was “sauced” with sugars from honey, molasses, licorice and so on. This was first done for chewing tobacco, but Reynolds put it in Camels, and this really did the trick. Why? Because by blending “sauced” Burley tobacco with already-sweetened flue-cured Virginia, Camels were able to deliver a sweet-tasting and -smelling cigarette that was easier to inhale, and thus “maximized the delivery of nicotine—and carcinogens—to the human lungs” (69). Most other tobacco companies and brands wasted no time following Camels to the point that “by 1929, U.S. tobacco growers were saucing Burley tobacco with 50 million pounds of sugar a year” (69). That this is not fiction is evidenced by Taubes’s quoting of a 2006 report from the Netherlands: “Consumer acceptance of cigarette mainstream smoke [what’s directly inhaled] is proportional to the sugar level of the tobacco” (70). In other words, sugar’s key role in making cigarettes palatable (inhalable) to both men and women worldwide contributed in a major way to the epidemic of lung cancers that are still with us. 

            Taubes has endless data on the role of sugar in diseases, but a couple stand out. First, he cites studies showing that sugar may well be addictive (as anyone with children knows). It elicits a response in the brain’s “reward center,” e.g. the nucleus accumbens, that closely resembles the response from nicotine, cocaine, heroin, and alcohol. This may help explain why its rise has been so spectacular in every society where it was introduced. More important, to me at least, is the connection Taubes tries to make between sugar and what is now generally conceded to be a key factor in diabetes and a host of other diseases that cluster with it—insulin resistance. Insulin, of course, is the hormone produced in the pancreas that acts to combat high blood sugar. Basically, when blood sugar (glucose) levels rise, the pancreas responds by secreting insulin, which “signals the muscle cells to take up and burn more glucose.” Insulin also induces cells to store some of the glucose as fat (insulin is said to be “lipogenic” or fat-forming). Then, when blood glucose falls, the insulin level falls too, and the stored fat can be burned instead of glucose. The problem is that some people (and increasing numbers in Western societies) exhibit a condition known as “insulin resistance”: their cells do not accept the insulin, and hence the glucose levels in the blood, and the levels of insulin, remain high or get higher. 

The question is: what causes insulin resistance in the first place? 

This would appear to be the 64-million-dollar question (the fight over this is quite active even today, with one side blaming the “drop in insulin sensitivity” on a fat, “intramyocellular lipid” said to block cell receptors from accepting insulin; and another blaming insulin resistance on excess carbohydrate [especially sugar] consumption and too much insulin production). Oddly, Taubes himself does not give a conclusive answer. He strongly suggests that insulin resistance is caused by too much sugar consumption, but he hedges. He says that in contrast to the sugar industry’s old mantra that insulin resistance and diabetes are caused by obesity, i.e. eating too much or consuming too many calories, another possibility 

is that these elevated levels of insulin and the insulin resistance itself were caused by the carbohydrate content of our diets, and perhaps sugar in particular. Insulin is secreted in response to rising blood sugar, and rising blood sugar is a response to a carbohydrate-rich meal. That somehow this system could be dysregulated such that too much insulin was being secreted and that this was causing excessive lipogenesis—fat formation—was a simple hypothesis to explain a simple observation. (120-1). 

But because insulin resistance is so important as a causal factor in diabetes, obesity, metabolic syndrome, heart disease, and so on, we would like something firmer. Taubes doesn’t give it to us, partly, he explains, because the NIH decided long ago not to fund long-term studies on the effects of sugar in the American diet because it would cost too much. It would also take a long time, since diabetes does not manifest overnight; like tobacco, sugar’s effects usually take years to manifest. But still, we want more. And Taubes does cite one study from Switzerland that seems to provide some scientific proof. Luc Tappy of the University of Lausanne studied fructose (fructose is metabolized without the need of insulin) in the mid-1980s. What his study found is crucial, even though it was short-term:

When Tappy fed his human subjects the equivalent of the fructose in 8 to 10 cans of Coke or Pepsi a day—a “pretty high dose” as he says—their livers would start to become insulin-resistant and their triglycerides would elevate in just a few days. With lower doses, the same effects would appear but only if the experiment ran for a month or more (205). 

