A Colossal Wreck (80 page)

Senior FDA officials apologized for their lack of effective oversight and promised to do better in the future. The Vioxx scandal began to sink into the vast marsh of semi-forgotten international pharmaceutical scandals.

The year after Vioxx was pulled from the market, the
New York Times
and other media outlets ran minor news items, usually down column, noting that American death rates had undergone a striking and completely unexpected decline.

Typical was the headline on a short article that ran in the April 19, 2005, edition of
USA Today
: “USA Records Largest Drop in Annual Deaths in at Least 60 Years.” During that one year, American deaths fell by 50,000 despite the growth in both the size and the age of the nation’s population. Government health experts were quoted as being greatly “surprised” and “scratching [their] heads” over this strange anomaly, which was led by a sharp drop in fatal heart attacks.

May 18

The news is in. White births are no longer a majority in the United States. The Bureau of the Census confirms that non-Hispanic whites accounted for 49.6 percent of all births in the year ending July 2011, while minorities including Hispanics, blacks, Asians, and those of mixed race reached 50.4 percent.

Is whitey ready for a fresh start? Face it, we may be a minority, but we got the firepower. Where did we go wrong? Too much atonal music, maybe. Richard Pryor probably put his finger on it. Pryor to a white audience: “What the matter, y’all stop fuckin’? There will be no shortage of niggers. Niggers is fuckin’.”

The news is not good. At almost exactly the moment we yielded majority status, we—not the people to be sure, but our President and our Congress—were putting the finishing touches to our modern system of government, known as fascism.

The mobs who flooded into the streets to revel in the execution of Osama bin Laden were not exulting in America, land of the free and of constitutional propriety. They were lauding brute, lawless, lethal force. In this year of political conventions we’ll be hearing a lot of
tub-thumping about American freedoms, but if there’s any nation in the world that is well on the way to meriting the admittedly vague label of “fascist,” surely it’s the United States.

May 20

In the dock is “anecdotal,” long sought by the force of revolutionary vigilance. Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville says he can do no better than read from the denunciation filed with his office by Patrick Cockburn:

A telling example of how undervaluing evidence as “anecdotal” gives a free pass to misrepresentation, fraud and crime came last week in a report in Britain over unsafe breast implants. It had emerged that 47,000 British women had French manufactured implants made out of mattress gel using industrial grade silicon, never intended for medical use, that can burst and swell in the body. The “deliberate fraud” by the French company was unmasked by French investigators in 2010.

In Britain, it emerged, surgeons had warned that the implants were rupturing during demonstrations as long ago as 2006, one demanding the implants no longer be used. Two other surgeons had experience of the “catastrophic disintegration” of implants. But the British government medical devices watchdog, MHRA, decided to do nothing because, so the report says, the evidence was “anecdotal.” Furthermore the official watchdog, discounting the evidence of three surgeons, felt that to issue a warning would lead to an “unwanted scare which could have serious commercial implications.”

There were lively outbursts of emotion during the unfolding of this outrage to morals and upright conduct and it was clear to “anecdotal” in the dock that this was not its lucky day and that a rendezvous with the fatal blade would not be long postponed. Sentence was duly pronounced, without a single dissenting voice.

May 30

A heart in love will decipher every squiggle in the letter as a kiss. In the final days of the 2008 campaign and in the opening ones of his administration, Barack Obama and his top legal aides seemed to the
eager ears of marijuana legalizers on the West Coast and around the country to be opening the door to a new, more sensible era.

Drug activists exulted in a big win. “Today’s comments clearly represent a change in policy out of Washington,” Ethan Nadelmann of the Drug Policy Alliance said to the
Los Angeles Times
. Attorney General Eric Holder, Nadelmann added in the
New York Times
, had sent a clear message to the DEA that the Feds now recognize state medical marijuana laws as “kosher.”

On January 22 (two days after Obama’s inauguration) DEA agents raided a South Lake Tahoe dispensary run by Ken Estes, a wheelchair-bound entrepreneur. In a typical “rip-and-run,” they seized about five pounds of cannabis and a few thousand dollars but made no arrests. Less than two weeks later, the DEA raided four dispensaries in the LA area. Eight days after that came a bust on the Mendo-Healing Cooperative farm in Fort Bragg, California.

