On its face it’s a wasted 50 billion that could be used elsewhere. No way to justify it.

Except.

Except that it buys something absolutely necessary, something without which the matrix would rend, a cover story, an engaging, fear-based, war-metaphor distraction, the story that allows us to avoid looking at how our very way of life and of constructing societies and social relatedness engenders the alienation, fears, repression, insecurity, deprivations, hopelessness, anxiety and general distress that drive addiction. The war on drugs falsely and safely externalizes the explanation for a nation of users.

Addiction is part of the normalized collateral damage we accept as the price of evading existential freedom and growth to instead grasp the illusory safety of family, marriage, culture, country, economy, authority, and religion. Without the attention-distracting “war” on “drugs”, we risk gaining insight that the real enemy is all that we know and cling to.

the Folk

so accommodating to those of their own

so easily soothed by rich, rhythmic, sonorous assurances of their goodness

so warmly responsive to that paternal embrace

so fine in that civil intercourse

easily enough to put out of mind the nearly predictable move by Our conduct-disordered young tough to promise a place on his crew to the eloquent and distinguished U.S. war criminal. He owed him a solid. Look out Iran. Our next shot-caller just got a torpedo.

We (falsely but effectively) experience (somatically, emotionally, cognitively) and estimate our social standing, valuation, self-worth and thus security in relation to that of others (and in terms of the external validation provided by inclusion in and validation by legitimized institutions), so that when others are marginalized or lowered in esteem, we seem to gain. When we can identify “losers”, some of us become winners in the competition and rankings for validation and safety. The laughter is this sense of improved standing felt as shared relief and safety with others who are “in on” rather than objects of the archetypal utterances, sounds, and forms that serve the purpose of marginalization and exclusion.

Sure, we got on board after 9-11, we’re Americans. But we’re not as gullible as those losers! Ha ha.

Yeah I could drop a hundred pounds, quit smoking and get off my Paxil that’s not doing anything for me, but check out those idiot crackheads! Ha Ha.

Yeah I party hard, pass out, throw up, but what kind of loser shits in bed! Ha ha.

Comedic relief.

It’s not just the bedazzling intellect (that, for example, keenly surveys, analyzes, and concludes that the workable remedy to an addicted nation is to “rout” the drug dealers, just as we will rout the terrorists) that fills me with awe and confidence in Our Boy, it’s also the willingness to “reach across the aisle” to recruit American heroes to Our Side, like the eloquent general who had what it takes to incite the Folk against our Enemies after 9-11.

But even more than the policy smarts and principled team-building, it’s the combination of moral vision, intellectual maturity, and courage expressed, for example, in the kind of simple certainty that guides a nation of Faith: that the sanctity of the Holy Matrimony is for a man and his woman. As Our Boy so forcefully reasoned, “I'm a Christian. And so, although I try not to have my religious beliefs dominate or determine my political views on this issue, I do believe that tradition, and my religious beliefs, say that marriage is something sanctified between a man and a woman."

That level of thought and expression says something about a person.

“What will he air this time? A variety show? A live fireside chat? A three-ring circus?”

I’m just not sure that the TV-viewing 2-year-old as metaphor (“I want more Obama.”) got across.

to control, infantilize and degrade public discourse is to find here, on a site like Salon, juvenile defenses (He is not! If he is, then I guess your daddy is too! So there!) against attributions like “radical”, “Marxist”, “socialist”, almost as if, in the darkening confusion and decay that is our pretense at civilization, adult minds could still be frightened back into orthodoxy, to still construct the illusion of choice and hope where, as ever, as Mr. Lind notes, the choices “are differences of degree, not of kind”.

Pulling back on analysis and interpretation seemed to sharpen and bring to the forefront the picture these American voters present of a people simultaneously ravaged by free-market/classist/capitalist pathology while domesticated to fear the sharing of resources for the collective good.

embraces and allies with a disgraced right-wing Bush administration warmonger who helped incite the Folk to the moral debacle that is Iraq?

Ooops! That didn't come out right. Never mind.

or among contemporary commentary for that matter, striking eloquently and simply at the root of the pathology that is our RepubiDem military/corporate state. Power controls language and symbolism to construct meaning and reality in ways that consolidate and maintain that power through fear and normalization of abuses. “Orwellian” is right. The distorted and maladaptive cognitive schemes that could allow Iraq help explain the absurd, confused and damaging use of a war metaphor as an approach to “helping” Americans with addiction problems, as another reader astutely noted.

Mr. Biden’s mind and behavior are owned and run by silly stories in which wars bring victories and solve problems and “socialist” is a dirty name. Joey, Johnny, Barack, and Sarah all learned the same childhood stories, and have yet to construct their own.

Because something is happening

But you do know what it is

Don’t you, Ms. Traister ?

is the horse calling bullshit.