I don’t know just where I’m going
But I’m goin’ to try for the kingdom if I can
‘Cause it makes me feel like I’m a man
When I put a spike into my vein
Then I tell you things aren’t quite the sameWhen I’m rushing on my run
And I feel just like Jesus’ son
And I guess I just don’t know
And I guess that I just don’t knowI have made very big decision
I’m goin’ to try to nullify my life
‘Cause when the blood begins to flow
When it shoots up the dropper’s neck
When I’m closing in on deathYou can’t help me not you guys
All you sweet girls with all your sweet talk
You can all go take a walk
And I guess I just don’t know
And I guess I just don’t knowI wish that I was born a thousand years ago
I wish that I’d sailed the darkened seas
On a great big clipper ship
Going from this land here to that
I put on a sailor’s suit and capAway from the big city
Where a man cannot be free
Of all the evils in this town
And of himself and those around
Oh, and I guess I just don’t know
Oh, and I guess I just don’t knowHeroin, be the death of me
Heroin, it’s my wife and it’s my life
Because a mainer to my vein
Leads to a center in my head
And then I’m better off than deadWhen the smack begins to flow
Then I really don’t care anymore
About all the Jim-Jims in this town
And everybody putting everybody else down
And all of the politicians makin’ crazy sounds
All the dead bodies piled up in mounds, yeah

Wow, that heroin is in my blood
And the blood is in my head
Yeah, thank God that I’m good as dead
Ooohhh, thank your God that I’m not aware
And thank God that I just don’t care
And I guess I just don’t know
And I guess I just don’t know

Dear Mommies and Daddies–Lou Reed may not be your cup of tea, we know dears, it’s all so very unsettling to think about those people–but consider this message found in our mailbox this sunny morning in Happy Valley at Washington.

We are much indebted to Delancyplace.com for this useful thought for the day.  We now quote them until, duly noted, cease quoting.

Delancyplace.com writes us about that which is, beyond debate, or even reasonable counter-argument, the biggest and most socially influential, and corrosive, business in the entire world…the biggest business in the entire world–DRUGS, Mom and Dad–attend here:

In today’s selection — the explosion of narcotics use in America after World War II:”The Cold War inadvertently set the stage for the return of narcotics, in devastating strength. For the most part, the Mafia had been bitter enemies of Mussolini, and several men who would become leaders of the American underworld, such [as] Joe Bonanno, were driven into exile by the Fascists. During the Allied Occupation, many of the local mafiosi were returned to power by the Americans, who were in need of a leadership that was equally free of Fascist and Communist taint. This resurrection of the Sicilian Mafia coincided with the deportation of some four hundred gangsters, including Lucky Luciano, who introduced their local counterparts to the lucrative narcotics trade. The Sicilians often worked with Corsican gangsters in Marseilles, where the ‘French Connection’ soon supplied 85 to 90 percent of the heroin that arrived in the United States. The French government did little to discourage it: de Gaulle was delighted to thwart American policy, and the problem of addiction was not significant in France at the time. More sinister was the fact that the narcotics trade helped finance French military and intelligence efforts in its about-to-be former colonies, especially in Indochina, where the ‘Golden Triangle’ was the world’s great opiate producer, along with the ‘Golden Crescent’ of the Near East, from Turkey to Pakistan.”After the war, heroin use was largely confined to a few, narrow sub-cultures — among jazz musicians, most famously — from which it spread, like a rumor or a fad, in a geometric progression. The drug was seen as part of a lifestyle that opted out of the mainstream, whether as a protest against the specific exclusion of blacks from postwar opportunity, or as part of the larger, looser cynicism of the counterculture. Some junkies started because they were shut out of society, others because they didn’t want to join it, and still others because they believed it explained how Charlie Parker played or Billie Holiday sang. Whether the pipe dream appealed to them or the American dream didn’t, once people started, their original reasons didn’t matter. As heroin spread through the larger black community, especially in the northern ghettos, the price went up and the quality went down, even as the addict population exploded. Property crimes skyrocketed to pay for habits, and then violent crimes followed, not only in the competition between dealers, but also disciplinary and debt-collecting functions of the gangs. By the 1960s, changes in the welfare system had accelerated the already extraordinary chaos of the ghettos, in its disastrous effects on patterns of marriage and work, which remain the two greatest bulwarks against criminality. Heroin created thousands of rich killers and millions of derelicts, whores, and thieves. In short, it created crime as we know it.

“In a sense, heroin was one of many white appropriations of black culture, following the same routes of imitation as the blues and hip-hop. But if heroin moved up from the ghetto, cocaine reached down from the white upper classes, offering a mass-market taste of glamour, like designer jeans. Through the mid-eighties, most media coverage of cocaine had an envious quality, as if the chief problem with the party favor of Hollywood parties and Studio 54 was that it was too expensive. Though official anti-drug rhetoric had been fairly constant for decades, it was only in 1986, after the death of basketball star Len Bias, and after crack began to burn through the cities, that action backed up the words. Until then, there was little attention paid to cocaine at the federal level: in 1985, of the hundred agents in the New York office of the DEA, only ten were assigned to cocaine cases, and in South Florida, where the drug had become a seven-billion-dollar industry, the DEA had to have a bake sale to raise money. In other words, until fairly recently, the war on drugs was remarkable for its lack of troops and ammunition, though the casualties certainly abounded.

