LIVING

IF EMPIRE IS THE PATTERN

of human predation on the social scale, then addiction is the pattern of predation on the individual.

one’s addiction is another’s religion

Not even going to argue that one.

Addiction can be defined as the pathological pursuit of reward and/or relief through substances and behaviors which diminish the ability to identify and rectify problems and foster dysfunctional emotional responses.

-reward or relief, like our pre-conventional morality motives

-behaviors and substances, not only things but actions as well

-and the important part, the fact that it must be a harmful relationship

Specifically harming problem solving and emotional stability, which seem like important life skills to foster.

you’re the asshole!

…where are my car keys?!

Yes, the addict is often swinging from dysfunction to projection, with their habitual use being the small eye within the storm where they find temporary peace.

Usually in secret, and usually with enablers on standby to sell them more.

Being an American who grew up within more “modest” neighborhoods, I have my fair share of addiction stories.

But we’re not talking about substance abuse, although the British Empire did use opium to bend what was the largest economy of the time in China to their imperial will.

The imperial will that invented the central banking system which underwrites the current global hierarchy which is enforced through American militarism which goes unchecked partly because we’re too busy dealing with…wait for it…an opiate epidemic.

Music is essentially twelve notes.

How many more notes are in the sheet music of empire because a lot of this is starting to sound familiar.

you’re reaching my dude, ‘scripts are for the children

Apparently.

But we’re not going to discuss that aspect of addiction, at least not now.

Money, power, belief systems-

I can stop praying whenever I want

Debatable.

But addiction requires irrationality and emotional instability.

Religion actually can help mature you IF it’s used as a tool for self-correction.

A spiritual path which humbles oneself to the unknown without and within.

Cults prey on membership.

Americanism, the claim that all of our actions are right because we’re us-

a strange loop!

operates as an addiction.

So let us take the HM 1300 down another scale, this time 16 years to 1.

we’re slowing way down!

General to the specific.

Now we have 15 years according to our newest metaphor to explore the United States from 1776 to 2016 and determine if a society indeed exhibits the traits of its constituents.

That is, have we developed unhealthy relationships which are leading to self-harm.

But we’re not going to start with age zero this time, because as you pointed out previously our developmental years might be hard to explain.

partying at 7?

there’s unreliable and there’s sloppy

Then let us instead borrow from real life and lay the history of the United States over an addict I personally watched develop from her first cigarette at 17 to her finally quitting heroin just last year before her 32nd birthday.

not too personal?

All I know is what I’ve lived.

I just speak my truth.

look who’s addicted to the melodramatic

Quiet you.

The 5 commonly described phases of addiction-

we’ve gone from scientific to “commonly described?”

I found them on a celebrity rehab website.

Anyways, here we go; use, abuse, tolerance, dependence & addiction, courtesy of Seasons In Malibu, world class addiction treatment in luxury resort settings.

They accept most major insurers and are standing by 24/7 at 866-780-8539

really?

Maybe we can parlay a sponsorship?

I have bills, man.

Onto the first phase: experimental use.

not sure how I feel about opiates, might need more data…

blues are the good ones right?

1776 to 1824, our first “phase” of American history, covering my friend when she was 17 through 19 years old.

She tried a lot of drugs before I met her but I know she hadn’t done heroin.

She transitioned from cloves to cigs then other things.

We fell in and out of contact those early years.

I remember teaching her how to drive, the jumping hug she gave me when she passed her test.

Stealing a kiss and her getting mad.

I probably talked too much.

Always verbally processing.

I was still figuring out how to approach girls without freaking them out with my intensity.

let me guess, you were the guy sending novel-length emails

Anyways, while I learned how to chill out she was figuring out, well, I shouldn’t really speak for my friend.

All I can say is what I saw.

Something motivated her to experiment with a lot of substances, some mind altering and some highly addictive.

Some I tried with her.

And some she increased her volume & frequency of use on her own.

so my problem is when I’m crushing pills I can never get a fine powder…

What was the USA doing during this time you ask?

Coinciding with the industrial revolution, the first years of our country experienced rapid economic expansion.

Manufacturing, particularly of textiles, was mechanized through factory production.

Although, funny thing, we were an agrarian economy rather than an industrial one.

This owed in no small part to our peculiar domestick institution of course that we didn’t get around to abolishing until our next phase in addiction.

and even when you get a fine powder, how big do you make the line?

straw or dollar?

benjamin perhaps?

I say you gotta go with those foreign currencies, there’s a reason they’re plastic

Yes, Franklin himself testified to the land speculators of the frontiers.

Perhaps it was the risk-taking of youth, buying stuff of questionable quality from shady characters; the Louisiana Purchase from one French dealer, free Floridian samples from a guy with a Spanish accent.

Like I said, questionable quality.

I’m just gonna, I’m here but I’m gonna…

I’ma be a minute…

Do you, as America itself did its own due diligence in exploring its newly acquired territories.

But our addiction isn’t in territorial acquisition, that’s so Ghengis.

No, we live in an era of modern finance remember.

So let us trace the roots of our own central banking system, going back to the First Bank of the United States.

Pushed through in 1791 by Alexander Hamilton-

and they wonder why someone shot the guy

I thought you were checking out?

no drug can overpower this level of banter

I have a friend named fentanyl who might say otherwise, but let’s save that for our final act.

how can something that makes you so happy be so bad?

Right?

Money might not buy happiness, but it sure buys a lot of things that seem to provide it.

And it sure as hell can become addictive.

The First Bank of the United States, modelled coincidentally enough on the First Bank of England, has its 20 year charter expire in 1811.

This is partly because it only ends up controlling 20% of the nation’s currency with state-run banks making up the rest.

And then also possibly due to the fact that it was partly owned by foreigners who shared in its profits.

wait what?

really?

Sometimes the pattern is undeniably clear.

First country A wins independence from country B.

Then country B then insists that country A create a central bank they can profit from, which they do until it expires.

And then, one year later both countries go to war in 1812.

Without a central bank the United States resorted to issuing treasury notes-

english man, are these bills and can they be rolled into the shape of a straw?