This would seem to be a sound study, indicating insulin resistance and elevated triglycerides, both key markers for diabetes and for heart disease, from excess sugar. But again, its effects derived only from the use of fructose—though that is the main ingredient in most sugared drinks and lots more, via that demon invention, high-fructose corn syrup. 

            Unfortunately, this is as much as Taubes provides concerning insulin resistance. And that is a shame. 

            Still, Taubes’s book is well worth reading, if only for the disgraceful history it unfolds, a history of sugar that has scarred this nation from its very beginnings (slavery and sugar are intimately intertwined) and which still, in 2018, thanks to the power of the sugar industry in shielding its product from blame, continues its devilish work. 

Lawrence DiStasi

Opioid Crisis

I probably wouldn’t have read Dreamlandif my daughter and son-in-law hadn’t given it to me when we had Easter dinner. After all, there has been nonstop coverage of the overdose deaths plaguing white America for several years, and I pretty much thought I knew it well enough—well enough to be disgusted that the attitude of official America had softened dramatically from the “get tough on drugs” approach that had locked up millions of urban African Americans to the “we need understanding and medical treatment” that had prevailed when the addict ghetto suddenly became white and suburban. But they did and I did, and now I think everyone else should—read the prizewinning 2015 book by Sam Quinones titled Dreamland, that is. It really is a gripping and infuriating tale of malfeasance, first by a medical community that adopted prescription opiates for pain with missionary-like blinders; then by the health care establishment that refused to pay for the full treatment for pain (psychologists, social workers etc.) that pain clinics recommended but only for pills; then by the pill-pushing pharmaceutical companies that cashed in on the bonanza without a care for the horror they were perpetrating but only for their profit; and finally by an American public whom success had schooled to expect quick technological fixes, especially for pain, any pain at all which, they thought, every American had a right to not ever suffer. All this, and more, is part of the true tale that Sam Quinones tells. It is essentially a tale with two major strands: in one, unscrupulous doctors operating “pill mills” write thousands of opioid prescriptions for people with nothing but a claim of pain (back pain, knee pain, any kind of pain), thus creating millions of addicts in suburban towns where none had existed before; and in the other, young men from a small area in western Mexico called Nayarit discover that the black tar heroin they can make from poppies nearby can be peddled in an entirely new, safe, and convenient way in small cities and suburbs in America.  

            Quinones begins his tale with the story from which his title comes, Dreamland. It was the name of a community pool in Portsmouth, an idyllic center of safety and pleasure for a suburban town in southern Ohio that used to be a main U.S. manufacturing center for shoes and shoelaces. Like other small Midwest factory towns, though, outsourcing to foreign countries with cheap labor killed the manufacturing, and killed Dreamland along with it. And it was in Portsmouth Ohio, along with nearby towns in Kentucky and West Virginia, that the opiate epidemic found a dispirited and dead-end population eager to be seduced out of its existential pain. 

            To understand how this could happen, Quinones takes us through the growth of the American pain revolution. He starts with the discovery of heroin in Germany in 1898 (the drug was actually first synthesized in London in 1874 as diacetylmorphine, but the Bayer chemist named Dreser who duplicated it in Germany called it heroin—from heroisch, German for “heroic.”) Though heroin was first believed to be non-addictive, regulators soon learned better, and its use in the United States was strictly controlled starting in 1914. Still, there continued to be people, particularly in big cities, who got hooked, and one of the treatments for such addicts was a substitute drug called methadone—with methadone clinics maintaining addicts in cities all across the country. The problem with these clinics was that they tried to limit addicts to doses of methadone that were too small, so addicts had to find their dope fix elsewhere. Now shift to the Nayarit-based (the municipality was Xalisco) dealers of black tar heroin, a form that is much less purified than regular street heroin, but also far more powerful—delivering 80 percent heroin compared to the usual street version at 10 or 15 percent. As Quinones puts it, the Xalisco Boys “discovered that methadone clinics were, in effect, game preserves” which provided one of their first footholds in American cities. 

