There’s no such thing as ‘American Foreign Policy’, argues Andrew Cockburn, in an interview with Aaron Mate’. There’s just money and power sloshing back and forth from one group of elites to another, depending on circumstance and weather.
The worst thing neoliberals could find to impeach Donald Trump for was slowing down a sale of Raytheon’s arms to Ukraine. It was unthinkable that weapons sales should be reconsidered even for a moment.
Aaron himself makes another great point: the chest-thumping over Ukraine is pointless, considered geopolitically, because no matter how many weapons get poured into the Donbass, the Russian military advantage is so overwhelming that if there were an open war, Putin would roll right over the Ukrainian little league team.
Unless of course, the arms sales themselves are the real point.
And the chest-thumping just moral posturing to justify them.
Which makes a hell of a lot more logical sense than anything being grunted out from the Beltway media right now, including our beloved NPR.
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Earlier in the day I ran across a word coinage, the name of a mythical drug called Copium, which seems to be sort of both an anti-depressant and a painkiller.
Learning of the word’s existence made me re-think addiction a little.
What if … the priorities of the Empire we live in, and the quiet greed of humans everywhere, has led us to living in a world where it’s not possible to keep living without finding our own version of Copium, one that works for us?
John Lennon once suggested that for the working classes he sprang from, Copium was a cocktail of Religion, Sex, and TV.
Some people prefer alcohol or nicotine or crack or Qanon or some arcane little niche fetish addiction in the porn world.
The rich and famous get prescriptions written for them, and routinely overdose anyway. Prince. Phillip Seymour Hoffman.
Some lucky people can get by with little more than an addiction to something the system tells them to want anyway, like more money for it’s own sake, or for garages full of expensive cars they drive once or twice and park forever.
That’s as close to Normal as it gets.
Like some high-minded idea of US Foreign policy, a modern addiction-free life is a mythical beast.
We’re all hooked on some version of Copium.
Addiction is a sickness, they tell us lately, and maybe it’s even true.
But maybe …
It’s not you that’s sick, or me.
Maybe it’s the world we’ve made for ourselves that’s diseased, and our addictions are just more, or less, destructive Copiums that let us try to manage the symptoms to get through the harsh days and long nights.