Treasury notes were a debt instrument issued during financial stress, hand signed and in larger denominations and dimensions-

larger straws are good

-bearing the owner interest usually within three years; a financial crutch our nation used to heal.

ever notice how pens and straws share similar qualities?

They didn’t seem to work so well the first time around – the notes not your inventions –

I’m not sure how I, uh, feel about opiates, but I definitely like the way they smell

so to combat rapid inflation a second bank of the United States was chartered from 1816-1836.

I’m here but I’m…

I’ma be a minute…

And thus we close our first phase of addiction, experimentation with central banking.

And war of course, the most debt-incurring of any state activity.

zzz…snrk…zzz

Let’s see, we had all of those Indian wars, they’re not going to genocide themselves you know.

And then those pesky rebellions over credit and taxes, luckily most of these suckers can’t vote lol.

Barbary Wars and pirates of the Caribbean kept us busy with three thousand attacks between 1815-1823.

Remember empires need those open trade routes.

It looks like militarism was our gateway drug, with war-dealing financiers on stand-by to offer harder stuff.

huh where am I?

we could still stop at this point though right?

I mean, I’m asking for a friend…

We all seem to have friends these days.

Maybe we could have stopped, if we had really thought that our destiny was only to extend across the continent.

Or if we’d put more efforts into peace than into warfare.

Or perhaps stopped to look in the mirror to learn how to love ourselves sincerely and completely, as a human family.

I look into the mirror every time I bend over my coffee table

Like safeguards against any addiction, energy flows where attention goes.

Positive sources of esteem insulate against self-harm, gardens of self-worth you water daily with habits that develop emotional and intellectual maturity.

are we allowed poppies in our garden?

there’s an addiction gene they say

but it’s also a disease

the 6th step is actually relapse

it’s more of a circle than a progression

a warm happy circle

why am I so itchy?

can I borrow that twenty though?

gotta see a man about a horse…

As long as you’re still functional, you’re still in phase two, or “regular use”, transitioning into ABUSE.

totally in control

The years are 1824 to 1872, with the U.S. totally in control as well.

Remember, that second central bank expires in 1836, again not to be renewed.

Andrew Jackson was elected president and he really, really hated the central bank idea.

Something about corruption, speculation, foreign powers profiting off domestic turmoil, a bunch of antiquated ideas like that.

good ol’ andrew, not as fancy as ben, not quite as sad as a dusty George

This time though we didn’t get war a year later, rather a financial crisis in the form of the Panic of 1837.

There were a lot of contributing factors including Jackson’s own well-intentioned but short sighted idea to require federal payments to be made in gold and silver.

But the Bank of England holding the world’s reserve currency and expanding credit freely for the two years previous before raising rates, tightening global credit markets, probably had just a little bit to do with the crash as well.

ah the old boom and bust cycle, totally natural

Totally.

Banks collapsed, businesses failed, unemployment shot to 25% in some areas.

Naturally I moved in with my friend.

what?

She was like, around 20 or 21?

This phase in American history would cover her from 20 to 22.

We lived in a two bedroom apartment in the Inland Empire an hour outside of Los Angeles.

She liked to do the music festival thing, I was working in my parent’s insurance agency.

We both smoked weed while I crushed on her as she crushed multiple boyfriends between pills, or maybe the other way around.

But the boyfriends became less frequent, long trips more so.

Then the lighters and the spoons.

I found a needle in the bathroom which was the definitive proof, taking it with me as I moved out.

Which was a cruel thing to do.

Persecution doesn’t stop addiction it just makes it more dangerous.

what, are you suggesting giving them clean needles?

Actually yes, this goes a long way in keeping people healthy and gaining a chance at interdiction where they can be helped.

Treatment instead of incarceration decreased fatal overdoses in Portugal by over 50%.

what was Portugal up to back in the early 1800’s?

Empire of course, then something weird going on with the king giving his son Brazil but the kid called no-backsies?

But he made his dad emperor as a consolation?

I’m not, it’s…

let’s stick to America for now.

So I knew at this time my friend was definitely on heroin.

your friend is not america

Debatable.

Anyways, she was a somewhat functional roommate but I couldn’t live in that type of environment.

I was learning to draw boundaries.

Speaking of which, the boundaries of the continental United States were set after the mid-1800’s with the aftermath of the Mexican-American war and the Oregon purchase.

somewhat shaky segue but ok

There are other military incursions of course that aren’t official wars.

Our navy landed in Indonesia to retaliate for the plundering of a cargo ship in 1832 and then Argentina the following year to protect our “interests,” which is nation-speak to describe profits.

my interests are in a lighter that doesn’t quit on me within a week

That’s like your third one dude.

Peru is having a revolution in 1835 so of course we had to protect profits, I mean interests over there.

Sumatra 1838, Fiji in 1839, Samoa China and Africa, revenge pride and piracy, and then the Mexican-American War of course from 1846 to 1848.

wait you’re trying to frame american militarism as just a corporate protectionist racket from its inception?

and you have no more lighters?

Oh no, that would be sloppy scholarship.

We haven’t quite invented the modern corporation yet, many of these might be partnerships or even sole proprietorships.

thing about veins is once poked twice shy

I’ll take your latest nap to go from our Mexican kerfuffle to a nation divided.

Mexico had population issues with their territories to the north, so at first they welcomed foreign settlers.

But then they soon had another issue: how to incorporate these new mostly white slave-holding citizens into their culture?

One easy solution was to outlaw slavery, most Mexicans are against it by now time to get with the program gringos, but the newbs ignore that attempt.

So outlaw immigration?

Ignored as well.

If only you were awake to revel in the historic irony of white Texan illegal immigrants.

Then Texas being Texas they claimed independence, looking to the US to eventually bail them out.

Only, the US isn’t so sure that they want another slave state, especially not one so large.

See, some people in the north are learning how to not be such assholes.

At least not so transparently.

Industrialization and transitioning from literal slavery to wage slavery will do that to you.

Don’t have to feed or house them, just pay subsistence wages.

Less overhead, smaller HR costs.

