Numbing of a People

Even a passing look the history the arts in the twentieth century, confirms the terrible, unforgiving toll of heroin: the pathway that everyone who begins, unerringly regrets.  It is the near certain ruin of anyone who succumbs.  It’s hard to consider something that has been more consistently illustrated as inescapably wretched.

If I understand the phenomenon in the U.S., which has gotten so much attention lately, correctly, many people are prescribed painkillers.  They grow resistant to these pharmaceutically prescribed pain relief medications and look for something that will be more effective and perhaps cheaper.  The communities which J.D. Vance describes in his “Hillbilly Elegy” are reckoning with an epidemic of heroin and opioid usage.   Reading about this, as I did, in the context of a greater, systemic American decline, I considered the precedent for an entire nation anaesthetising themselves in the face of dynamic of change and decline.

The British brought opium in the late eighteenth century in the hopes of finding something the Chinese might actually pay for, something which they didn’t already have the best of.  Jardine and friends, found opium was a rather special product this way.  If one could get around the law, it was a fabulous business opportunity.  And with one war and another they forced their way into being able to bring the drug into the realm through their special extra territorial ports.  And as the Chinese civilization lost its agency, lost its rationale, its definition, the numbing of a people became a broad norm among a broad swath of Chinese society.

I suspect there are many Chinese who frame their analysis of this scourge in America in this way.  There is no disruptive foreign power forcing opium on to America at gun point . . . but perhaps the despair and loss of control and the collective surrendering, ring out familiar to this civilization that lost its way collectively with that soapy mud.

Monday, 2/13/17