Seems like good advice...I got it once from an Uncle of mine, who saged "Partying's cool...but if you know somebody really addicted to narcotics...really addicted...it doesn't matter how long you've known them...shit will come up missing from your house. They will lie...no matter what...".
Reading about Rush's latest, vilest, septic spew made me think of this. Having known a fair amount of people in my life that have been horribly addicted to one thing or another, I know this to be true. But it isn't only the fact that Rush's oxy-obsessions have famously led to some scrapes with the law that have me thinking about pharmaceuticals, because his presumably sober ilk all talk the same talk.
What's really has the NeoCon apologists, the administration, and those out in America addicted is not drugs in the street sense, or even drugs in the Walgreens sense, but drugs in the metaphysical sense. Derrida, in his ecstatic early masterstroke "Plato's Pharmacy" (see the complete in Dissemination) goes wild and wooly on Phaedrus, undermining the its very metaphysical distinctions, its hard and fast rules, black and white, etc: In short, shining a little objectivity into an untenable metaphysical sphere.
Derrida explains the use of the Greek "pharmakon" in this dialogue, noting that word is contradictory by definition; On one hand, it means "drugs/medicine" or "cure", and on the other hand, it means "poison". Thus it would seem that drugs, which exist in a metaphysical space which is synomous with the latter where the law is concerned, vis a vis, street drugs, and synomous with the former where institutions of medicine and commerce are concerned: "I know it seems like a lot, twenty five Vicodin ES a day, but I got a prescription, and its not like I'm a street junkie or anything...". One goes to prison, one goes to rehab, or, if one happens to poor, one will go to prison regardless...
But returning to the idea of the pharmakon, and the fact that Limbaugh is shuffling addiction with a nasty disposition but his ilk may not be, the metaphysical placement of this idea is dependent on the proximity of the subject to the metaphysical, or rather, who is thinking, writing or uttering the word and all the moral, spiritual or ideological baggage they bring to it, because, for this person, this baggage is not baggage at all, but obvious, and Platonically, absolutely True, even if it is objectively Not True, verifiably Not True.
In this way, the NeoCons, the Administration, and those out in America are all strung out on the metaphysical torpor of the pharmakon, the ideological fix derived from poisoning the United States to save America. The Constitution recognizes and allows for the free exchange of ideas to reach a reasonable middle ground. However, for Limbaugh, the metaphysical America, the construction which exists as ideology of the right wing, is the only objective, even as it is entirely subjective, and ruinous.
Derrida, in his discussion of Phaedrus, is interested in the myth of Pharmacia and Orithyia. Pharmacia (derived from Pharmakon) leads his friend astray, and while Derrida goes on to discuss how Socrates uses this myth to discuss writing, it think it is appropos here, not only because of the specific narrative details of the myth but because it is a myth, a construction used to explain an incomprehensible world, such as the Judeo-Christian view of the expulsion from the Garden and Eden. Inherent in such a myth is the idea that the world was different and better in a nebulous past, and this is the myth of America, and all of Limbaugh's rhetoric is a description of how and why we are exiled from this Paradise. In this way, Limbaugh et al. are both in the myth (Pharmacia) and the myth itself, for they lead astray the frustrated and confused Orithyias with their thetoric of the myth by proving it is not myth, citing themselves as proof of their own truth claims. This myth making is the ideological torpor, and when they come down, or come to, they face a crisis of needing to "cure" existential angst. Orithyias tune back it, and symbiotically, as a pusher to a junkie, Limbaugh is there, his "works" ready...The myth is self perpetuating, as is the need.
The "cure" is poison, but the poison is also the cure in that the recognition of the pharmakon as such becomes the vehicle of liberation from it. When the myth is taken back from its lofty, golden metaphysical space, it becomes again physical, actual, and human, just as when the addict ceases to want the dream over the real, and quits using-Orithyias finds his way back. Limbaugh may never kick, but we may yet be cured, must be cured, or we will die. The junkkon will perpetuate.
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