I think they call it a “hollow corporation.”

We waffled for a couple decades on the Texas issue before this guy named Polk was elected.

And he lived up to his name by “poking” the frijaleros until we had an excuse for full scale war which we won easily, marching into the heart of Mexico and flying our flag over their capital.

wait we took over Mexico?

I see you’re starting to build up a little tolerance, as America was for conquest.

Yes, congress was torn between completely taking over our southern neighbor or just accepting the concessions won from war.

They would have pushed for total conquest if not for the “fatal error” of Mexico “placing the colored race on an equality with the white.”

who was that jackass?

Former vice president.

Yeah, when racism supports your entire economic outlook it becomes somewhat of an institution externally and internally, to the point that it’s wrapped up in your very identity.

If money and power are addictive, then it would stand to reason that the hate that defends accumulation would also be addictive.

The imperialist’s suspicion of equitable societies can overcome even their own greed.

My question for context would be, why would the profiteers of our current economic disparity act differently in challenging their biases?

Or as another novelist would say in the following century: “It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on not understanding it.”

The question then becomes, how can we expect to understand peace when war is so profitable?

Addiction becomes a part of your identity, along with all of the lies you tell yourself to rationalize your habit, until soon you lose all sense of reality.

And sometimes human decency.

big toes have veins right?

That’s right, it was a big chunk of land acquired after the Mexican-American War.

And the question was going to be to slave or not to slave?

Who are we kidding, most of us still slave away for our corporate masters.

But the illusion of freedom right?

So the north wanted the illusion along with the centralized federal bureaucracy that comes with it, while the south had that whole openly-proud asshole market cornered, then and now apparently.

shots…ow!

You’re not, you uhm…try the inside of your thigh.

And so we had a war about it, violence being the rational course of rational men.

After our president spent more public funds fighting than he would have spent just purchasing every slave outright and one out of every ten northern young men died – as high as one out of three in the south by the way – the union drove old dixie down to earn the right to legally discriminate against former slaves nationwide.

look at abe trying to put up mongol numbers

Precisely.

More than just slavery, at issue was the concept of who controls the country?

Which brings us back to our banking history.

Armies do not build themselves soldier by soldier any more than churches do brick by brick.

If you remember our previous lesson on empires, they require large agricultural centers, professional militaries and advanced bureaucracies.

I’m here but I…

need a minute

Chasing pirates to protect profits was fun and Mexico was a good dry run but a professional military on the scale of the British Empire currently bitch slapping the rest of the world would require a much more advanced bureaucracy.

So it’s no wonder that during the commotion of the Civil War between 1861-1865 we passed the National Bank Act of 1863.

Along with de-incentivizing state banks, creating their national counterparts and establishing a currency, this act gave the federal government the ability to sell war bonds.

As they say, both power and vice easily acquired are often not so easily relinquished.

Or distinguished.

slow clap…

not praise just really drowsy lately

This same law was used in 2004 to bar state AG’s from oversight that could have prevented the recession.

What good is a laboratory of democracy when the labs are neutered?

ok that’s definitely mixing metaphors

On the brighter side, we do get the official end of slavery with the 14th Amendment declaring all people born in the United States deserve equal protection under the law-

progress?

which was quickly used 20 years later to justify corporations as “legal people.”

This paved the way for the concept of these “limited liability” creatures to completely infect civic life, just as we were running out of continent and headed towards RISKY USE, or actual bona fide empire.

I, uh, I’ll be in the bathroom

for a while…

Yup, 1872-1920 now, changes in behavior around one’s habit due to increased tolerance.

You ok in there?

My friend, she’s 23 to 25 around this time.

She told me that people overdose because they try to stop and then forget their tolerance and take too much.

I don’t know if she actually ever overdosed, never told me that.

She did tell me when she put a gun to her head though.

Pulled the trigger.

Luckily her boyfriend had removed the firing pin before going to work that day.

Addiction can be a dark place.

I’m going to need an acknowledgement or a noise or something man, can’t have you in there for another hour.

it’s…I’m…

be right out

Risky use it is then, in bathrooms and gunboats around the world.

Columbia, Egypt, Haiti, Mexico…

mexico again?

you’re out of toilet paper…

and spoons

Something about “dey took er cows.”

Korea, Samoa, Argentina, Chile, South Dakota – hundreds murdered.

I’m sure they were armed

Nearly half were women and children.

but answer me this, did they have arms?

Oh, in 1891 our navy attempted to stop seal poaching in the arctic.

let me guess, so we could torture the defenseless seal babies in cruel imperial experiments?

No idea, maybe just America trying to protect the local animal population…

waiting for it

before it wages its first imperial war of conquest abroad in 1898, occupying Cuba, Puerto Rico and the Philippines and strangling nascent independence movements within all three.

Or perhaps drowning would be the better term, since the Philippines was where we first perfected the art of water boarding we’d later export to pacify Iraq 100 years later.

at least now we know why the navy needed that seal research

And now we have an actual global empire to manage and expand.

An official habit, if you will.

you act like we only use our military for nefarious purposes though

I want some fair and balanced perspectives, like some positive drug stories

man has successful career with wife and two kids and a side habit

who doesn’t want to come home after a long day and shoot up a nice warm one?

There might be a reason those stories are uncommon to non-existent though right?

Wars of conquest, empires, have one goal: consumption of value; reducing people to inputs in a system where the human gets cannibalized.

The thing about a highly addictive habit is that eventually even the wife and kids get in the way of your using.

There is no chill with drugs like opiates or war.

They become your purpose for living until they absorb your very will to live.

And then you’re just waiting to die on your best days, wishing you were already dead on your worst.

But enough about millennials.

We still have to walk our way from the turn of the 20th century to the present.

wasn’t this the gilded age?

Yes, industrialization brought concentrations of capital which mimicked the centralization of national authority.

The common worker protested for his fair share, or at least a fair workday, only to be quickly beaten back by private armies national armies or often a mixture of both.

we were dicks to the world

No, this is here in ‘Murica.

why?

Why was my friend living with a guy who kept a loaded gun in his house?

you’re really trying to wedge in her narrative

You’re really using your shoelace to tie off your arm?