But then the pain revolution happened. It started in the 80s with well-meaning doctors seeking to provide mostly terminal cancer patients with pain relief. They called it ‘palliative care,’ essentially figuring that risking addiction ranked low on the ladder for someone who was dying soon anyway. This work was ‘helped’ when, in 1984, Purdue Frederick Pharmaceuticals came out with MS Contin, a timed-release morphine pill that would soon become OxyContin. Fitting perfectly with pain-management, the new pills “seemed far less addictive because through their timed-release formulas they eased relief out to the patient over many hours” (85); that is, addicts couldn’t get the big “rush” from a normal morphine hit. At about the same time, pain management organizations promoted the idea that “America was undertreating pain,” all kinds of pain, any kind of pain. State lawmakers followed suit, passing laws “exempting doctors from prosecution if they prescribed opiates for pain.” Things then grew like Topsy, with patients soon getting used to demanding drugs for pain (my own doctor in Pt Reyes, CA told me that to this day, even with all that is known about the opioid epidemic, his clinic sees patients literally demandingpain drugs from doctors); and, more important, doctors becoming convinced that these morphine-based painkillers were virtually non-addictivewhen used to treat pain. This latter idea stemmed from an alleged “report” in the New England Journal of Medicine by a doctor named Hershel Jick, which claimed that “less than one percent of patients treated with narcotics developed addictions to them.” Drug companies like Purdue producing timed-release opiates seized on this alleged “landmark report,” turned it into a “scientific study,” and promoted their pills as non-addictive, with most doctors quick to believe them. In truth, of course, the Porter & Jick “study” was merely a “one-paragraph letter to the editor” that commented specifically on the use of opiates with cancer patients under strict hospital supervisionwhere the danger of over-use was almost non-existent. But no one bothered to look up the research (there was none), and Purdue Pharma aggressively promoted the use of OxyContin for all kinds of pain relief, at the same time ridiculing the fear of patient addiction as “basically unwarranted.” 

Now what you had in places like Portsmouth, OH were hordes of people looking for relief from their pain (from back pain to sports pain to post-operative pain to existential pain), and just as suddenly, scores of unscrupulous doctors setting themselves up in pain clinics to dispense prescriptions for OxyContin to anyone claiming to be in pain. Any kind of pain. All pain. The result was long lines outside these pain clinics, and beyond that, many now-unemployed people throughout Appalachia signing up for SSI (Supplemental Security Income), because with it they could get a Medicaid card that paid for their pain prescriptions. This Medicaid scam actually became a business for many; they would get their prescriptions filled for a $3 copay and sell the pills to those who had run out for up to $10,000 on the street. Some bright entrepreneurs actually took to driving carloads of pill seekers long distances to cheaper pill mills in Florida and elsewhere—anywhere that pills could be procured more cheaply—for a nice profit. By 2002, according to Quinones, OxyContin prescriptions for pain rose from 670,000 in 1997 to 6.2 million five years later. And of course, contrary to the claims by Purdue Pharma that the pills couldn’t be misused, addicts soon learned to crush the Oxy pill and snort it, or even liquefy it and inject it, thus “obtaining all twelve hours’ worth of oxycodone at once” (138). 

The stage was now set for the Xalisco boys to expand their range to those towns outside the major urban centers, especially in the middle of the country, that had a growing supply of opiate users. And they did, moving operators to Portland, Cincinnnati, Las Vegas, Portsmouth, Charlotte, Nashville, and everywhere in between. Their appeal was, first, that their prices for their black tar heroin were so much cheaper than prescription pills (which could cost as much as $30 a pill). As Quinones puts it, 

by 2011, you could buy fifteen balloons of potent Xalisco black tar heroin for a hundred dollars— $6.50 a dose, about the price of a pack of Marlboros—in Charlotte, NC, a town that barely knew the drug a few years before (229).