“The modern cocaine business began when George Jung met Carlos Lehder in federal prison, in 1974. Jung, who was from a white, working-class New England background, had developed a sophisticated marijuana business, in which he bought drugs by the ton in Mexico and flew them all over the country in small planes. Carlos Lehder was a car thief from Colombia, who would join with Pablo Escobar and the Ochoa family to form the Medellin cartel. Jung had a hippie’s soft-minded indulgence toward drug use, believing it to be kind of harmless and sort of a civil right, whereas the fanatical Lehder saw cocaine as the atomic bomb he was going to drop on America. Cocaine, which had been smuggled by the pound, now began to enter the country by the ton, and the Colombians introduced a degree of violence to the trade that would have made the Mafia blanch. Cops were killed by the hundreds in Medellin, and entire families were murdered, sometimes by the ‘necktie’ method, in which the throat was cut and the tongue pulled out to dangle down the chest. Sometime in the early 1980s, someone invented crack, and business got even bigger than anyone could have imagined.

“Cocaine used to cost as much as the best champagne, but crack made the price drop to that of a pack of cigarettes. People fought to buy it and sell it, with more and bigger guns that they sometimes shot without even looking. By the early 1990s, the New York City annual homicide rate had passed two thousand, of which half were estimated to be drug-related. Crack ravaged entire neighborhoods and seemed to claim as many women as men; heroin took a lot of fathers, and now crack took mothers, too. If heroin made the streets unsafe, crack killed people who hadn’t even left their homes, and mothers in the ghettos practiced a kind of fire drill, sending the kids under their beds or into the bathtub at the sound of gunfire. Even as the crack epidemic started to level off, the Colombians began to produce heroin of exceptional quality.

“We’re not back where we started, by any means, but quitting time — for addict, dealer, cop — is nowhere in sight.”

Author: Edward Conlon
Title: Blue Blood
Publisher:  Riverhead Books
Date: Copyright 2004 by Edward Conlon
Pages: 172-174

Blue Blood

by Edward Conlon by Riverhead Trade

Paperback ~ Release Date: 2005-04-05

If you wish to read further: Buy Now

 

 

 

We very much thank Delancyplace.com for this most arresting, and very troubling, missive of today and here cease to quote them.

 

Drugs are but a part of a fairly short list of issues that most need to be addressed in the American polity–fast behind the forced repatriation of all jobs now held overseas by US-flagged corporations and putting an abrupt end to the American war machine.  None of these issues are ever discussed in Americans political campaigns, debates or flighty television poli-talk shows–ever.

This is the opening salvo of a candidacy that will flood the nation with good jobs, end the war machine and both legalize and give all drugs away free. Yes, free drugs.

Why free drugs, Mom and Dad?  Because the polluting effects of the biggest business on earth cannot possibly have failed to infect and pollute the highest levels of politics, government ministries, the army, the police and all others charged with stopping that which cannot be stopped.

We will visit this issue and the others named, as no one else will, in notes to you, very soon to come.

In the meantime, in between time, we get endlessly to listen to, as Lou has sung for us, “all the politicians making crazy sounds,” about subjects of no consequence, while assiduously ignoring the comparatively few issues that do have consequence.

Meanwhile, Lou, unfamiliar with Jesus, or ambition, or other desire, or anything else of true value, lives myopically and many, many of your kiddies, Mom and Dad, do as well…they are….just.. waiting…on their man:   comme ca:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Cb_LyiuC-FEI’m waiting for my man

I’M WAITING FOR MY MAN

BY

LOU REED

Got 26 dollars in my hand
Up to Lexington 125
feelin’ sick and dirty
for a day and a life
Huh, I’m waiting for my man

Hey white boy, what you doin’ uptown
Hey white boy, you chasin’ my women around
Pardon me sir, it’s furthest from my mind
I’m just waitin’ for a dear-dear friend of mine
I’m waiting for my man, come on

Here he comes, he’s all dressed in black
PR shoes and a big straw hat
He’s never early, he’s always late
first thing you learn is that you always gotta wait
I’m waiting for my man

Up to a brownstone, up three flights of stairs
Everybody’s pinned you and nobody cares
He’s got the works, gives you sweet taste
then you gotta split because you got no time to waste
I’m waiting for my man

Hey baby, don’t you holler, don’t you ball and shout
I’m feeling good, I’m gonna work it on out
I’m feeling good, feeling so fine
until tomorrow, but that’s just some other time
I’m waiting for my man
I’m waiting for my man
I’m waiting for my man
man-man-man-man-man-man-man

AMEN

John Daniel Begg

At

Washington DC

Tuesday,  26th March, Anno Domini Nostri Iesu Christi, 2013