She was a dancer of some sort at this time, in Florida.

I think he kept her doped up as a way to get with her and then to keep her with him.

From the micro to the macro human behavior follows the same patterns.

Only, the imperial powers weren’t just keeping China addicted to opium as they defied laws to import chests of the stuff into their country.

They were growing addicted themselves to their standard of living and the violence required to support it.

By the way fentanyl comes from China, just putting it out there.

The very product that’s causing our spike in overdoses in the United States is coming from the country which the world powers humiliated a century and a half earlier using these same tactics.

Just saying.

Power has always been the real addiction.

Power for the financiers of the ultimate disposable goods; things that go boom.

And then of course the reconstruction of those things that went boom.

And then the taking of the resources from those who once lived where the boom happened to fall.

sometimes I can’t tell if you’re simplifying or confusing

Nation states were so Westphalia.

The real money was in the Dutch East type tendies so let’s get back to how centralized money, in the form of centralized banking, was coming along.

just a perfect day

We had a panic in 1907, your basic run of the mill stock manipulation gone wrong-

drink sangria in the park

and out of the ensuing chaos-

and then later when it gets dark

never wanting to let a good crisis go to waste of course-

we go home

first checking that domestic democratic impulse though by capping congress at 435 members-

just a perfect day

the powers that be succeeded in pushing through once and for all-

feed animals in the zoo

the Federal Reserve Bank of the United States in 1913-

then later a movie, too

capitalized by a newly-instated federal income tax that same year-

and then home

finally transferring the control of our nation’s money supply into private hands.

oh, it’s such a perfect day

Of course global war breaks out the very next year.

I’m glad I spent it with you

The imperial addicts who feasted on China had turned on each other-

oh, such a perfect day

and their newly automated weapons previously used to pacify weaker fledgling nations-

you just keep me hanging on

created the savage brutality known as trench warfare.

you just keep me hanging on

Almost half of British and Italian soldiers were killed or wounded and three fourths of French and Russian forces suffered the same fate.

Forty million dead or wounded human beings.

For what?

America got off lightly with only about half a million casualties.

We had control of our habit.

And so with our big stick in hand

ewww…

and banana obsessions in our own backyard-

so we’re just not doing phrasing then

we swore we’d never crash.

Which is exactly what we did of course in 1929.

kind of funny how depression fits both contexts of your metaphor

I wonder if they do that on purpose

Fractals my friend, the smaller pattern represents the larger and vice versa.

Whether you create a moral hazard by bailing out one too many stock schemes or you’re on the other end scheming for just one more hit, abuse is abuse

The depression was the ultimate boom and bust cycle-

totally natural

as agriculture consolidated and farmers along with rural poor took to the cities to survive.

And now we enter our fourth phase of addiction DEPENDENCE, from 1920 to 1968.

We’ve allowed a dangerous relationship to develop between the serialization slash monetization of citizens and the centralization of federal authority for imperial conquest.

Our “copy” dating to the “enlightenment” still reads as decent terms of service, for example Teddy the progressive-

that’s the teddy bear guy!

Yes.

He was “busting trusts” in the early 20th century to free up competition in the market.

But there were still some ugly assumptions underlying the “American Dream.”

Those who claimed the “race importance” between whites and “scattered savage tribes, whose life was but a degree less meaningless, squalid and ferocious than that of wild beasts.”

who was that jackass?

Teddy Roosevelt

but he was so adorable!

The stories we tell ourselves.

The same man who fought so hard for nature fought Puerto Rican independence – machine guns in tow – to benefit a color-wheel subset of “civilization.”

Replace the color wheel for the cultural one and what’s different this time around?

they don’t dance salsa in the desert

Iroquois to Iraqi, the right answers don’t change just the latest lies and the cowards who defend them.

How could we dare to claim to be bringing democracy to Iraq when we haven’t even figured it out here at home first?

How could this demonic teddy bear not empathize with the desires in Caribbean countries for the same terms of service as the American app to their north?

Or, to go back even further, when a Spanish profiteer of little moral note salivated over subjugating the first peoples of Puerto Rico bragging; “with 50 men they could be compelled to do anything one wishes.”

And so he chopped off their hands if they didn’t find him gold.

The hands of natives who introduced themselves as “Taino,” noble.

As in, we’re not the asshole cannibals to the south.

We’re good people.

We have a good life.

This is the land where God lives and as his caretakers we welcome our guests.

Anything one wishes.

I don’t remember this version of Aladdin

We find bright spots here and there of progressivism this, national parks service that humanitarian that other.

But teddy the bear has a statue still standing in front of the Natural History Museum in New York, not as a backpacker or a camper or another symbol of communion with nature.

No, he’s flanked by those he described, in his own words, as having less worth than the horse he rides.

The barefoot servants of history.

Savages Barbarians Pacified Colonized THE OTHER

a little less on the nose perhaps?

Even at your lowest, addiction is a choice.

As is the decision to get clean.

We are not automatons.

I really keep hoping you’re going to introduce robots into this narrative

Why do junkies brag about their habit?

Why the subculture?

Like our older bro Freddy-

I remember him!

humanity also “grows” in colonies.

This is the face of our addiction.

These are our fruiting bodies, the hate of inhumanity that mental gymnastics rebrand as necessary components of our national identity.

There could have been no other way we tell ourselves as we cook up one last time.

Everything happens for a reason we mumble and make our peace with death checking out, drifting further away from our moral compass.

We escape from connected humanity into solitary bliss, continuing our suicide pact with the one habit we can’t give up; the subjugation of our fellow man.

Manifest Destiny is sold not as genocide but a natural occurrence beyond our control let alone our questioning.

Great Britain describes waking up to an accidental empire.

a lot of people have trouble sleeping lately…

can you return these things to walmart for me?

Don’t worry.

I understand.

You had no choice.

Admitting choice allows for possible alternatives.

Yours is a noble path even.

It’s a big company.

They won’t notice.

They’re screwing us anyways.

It’s better than you hurting someone.