The love-lost Obamians had forgotten how to read political declarations with a close and cynical eye, and to bear in mind the eternal power struggle between federal prosecutors and enforcers—e.g., the DEA and equivalent state bodies. The Feds wanted to make it completely clear that, whatever Obama might hint at, they weren’t going to be hogtied by wussy state laws. Bust a guy in a wheelchair, bust a dispensary, make your point: I’m the man.

Meanwhile, what has been happening out in the fields, dells, plastic greenhouses, and indoor grows in the counties of Mendocino, Humboldt, and Trinity? The timeless rhythms of agriculture: overproduction, plummeting prices, the remorseless toll of costly inputs like soil and fertilizers. Back in the early 1990s, the price to grower per pound was around $5,000. A couple of years ago, the average had dropped to about $2,000—more for really skilled growers who “black box” their greenhouses, darkening them earlier each day to trick the plants into putting out an early crop. Right now, it’s down to maybe $1,000 a pound in the fall, $600 in the Christmas rush. Do these prices bear any relation to the prices in the fancy dispensaries in Southern California? Guess.

Bruce Anderson, editor of the weekly
Anderson Valley Advertiser
, says that in recent weeks, “raids were conducted on two homes—one
in Eureka, one in Redwood Valley—where better than $400,000 cash was confiscated by the forces of law and order. Every time the cops make big cash hauls, more people are convinced that they, too, should get into the pot business. Looked at objectively, and all things considered, the nebulous legal status of marijuana is perfect for Mendocino County’s financial well-being: every year the cops take off just enough dope to keep pot prices at at least $1,000 a pound. Legalization would further depress the Mendocino County economy, and depress it big-time. Short of legalization, nothing is going to stop any kind of grow, indoors or outdoors.”

But legalization is not a realistic prospect, and so the status of the herb will inevitably remain cloudy. For its part, the DEA is announcing big impending raids in Mendocino County, some targeting the vast stretches of the (federally controlled) Mendocino National Forest and the growers drawing on the waters of the Middle Eel.

This is all happening under the aegis of a president who cozily disclosed his marijuana habit as a young man. One bust and Obama would still be organizing communities on the South Side of Chicago. But his sense of self-righteousness is too distended to be deflated by any sense of hypocrisy. The war on marijuana has nothing to do with medical properties and so forth. US drug policy is about social control. That’s the name of the game.

June 1

Never trust a president who claims he reads himself to sleep with the help of Marcus Aurelius. That was Bill Clinton, who claimed this thundering imperial bore never strayed far from his hand. Most certainly view with profound suspicion a president who professes to be guided in his conduct in grave moral matters by Augustine and Aquinas.

The excellent, astounding
New York Times
story by Jo Becker and Scot Shane, published on May 29, reports that Obama decided to take personal control of the White House’s secret and unconstitutional death list after reading Augustine and Aquinas. “A student of writings on war by Augustine and Thomas Aquinas, he believes that
he should take moral responsibility for such actions. And he knows that bad strikes can tarnish America’s image and derail diplomacy.” Notice how the paragraph devolves rapidly from moral duty to PR.

June 3

With rare emotion Prosecutor Fouquier-Tinville announced that “play by the rules” had been captured by revolutionary vigilance, and faced the supreme penalty. This pious phrase, he said, is the tribute power pays to the oppressed. Yes, he cried, the feudal peasants whose daughters were raped by Monsieur Le Vicomte “played by the rules,” even as they groaned under the extra taxes levied by the Vicomte. “Our glorious revolution says No, we do not play by the rules.” A stormy ovation accompanied the condemned to his final night in the Conciergerie.

The keen blade of justice must fall swiftly on the word “tsunami” which has turned into a cliché through overuse with astonishing speed. This happened rapidly after the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami and its use reached epidemic proportions after the tsunami in Japan in 2011. Its use is mainly to add verbal spice and drama to usually mundane events by suggesting that what is happening is massive, devastating, and unstoppable.

