I Understand Addiction
I understand addiction. I believe almost all of us contend with it in some form or other. Some addictions take less benign forms and may, therefore, seem less benign. However, the true danger in addiction is not in the thing we may be addicted to, but in how we manage our addictions. An addiction to gum could end up killing you—while an addiction to heroin, if very carefully managed, can endure into a ripe old age [see William Burroughs]. The worst though is thinking that you could cured of an addiction as if it is were an external agent, a disease.I understand the whole Sarah Palin thing and the Bush thing before that. It’s not about white women and family values. It’s about addiction. Or denial. Denial being the core of addiction. Hiding in the thing rather than facing the other thing. We as a nation have been trying to ignore that we are a part of the world for as long as we’ve been a part of the world.
Now, we are mounting one last attempt to deny the reality of the world even as it crashes around us. The Reagan revolution helped us forestall facing that reality. Pushed time back for a generation. As the world has gotten closer to our shores, the need to block it out has become more desperate. We’ve had to hit the vein ever harder and with crazier mixes. We didn’t care where the shit came from or how dubious it seemed [W a man of the people? Sure, I’ll buy it and give me a hit of China White too].
The late David Foster Wallace, who took his life on September12, 2008, will be greatly missed. Motherfucker could write. Infinite Jest had more soul in its jacket cover than The Corrections had in its entire body. A major thread of the book is addiction. One character, so beautiful she has taken to wearing a veil for all the trouble her beauty has caused her, has the added burden of being a crack addict. Her addiction at once became so intense that she took to picking over the fibers of her carpet for stray white specks—whether or not these specks proved to be crack didn’t matter, she’d smoke them anyway.
Sarah Palin is the Reactionary Right’s last speck of crack dug out from the wall-to-wall carpet we laid in our mildewy rec room 30 years ago. Rather than hitting the pipe, a certain strata of America started taking regular hits of god and guns [yes, that line] and that particularly unreflective approach to patriotism.
Palin represents the last run: one last chance to deny the fact that the USA is not the center of the universe, that the rest of the world matters, that evolution is a basic tenet of nature and that global warming is real. There are so many things I would like to not believe in: cholesterol, aging, saving money. It is painful to think about these things and hard to deal with their reality, so sometimes rather than face them I hide in my various addictions.
The Reagan era gave us an uncontrolled crack epidemic. Then the Reagan era offered us damnation and redemption in the form of mandatory drug testing and rehab. The myth of rehab is that you can cure addiction, get clean. You can’t cure addiction, you can only shift it laterally, sublimate or manage it.
In order to manage addictions—first they must be acknowledged for what they are, but not judged. I grant people their religion and their patriotism and even their guns just so we can move along to the real issues like poverty, education, global warming, crumbling markets, the failure of unilateralism and the decline and fall of the American Empire.
I will always be prone to addictive behavior. I can quit smoking, but then I might shift to painkillers. The form changes but the urge is the same, it is the urge to hide. The myth that we can cure addictions is the most pernicious outcome of the notion that addictions are diseases in the physiological sense. It is no coincidence that the U.S. entered its least reflective, post-psychological phase during the Reagan era. The man declared war on sex and drugs and all of a sudden everyone was an addict of something but addiction was a disease that could be cured if you made your penance and received absolution in the form of rehab and renunciation. Defining everything as a disease was the silver bullet that made so much else possible. With everyone taking the cure, finding the 12 step religion, bowing their sweaty heads in contrition, the last ounce of counterculture rebellion was effectively snuffed out. Drugs became less a poor way of dulling the edge of hard realities faced or of exploring the contours of the mind, than at best alternate booze and at worst performance enhancers. Without drugs, the nation turned its lonely eyes to other more pernicious forms of denial. Flags and fags and god and guns trump facing the consequences of our behavior in the world and taking responsibility for our actions as stewards of it.
You would have thought that after 8 years of W, a binge of blind faith and pure avoidance [it’s no coincidence that Bush is a reformed alcoholic etc. who now denies the world through the cocaine rush of evangelical patriotic zeal], that folks would have been willing to swear off some of this shit and they did, but only for the length of one hungover day at work. As soon as our buddy came along with a whiff of something good—no matter how fucking bad we knew it would be, no matter if we knew it would cost us our job, our wife, our nation’s wealth and standing in the world—all that was readily sacrificed because of a little taste of the good stuff. Forget that this shit is pure shred. Hooking on to Palin is like smoking carpet lint. She is so clearly rock bottom. The desperation is so clear because the reality is almost impossible to stave off any longer—no wonder they had to go outside the lower 48 to find someone out of touch enough to peddle this crap.
In the end and after much thought, I believe I know what killed David Foster Wallace. I have been afraid to analyze a man I never knew and who was so clearly a genius and therefore existed in a different sphere of logic and dreaming from the rest of us, but what the fuck. In the end what killed him was the fact that he could not escape his own culture. A white Christian boy who came of age in the 80s, he ultimately believed in rehab and redemption and that one could be free of dependence and addiction and become purged and pure and saved—or die trying. Wallace had been suffering from hardcore depression since college and had endured the life of his mind with the help of an early powerful anti-depressive drug he’d been taking since the late 80s. In the summer of 08 he tried to get free of that drug. He wanted to cleanse himself and be able to function within the contours of his beautiful mind unsullied by external taint. He killed himself that autumn. Some see his act as noble, trying to get free; to me it’s the same sad and reckless denial of our nature that has landed us here on the precipice of nothing good.