Addiction becomes the absolute around which the addict constructs their world view.

And if you have to hurt someone to get what you need?

Then you’ll need to imagine a worse action you could have taken to soften the blow against your conscious.

At least we gave them reservations.

At least we didn’t nuke Iraq.

We’re always rational & benevolent.

In the end our victims deserve what they had coming, if only because they happen to not be us.

We Are Right.

Always. In all ways.

There will always be a reason to continue using.

And so the cycle continues, from the micro to the macro.

One doesn’t become an addict instantly.

The lies they tell themselves along the way hide the inhumanity of the journey until by the end of their path they are doing things they couldn’t ever imagine doing at the start.

Like felony larceny.

At this time in my friendship with our other side of addiction I had graduated from insurance in SoCal to real estate in Manhattan.

I was only hearing from her sporadically.

After the suicide attempt I made my peace with the fact that each haphazard communication might be the last I heard from her.

Then she said she wanted to get clean.

It wasn’t the first attempt I’d witnessed, and wouldn’t be the last.

But I hadn’t given up on her.

I opened up my apartment to the nobility I still recognized.

She hit the couch while I hit up dating apps to keep my personal interests out of her life.

You start to realize that the last thing addicts need is more compulsion.

Romance requires an honest foundation.

Perhaps democracy does as well.

I could see that she was teetering on the edge as she would groan and sweat into the night.

But she got better, at least I thought she did.

Enough so that I loaned her my car that winter to keep it out of the New York snow, letting her take it to Florida to visit family for the holidays.

questionable quality!

Questionable judgement.

When the spring came and I asked for the car back, the texts became less frequent.

My urgency increased but to no effect.

She only relented once I threatened her with arrest.

I found her puffy-eyed parked in front of a Brooklyn hospital.

She was trying to get suboxone, trying to get clean.

But the reality was that she lost my trust.

She was on her own.

you wouldn’t quit me right?

Don’t think it works like that.

Would you steal my car?

not if you give me $20

Yeah, we don’t really have a material relationship.

well I can use your thoughts against you

Why would you do that?

why won’t you spot me $20

I don’t…you’re not real.

You’re a figment or dialectic or lazy rhetorical device.

you’re a creep

What?

tell them why your friend always turned you down

This isn’t about me.

isn’t it though?

aren’t you going to admit you tried heroin yourself this past september?

didn’t the girl who hooked you up overdose earlier this month?

the one you were trying to bang

Dude you’re fucking up the linear narrative.

you’re bitter she didn’t fuck you

you freaked her friends out by chasing them in your car when she was 17

stole kisses because they weren’t offered

you didn’t move out because of the needle

you felt rejected

This isn’t the time to analyze myself, we still have two sections of America to go.

you enjoyed her addiction, it gave you more control

you didn’t even need to fuck her anymore

just bring tinder thots home so she could sweat her regrets out on the couch

you wanted to rub her nose in it

you wanted her to suffer

This is dark dude.

you gave her the car out of guilt, knowing that she wasn’t responsible enough to handle it

you knew that she was going to fuck this up too

you suspected this was the only way she’d ever really get clean, locked up like an animal

just to make you feel better about yourself

Just because you have access to my worst thoughts & fears doesn’t mean that your voicing them creates who I am.

We are all the editors of a rough draft that we’re in the process of constantly revising.

Honesty and sincerity correct toward the truth and every day is a new page in the story.

I’m my own creation.

you never loved her, just wanted to do “what you wished” with her, hypocrite columbus try-hard piece of shit

you’re addicted to avoiding your loneliness

there’s no truth to you, only clever justifications

you can’t hide from yourself

what right do you have to judge anyone else?

I see you motherfucker

This is unsustainable.

We have two more phases left in this section.

I’m going to try this next one solo.

Boundaries.

That…was weird

Our 4th phase of addiction 1920-1968, DEPENDENCE, describes a national mind and body reliant on our fix.

The “unequal treaties” signed during China’s “century of humiliation” were now replicated with the Treaty of Versailles and Germany, setting the stage for a second global conflict.

Pandering to addiction only increases its hold on one’s psyche.

Every bottom is rock bottom until you fall to a lower level.

Until we’re all finally in the earth for good.

But before we unpack the deadliest conflict in human history that involved over 100 million people from over 30 countries, up to 85% of which would overdose on war to end up in that good earth, let’s set up some context.

Since my buddy seems to be on time out I’ll have to proceed with a little more caution.

Perhaps we should consider how people fit into our lives.

Does our inattention support their vices indirectly?

Do they hold things for us?

Not just substances but pain?

Pity?

Convenient narrative transitions?

More words.

FEUDALISM

A result of the decentralization of an empire, feudal societies replaced strict bureaucracies with “manorialism.”

This involves a lord of a manor and peasants attached to the land from birth.

Then you add a roaming warrior class to lay down the law and assemble armies.

These last bad asses were the knights of medieval Europe or the samurai of Japan for example.

It’s like diet-empire, all the territory but with a fraction of the overhead.

Around the world empires had fractured into feudal stasis with peasants further devolving into serfs as they incurred generational obligations for living on other people’s land.

As the lowest members of “civilization,” serfs were barely a step above slaves since they could even be bought sold or traded.

America escaped this pattern due to first and foremost our founding fathers being excellent at writing A+ terms of service copy which, although ridiculously hypocritical did offer some protection from outright serfdom.

But then we also had a lot of other people’s land up for grabs, so the whole lord and estate system hadn’t taken hold for centuries as it had in Europe.

Though once we ran out of continental territory we did our best to catch up to global inequality.

When the industrial revolution came along lords began to function more as barons of capital.

This allowed the smooth transition to capitalism in Europe with industry setting up near plentiful energy sources to exploit people used to being born into servitude.

During the latter half of the 19th century however the serfs – and some lords even – were growing restless.

Especially in Russia.

One of the most famous of the “class traitors” was a Russian prince named Peter Kropotkin.