The second appeal was the delivery system. The Xalisco boys had early discovered that it was easy, in the suburbs, to set up personal delivery to addicts. All an addict had to do was call a cell phone number; the driver would deliver it in minutes to an agreed-upon place like a mall parking lot. And since the Mexican drivers were trained not to carry either weapons or excess dope but only five or six balloons with pellets of heroin inside that they carried in their mouths, they were almost never caught carrying heroin. If police came, they would simply swallow the balloons. Even when caught, their punishment was usually simple deportation, and another driver would soon replace them. The third appeal, of course, was the potency of their product. As noted above, black tar heroin was up to 80% pure. This was a boon at first, but then it had its negative effect: overdoses by addicts who were used to a far-less-potent hit. 

            It was the overdose deaths that began to alarm officials throughout the nation. Two government workers in Olympia WA, Jamie Mai and Dr. Gary Franklin, began to investigate the overdose deaths in their state and found they were increasing by alarming rates, and in tandem with the amount of opiates being prescribed, or rather “overprescribed.” When they published their results recommending strict prescribing limits for opiates, though, they were not greeted as heroes; rather Mai and Franklin were sued by a doctor named Merle Janes alleging that their opiate guidelines exhibited “an extreme anti-opioid discriminatory animus or zealotry known as Opiophobia” (234) that would corrupt the management of public health policy. Fortunately, Dr. Janes’s lawsuit was thrown out of court in 2011, and Washington state issued its guidelines, soon followed by several other states. But it had taken a long time, perhaps too long. In 2005, for example, an epidemiologist in the Ohio Department of Health noticed that not only were poisoning deaths in Ohio increasing alarmingly, but that most of them were drug overdoses. By 2007, further analysis revealed that drug overdose deaths in Ohio were about to, and did in 2008, “surpass fatal auto crashes as Ohio’s top cause of injury death” (249). This, again, corresponded with the amount of Oxycodone dispensed, which rose by almost 1,000 percent in Ohio between 1999 and 2008. Put another way, “the number of Ohioans who died from overdoses between 2003 and 2008 was 50% higher than the number of U.S. soldiers who died in the entire Iraq War” (250). 

            There is much more detail in this astonishing and infuriating book, but to bring it up to date, here are some facts about the state of the opioid crisis in the United States as of 2018. The U.S. is still, by far, “the leading prescriber of opioids in the world” (this and all subsequent quotes from Vox.com, 3.6.18, Ella Nielsen, “America’s opioid crisis has become an ‘epidemic of epidemics’”). Driven by the drugs named above, plus the powerful heroin synthetic, fentanyl, “drug overdoses claimed 64,000 lives in 2016 alone, more than the entire death toll during the Vietnam War.” And finally, because of intravenous drug use, “there are 40,000 to 50,000 new cases of bacterial endocarditis (infection from re-using unclean needles) in the U.S. each year” which cost “more than $120,000” apiece to treat. When added to the new cases of Hepatitis C from the same source, this amounts to what researchers now call a “syndemic,” or “multiple diseases feeding off one another.” The two Washington State researchers, Jaymie Mai and Gary Franklin put this another way, calling the opioid crisis “the worst man-made epidemic in history, made by organized medicine” (Quinones, 310). 

            One has to agree with this, and with Quinones, when he underscores Martin Adler’s (professor of pharmacology at Temple U) take on morphine as “a great metaphor for life.” Here’s how Adler puts it, referring to the perversion that prevailed for a time in the idea that pain was somehow to be exiled from human experience:

“The bad effects of morphine act to minimize the use of the drug, which is a good thing. There are people born without pain receptors. [Living without pain] is a horrible thing. They die young because pain is the greatest signaling mechanism we have” (313). 