Users of the word can often hope to see their use of the phrase “a tsunami of …” promoted into a headline. Take, for instance, the case of identity theft tax fraud in southern Florida. Whatever else this is doing it is not, unlike Sri Lanka in 2004 or Fukushima in 2011, killing a lot of people. But the chief federal prosecutor for the Southern District of Florida, Wilfredo A. Ferrer, first described it as an “epidemic” and then added “the IRS is doing what they can to prevent this, but this is like a tsunami of fraud.”

And sure enough “Tsunami of Fraud” was in the headline in the
International Herald Tribune
version of the
New York Times
story.

June 4

To: Patrick Cockburn

Subject: Directions

After reviewing our intended restaurants in what aides emphasized was
an unusual personal initiative
, it seems to me much better you come directly to the apartment, leave your bags, and then we can walk the 100m or so to a restaurant reconnoitered by Daisy.

Tell your taxi driver to cross on to the Ile St. Louis from the right bank (i.e. Gare du Nord side) across the Pont Marie, debouching—on the Ile itself—into the Rue Des Deux Ponts.

Cross straight over the Quais Bourbon/d’Anjoi running on the northern edge of the Ile. Then, take a RIGHT, onto the Rue St. Louis en L’Ile (which is the street running up the middle of the Ile). Then take the first RIGHT on the Rue Regrattier, go about 20 m. Number 24 is on the right hand side and an antique shop on the left. We’ll be able to spot you.

NB I think there’s some mysterious Ile St. Louis elsewhere in their search engines. Just thunder Ile St. Louis, next to Notre Dame island.

June 15

I’d never realized, until reading Neil Schaeffer’s biography, how close Sade came to being guillotined by the Committee of Public Safety.

His trial, which would also have been his death sentence followed by instant decapitation, was scheduled for July 27, 1794. But the bailiff never came for him at his prison at Picpus. There’s no clear explanation why. Bribery of the bailiff by Sade’s faithful friend Mme. Quesnet may have been Sade’s salvation. That same day, July 27, spelled Robespierre’s own doom, on 9 Thermidor, in the revolutionary calendar. The next day Robespierre was executed and Sade was safe. He was freed on October 15, 1794. This was not the end of his experience in prison. By the end of 1801 Sade was in Charenton, dying there in 1814, his final liaison being with Magdeleine LeClerc, a seventeen-year-old. He was seventy-four and there seems to
have been affection on both sides. He recorded her visits to the prison meticulously, as was his habit. The last embrace was their ninety-fourth.

Poor Mme. de Sade. She had to run around Paris looking for glass test tubes that would serve as dildos for her husband, the Marquis, to use in auto-erotic stimulation in his prison in Vincennes. She had to order them from a glass-blowing factory, where the sales folk would ogle respectable Renee, indicating their view that these glass flasks—Sade wanted some of them 9.5 inches in circumference—were intended for her own gratification. In twenty-seven months, Sade noted, he used such flasks a total of 6,536 times, an average of eight a day.

Names Sade called his wife in one letter sent from Vincennes in the late fall of 1783 included “Mohammed’s delight,” “heavenly pussy,” “fresh pork of my thoughts,” “shining paintbox of my eyes,” “mirror of beauty,” “spur of my nerves,” “violet of the Garden of Eden,” “seventeenth planet of space,” “discharge of angelic spirit,” “rose fallen from the bosom of Graces,” “my baby doll.”

June 22

The predictable word is in from Rio: failure. The conference twenty years on from the huge Earth Summit, Rio ’92, has been unable to produce even the pretense of an energetic verbal commitment of the world’s community to “sustainable principles.”

The reason? These conferences have always been pretty fraudulent affairs, lofted on excited green rhetoric and larded with ominous advisories that “this time we cannot afford to fail” and that “the tipping point” is finally here. But failure has been a loyal companion, and many a tipping point has tipped without amiss. There is no such thing as a world “community.” There are rich nations and poor nations, all with differing national interests and the former will never accede willingly to the agendas of the latter, however intricate the language of the final windy “declaration.” Since Gro Brundtland lofted it to glory in 1987, the word “sustainable” has long been drained of all meaning.