The addicts of accumulation justified their habit through the pseudoscience of social Darwinism so Peter the Prince offered his own corollary:

“Mutual Aid; a Factor of Evolution”

Pete pointed out that “it was an evolutionary emphasis on cooperation instead of competition in the Darwinian sense that made for the success of species, including the human,” a fact that could be witnessed in any sustainable village or even family.

Or job.

Or sports team.

Or military.

Competition, although necessary for survival, is exhausting.

Which is why, even among the animal kingdom, bluffs and posturing make up a majority of aggression.

Ain’t nobody got time for all that fighting.

In fact symbiosis, or as the prince called it “mutualism,” is the reigning pattern of ecosystems from key species to the whole.

We’re only now discovering fungal “nutrient highways” that deliver minerals to trees vast distances away.

I know I know, I shroom.

How does this relate to American history, someone might ask me if they were here?

(sigh)

The lords turned capitalists exploiting the skeletons of feudalism needed more land for more industry, along with more labor and energy.

What had been historically held in common was now closed to the public, further solidifying CLASS-CONSCIOUSNESS:

Why do we remain poor generation after generation?

Why should we give up another river or even stream to power the greed of the few?

And now our air.

And now my child.

Doesn’t nature belong to all?

Don’t children belong to their parents?

Shouldn’t progress benefit the common good?

Our earth could be held in common for the enjoyment of all if we just stopped abusing it.

Abusing each other.

Abusing ourselves really, if you look at the bigger picture.

Why do we keep allowing fractured identities to become so reliant on these hateful excuses that only justify the assholery of an elite?

The “oppressed class” saw cooperation as the key to survival with the earth being held in common trust for the species.

But then their oppressors claimed that might makes right and only the strong should survive, the logic of self-justified habits and intellectual infants who defend so many hands in the global cookie jar.

The response to this fracturing of our world into private fiefdoms to be exploited was conceptualized as socialism, a hope that social good could one day be held above personal gain.

Socialism, in all its rainbow variants, is merely a belief in protecting what we share in common.

Enter communists stage left offering communes & bureaucracy to fix things, basically saying “great idea guys just put me in charge.”

Which is how you get an ex-bank robber running things in Russia, with it working out about as well as one would expect including scripts full of death & chicanery.

Then you had the anarchists with their “great idea but let’s put NO ONE in charge” solution.

Prioritizing sincere expression over collective effort, they were sometimes shouty but at least more participatory.

A half century before dubya dubya part two; electric boogaloo, the anarchists split from the communists on the global stage over the use of authority.

But the communists to their credit succeeded in overthrowing the czarist government of Russia.

America – to our shame – interfered in Russia along with the other western powers to reinstate the elites and try to keep the whole feudal thing going, addicted by then to corporate profits protected by national militaries.

But the US wished on the wrong shooting czars, with the Dog’s Day Afternoon guy winning the- er…day.

No one really took the anarchists seriously, as people do cats.

So they started to claw the social fabric, as cats do when ignored.

As they say, you can write a million books but you shoot one president and you’re not an author you’re the terrorist.

Some nut tries to make friends by shooting McKinley just after the turn of the 20th century and anarchism is outlawed in America.

Meanwhile Europe is cracking down on labor and Russia consolidates power under Mr. Point Break.

Then democratic socialists start to emerge who neither want to dissolve the state completely like the anarchists claim is needed nor build new hierarchies like the communists.

These “social democrats” proposed that democracy could protect the things that should be shared in a society, such as;

-healthcare

-information

-the environment

-and even markets

Yup, even capitalism can be socialist if you accept markets as natural human expressions.

“Social capitalism” can be considered a market economy with oversight by the affected parties.

Remember, socialism is just the concept of a general welfare beyond individual greed.

The use of authority required to uphold these ideologies is where they separate.

For example, zombie libertarians might care more about protecting their property than improving society.

It is all about what your values are; personal liberty or the social good or (just maybe) a healthy mixture of both.

As far as the communists, it was always about power and promises borrowed from others.

In that way their obsession with deceit & authority mirrored their crony-capitalist counterparts, instigating a false dichotomy which would dominate the world for the next 100 years.

But before we go modern first we have another world war to grossly oversimplify.

Another president – cousin to “proud boy Ted” – headed off the proto-hippies by introducing a “New Deal” to bring economic relief and reform in industry, agriculture, finance, waterpower, labor and housing.

Elites saw what was happening in Russia and said maybe we should ease up on creating our own domestic serf problem less we start experiencing homegrown Heat.

Although Roosevelt made sure to also consolidate federal power as he placated the serfs.

And now the world was set for us to join the largest excuse for violence man’s addiction to wealth had ever conceived, that great multinational Axis and Allies piñata party known as Risk without the game board but way more drinking.

No seriously, Winston Churchill was a lush.

This whiskey mouth-washing cubicle cowboy was once so drunk by noon he fucked up Jordan’s border with Saudi Arabia in what’s excused as “Winston’s Hiccup.”

The world has always suffered from illegitimate authorities and man has always played God drunk.

America’s TOS was supposed to have addressed this, no not the alcoholism the checks & balances on power.

Otherwise you get a pyramid a barfly can climb to draw your maps and shoehorn his way into your textbooks with half-hearted quips.

Church the lurch secured BP their first oilfield in the Middle East to build the world’s largest refinery on the gulf and fuel British imperial might from the 1920’s to 40’s.

By the time an art-school dropout capitalizes on the schadenfreude of that Versailles fiasco the fix is in.

Dealers aren’t surprised by 3am texts.

They expect you to want more.

Financing war between empires is a captive market, it was only a matter of time.

Although it didn’t hurt that Germany’s central bank head was very close to Britain’s central banking baron.

That would be a Mr. Montagu Norman, the self-described currency dictator of Europe.

Every now and then an asshole is stupid enough to go on record for the sake of vanity and a Time magazine cover and the world is offered a glimpse into the higher echelons of inbred power.

So Germany rearming surprises no one, especially the United States corporations who helped Nazis unapologetically throughout the war ahem Associated Press.

Fascism played the foppish fall guys for a huge free for all which takes out Great Britain’s main competitors to daddy dicking the world.