To attempt to take away that signaling mechanism, as American medicine tried to do, was more than a terrible blunder; it was a fundamental misunderstanding of life and the human organism— how it works and how it is designed to work. 

Lawrence DiStasi

Dear Facebook

Like everyone else, I followed the highlighted testimony of Mark “the zombie-shark” Zuckerberg before Congress. And what I have decided is that there is simply no way these creeps are going to desist from their surveillance of me and billions of others—because it’s their business. Facebook followers like myself sign up so we can see the pictures and doings of our relatives, mostly the kids, and in doing so unintentionally allow the Facebook creeps to harvest all our information and preferences so they can sell it to advertisers who want to target their ads to us. In short, the business isn’t about connecting people to each other; it’s not a “service” as Zuck likes to say; it’s about spying on everyone everywhere to get their information and preferences, so the data can be sold for billions to the greedy corporate bastards who want to precisely target customers (and apparently to Russkies who want to target potential voters). If they know I’m interested in cars, they can send me ads for new cars. If they know I’m interested in underwear, they can send me ads for underwear. I’ve had this happen recently: I looked on a couple of websites for packages of underwear to redeem a gift card, and haven’t stopped getting underwear ads on every site I go to. At one point recently, I was pissed off at a rise in my car insurance rates, and so checked out a site that promised cheap car insurance for low mileage drivers. I’ve since been besieged daily with teasers for “Ford owner in Bolinas” trying to lure me to check out a great insurance rate (which turns out the same each time: they feed me to some company who asks for more information which feeds me to someone else for the same routine, but never, ever do I get an actual rate quote). 

            So here’s what I’ve decided. Ok. You’ve got my browsing records. You’ve got my “likes” and the articles I’ve seen posted by others on my Facebook feed that I’ve re-posted. You’ve seen my blogs that I’ve posted, and articles I think are worth posting, so you know what I like, or think you do. So to save you time (with the saved time, you’ll have ample time to shove my preferences up your blowhole), I’ve decided to put it all out there and let you pursue me with your best shot.

            --I need underwear every once in a while. I like boxer briefs.

            --I need socks periodically, though my sister bought me enough one recent Christmas to last me for years. 

            --I need gasoline for the little driving I do, but you can’t sell that over the internet.

            --I read political articles on some sites you may not like much: Truthout, Common Dreams, Consortium News, Counterpunch, Reader Supported News, Nation of Change, Daily Kos, and others of that lefty ilk. I also read anything I can get my hands on that shows why this nation is going into the toilet, and how we might hasten its demise, especially its current economic system, to bring about a more equitable distribution of wealth, health and happiness. That includes revolutionary change of the kind that doesn’t involve buying lots of useless shit from big box stores, or going out to stupid restaurants that prepare tasteless, nutritionally disastrous meals; quite the contrary: it involves, quite precisely, refraining from the great American pastime of buying dumb shit or wasting time on websites that allow us to observe others posting about the dumb shit they’ve just bought or eaten, and instead procuring only what one needs, when one needs it. Taking pride, in fact, in not buying useless products that only help destroy our planet. 

            --I have decided that keeping up with the news from my relatives may make it worthwhile to maintain my Facebook account, at least for a time, but know that you can spy all you want and target me with dumb commercials all you like, but I’m not about to buy a damn thing. Not a damn thing.  

            So spy away, Zuckerberg and company. These eyes refuse to buy or even notice what you’re selling, nor do I have even the remotest intention of getting a smartphone or any apps that make it easier to tune in and buy said dumb shit. All I might buy are books, and I don’t like reading books on screen in any case; I like the old-fashioned paper kind you can cozy up with, which is also what I like to write. 

            In closing, let me summarize what I really mean to say, by saying to Facebook what my Great Aunt Zi’Carmela would’ve said: a’ fottuta. 

Lawrence DiStasi