A world order which since inception was a stock venture to socialize costs for private profits succeeded in keeping nation states addicted to the suicidal habit of militarism.

Some might not agree with this interpretation.

But then how does one explain the Congo Free State not referenced in the common narrative?

Through the alchemy of violence King Leo took externalities to the next level, murking 2x as many Congolese as the Jews who died in WWII.

Where is their outrage?

Their holocaust museum?

It’s not the right narrative.

No “great man of history” to scapegoat the world’s problems.

Because this is the natural result of addiction unchecked.

You make a bust which makes the papers to justify your authority which is actually just a protection racket to keep the con going.

And the bagmen?

Well Hjalmar Schacht died peacefully in Munich in 1970.

This is the financier who visited J. P. Morgan in America and was basically related to Montagu.

The man who invented the MEFO bill scheme which allowed Germany to illegally rearm.

The member of the global finance syndicate pushing our collective habit.

MONEY making MONEY.

The Belgian Congo was our 1st genocidal overdose before even the Jews & Armenians.

Yet we disrespect THESE victims of inhumanity by excluding them from the stories we tell.

We have not been informed, merely indoctrinated to support the power structures which prey on humanity.

Worshipping at alters to spoons & needles it’s claimed that this habit of avoiding actual reality is the highest form of love we deserve.

what does chicanery even mean?

I see you’ve rejoined the discussion then.

a little ranty without me

I am not alone

There have been many rants in the modern age against the predatory behavior of the 20th century, most falling on deaf ears;

 

Charlie Chaplin

More than machinery we need humanity. More than cleverness we need kindness and gentleness. Without these qualities, life will be violent and all will be lost.

 

Anne Frank

Everyone has inside of him a piece of good news. The good news is that you don’t know how great you can be! How much you can love! And what your potential is!

 

John F. Kennedy

What kind of peace do we seek? Not empire won by weapons of war. Not the peace of graves or the security of slaves. Genuine peace. The kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, the kind that enables men and nations to grow and to hope and to build a better life for their children–not merely peace for Americans but peace for all men and women–not merely peace in our time but peace for all time.

 

maybe it’s true that only the dead see the end of war, he sure got his peace

Yes, yes he did, somewhat prematurely I suppose.

I’m glad you’re still with us friend.

and of course by me we mean you

Hopefully our destiny involves a higher peace than collective suicide.

Time will tell.

don’t you have one more section to write about, 1968-2016, the description of full blown addiction?

Oh yeah, I guess I will tell then, not time.

never seen a clock write a book

More words.

more words & heroin

yeah you can just skip the words part, I’m calling it

I’m an addict

some people go their entire life without knowing their true calling

I’ll never finish this fucking book proposal.

wait I thought we sold-

The 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago…

MLK in April, RFK the following month.

Earlier John and Malcolm.

Cultural & Political icons

Uncoordinated bullets.

totally natural

Were these overdoses related to America’s addiction or just the natural risk of being in the public eye during violent times?

But why so violent?

Why send the police into the streets to “beat the crowds” as their union t-shirts would tongue-in-cheek proclaim 40 years later when they reenacted the same aggression to intimidate the latest generation of anti-war activists?

How could this be the face of the supposed opposition party?

what are you, republican now?

No, I’m creating a Political Afterparty grounded in verified reality to audit our government, starting with these needless, endless wars of aggression.

what makes you an expert?

So you have to be an expert to figure out the truth these days?

maybe you’re just confused

maybe it’s all these liberal colleges and that mainstream media that are brain washing you

maybe you’re addicted to narcissism, playing the hero in your own morality play

Ah yes, the final stage in our process, the deep throes of addiction where the reality of NATURE is questioned.

Perhaps the addict is the normal one and the rest of the world is crazy.

How would we know how you feel anyways?

We don’t know where you’ve been-

off the page maaaan, blank docs and blinking cursors…

With the pretext of checks and balances discarded, my gov decides to go full BEASTmode.

A couple of Wall St lawyers invent a covert paramilitary organization without a budget or accountability to terrorize the world in the name of profits.

Korea, China, Greece, interference in democracy.

The Philippians, Egypt, Italy, anti-communist muppets and forgeries.

Syria, Iran, Guatemala, Laos, Indonesia, Lebanon, Iraq-

wait iraq was recent tho

Who originally backed Saddam?

CIA assisted Hussein in his failed coup then hid his ass.

so you’re going to defend america’s enemies then?

because that sounds a lot like treason and the subway keeps telling me if I see something I should say something

edging close to the t-word

Who is the terrorist?

Is it the propped up dictator when he’s doing our bidding?

The nationalist trying to stop foreign interference?

What is our moral code?

When you refuse to recognize the right to self-determination by people within their own borders the terrorist becomes the guy with the smaller bomb.

Meanwhile the hero sells the movie rights to embed their authority’s version of the truth into our historic narrative.

Why is America’s main export to the world culture?

Is it to justify our unspoken export, violence?

Why was the CIA depicted defending Wakanda in the Marvel Universe?

They admittedly provided the intelligence to kill Lumumba, the Congo’s first democratically elected president.

Like the addict, we seek nobility through the lies we tell ourselves to avoid actual reality.

Our culture is founded on avoiding any introspection that could lead to growth.

We wash naked aggression with selective victims while instigating cycles of violence.

Our rationalizations strain sanity.

From Nixon to Reagan our elected officials prolonged conflicts to gain political advantage over domestic rivals.

An old rock-bottom in our collective spiral downward, treason itself became a partisan political tactic long before the orange buffoon cheese-puffed his bouffant into the presidency.

Indonesia, Bolivia, Chile, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Grenada, Panama-

I refuse to be in your story as the addict

you’re a rapist

I’m your conscious and you’ve created this entire format of a political book to run for president in order to come clean and earn peace of mind for all of the awful things you’ve done against women

That’s…a dangerous metaphor to play with.

I’ll take it.

you’ve thrown away your life

you project insecurities

you’re a failed writer & druggy who’s about to be metoo’d out of existence

So that’s the leverage of the cornered addict then, to grab at straws – pun intended –

I’ll allow it

in a desperate attempt to hide vice behind hypocrisy.

Details are conflated in strawman-

objection, recycled material

arguments used to discuss anything other than consequences of specific behavior.

don’t act like you care about my behavior, you wrote two thousand words without me just fine

my existence is merely a crutch for bad writing

you’re not actually trying to flesh out a partner in a discussion

you gave me this habit to amuse yourself like you’ve been amused by all the junkies in your life, mining their real suffering for your shitty little projects

With the advent of cinema and then television reconstructing reality has become elevated to an art form.

“Facts” are laid over dramatic arcs to influence audiences through emotion.

tell them how you broke into her room to compare her dildo to your cock nice guy

wtf’s wrong with you?

how you would volunteer to wash her clothes so you could smell them first?

creep

what about the girl from tinder who didn’t want to have sex?

but you kept insisting right?

because guys are the gas and girls are the brake, you laughed

did she laugh?

what did you tell your roommate, some girls make it so hard that you feel a little rapey?

what did your ex tell you, she felt pressured the first time?

she regretted it didn’t she

you are the opposite of a good man

Shock becomes the standard procedure to graft narratives into the social fabric, leading to a bland cultural paste tuned to the lowest common emotional denominator.

Thus the need for increasing the stimulation of our pop confections.

you’re going to get metoo’d so hard and you’re gonna deserve it cause you’re a pig, a fucking hypocritical misogynist pig who can’t change the fact that you weren’t loved by a distant mother and now have to seek female validation through your wannabe playboy ways

Paint-by-numbers psychology is layered over tropes which support authority figures from the local police to foreign adventures.

Paramilitary operatives are mysterious rather than symptoms of unaccountability.

The empire is indirectly condoned through backstories which serve as set pieces.

Profit is replaced by duty towards a country that is mistaken but never malicious.

We can’t even stomach the deceit anymore but at the same time we can’t change.

Where does that leave us?

What is our option then but to ignore the past wholesale even if soldiers-

should have been your ass

are STILL sacrificing for no reason other than profits for elites.

It no longer matters if we were lied once again into this latest war.

We are powerless in the face of our addiction.

This is the only life we now know.

We were born and bred into these cages and have stopped being able to imagine life beyond existence as victimization.

A society which preys on the elderly, the young.

Needless competition.

Senseless hate.

I hate you and soon everyone will as well

the whole world will hate you

you’ll be alone

We’re distracted though dopamine manipulation with ever more present screens selling us consumption over civics.

Through this one simple reframing the corporatists claimed the value from increased efficiency as well as profited from increasingly frivolous consumption.

They offered a beautiful circle to chase one’s tail forever; increase productivity to increase production to increase consumption to work harder to pay it all off, increasing productivity.

All of it just a distraction from learning to love.

people like you never find love because no one can tolerate you

You should love your master.

Addiction becomes identity, defended rabidly as anyone would their sanity.

you should just kill yourself because you’ll wish you were dead by the time this is over

you’re a crisis mgmt wet dream

they’re going to find anyone you’ve wronged, and that’s just the moves you’ll see coming

then there’s the lone-wolves who pop up in history to take out the trash, radical book in their pocket

your ideas will be overshadowed by the infamy of your assassin

you really don’t want us to live do you?

Not a lie.

Not like this.

We grow coercion instead of communities.

Municipalities have become monetized to the point that the life is being squeezed out of our cities.

Town squares are strangled.

Big-box stores replace small businesses, now replaced themselves by online behemoths.

Our commons are auctioned to the highest bidder in the pattern of empire cannibalizing itself inward: the banana republic.

We are owned.

Our stories are owned.

Our history is owned.

Our culture is licensed and optioned back to us on a subscription basis.

Now the very data that constitutes identity, our photos and memories and creative content, have been captured by a “social media” where one can’t distinguish between bodies and brands.

The human experience itself has been monetized.

No avenue to be happy is offered other than a culture founded on the propagation and rationalization of violence, overtly and indirectly, our needs met at the expense of others.

you’re just an autist awaiting diagnosis

a failed human being

a loser

We’re motivated to be enraged @ trivialities instead of engaged in our democracy.

Our conversations compete for the most superficial of emotional triggers to rally predefined, sequestered political bases.

We create more bonds with fictions than flesh & blood.

We rattle off our latest fav shows while remaining ignorant of our neighbors, children, partners.

Ourselves.

Power props itself up through stories.

With each additional false narrative we ingest – are force fed – we stray further from objective reality in both concept and substance.

Thus we experience the alienation of modernity rationalized by the cheap cynicism of the abused.

The window into a new world that the internet promised us through its revolutionary connectivity is closing.

Censorship is rising.

The left and right, labels born out of the French Revolution and now bludgeoned into meaninglessness by cults of political power-mongering, broker the interests of empire while claiming absolute authority over the truth, whatever that means anymore.

I can’t help you because you can’t help yourself

you don’t offer any answers

you’re worse than useless, you’re the liar who pretends he actually has something worth saying

you are a fraud, sir

you have truly wasted the time of anyone who’s read these scribblings of a drama-loving solipsistic man-child

I give up

What I learned that last time in New York before I finally gave up on my friend and sent her packing was that you can’t save people.

You can only share what you’ve learned.

We are the stories we tell ourselves.

She is a part of my story.

The world has only ever suffered from a lack of love.

We have always known and yet still fail to show the courage to live this simple truth.

I am you, buddy.

I am your anger.

Your doubt.

Ridiculous rants and silliness and corny jokes.

We are the work in progress.

And my friend did get clean.

She went home to drink deep from that inexhaustible well some of us are still blessed with, a mother’s love.

Then I opened my apartment back up to her for one more try.

But this time it WAS selfish.

I needed her.

I lived deep within the heart of this empire-loving culture for the past five years and I was starting to work my way out to see it objectively again.

I needed her now as a friend, to ground me as I inspected myself.

I need you to believe in me

I do, friend.

I do.

Always have and always will.

I love you.

You are me

and we are you

So let’s tell our story together, ok?

We’ll figure this out one page at a time.

One day at a time.

more words lol