DOES ANYBODY CARE?
Playing politics in the overdose capital of the world
When it was the most popular program on cable news, I tuned into Tucker Carlson’s show exactly once.
The night he interviewed Kanye West. RIP.
It was disturbing. It was dystopian. It was disheartening. It was dynamic. In short, it had all the hallmarks of compelling reality television. Just two Housewives, chopping it up.
I’m not a fan of Carlson. Never have been. Probably never will be.
And it’s not just the content. It’s the sanctimonious delivery. It’s hard to believe that anyone—let alone 3 million or more nightly viewers during the show’s run—would like being talked down to in such a manner. But I guess everyone has a kink.
I don’t care that he has been physically sober for over 20 years. Carlson is the epitome of personalities-over-principles pomp and pompousness that now color the deranged political conversation—on the right and left—in the United States today.
I have shingles, by the way. I’ve been laid up for days. So, in the last week, I’ve already watched Dune (running time 2 hours 35 minutes), Dune 2 (running time 2 hours 46 minutes), and Oppenheimer (running time 3 hours). While my skin killed me, I killed time. And I was desperate to kill more of it.
So I tuned in to see what the red-hatted, self-described hillbillies and salmon-slacked squash-playing set were up to at the Republican National Convention. And I basically watched the entire thing (running time interminable).
Sometime before Hulk Hogan and Kid Rock appeared on stage—yeah—out comes Tucker Carlson, all blue-of-blazer and punchable-of-face. The stylistic cognitive dissonance of this unholy trinity needled my Libra brain with the same merciless violence that herpes zoster has been needling my skin.
And here’s some of what he said:
“Lawmakers [are] stepping over the prostrate bodies of their fellow citizens OD’ing on drugs to go cast votes to send money to some foreign country. Yeah, actually. We’ve lost more Americans from drugs in the past four years than we lost in World War II. Yeah. Our bloodiest war, more than we lost in World War II. Does anybody care? It is pathetic. It is pathetic. And do you hear a single word from Washington about doing anything about it? We know where the drugs are coming from. We know the supply route. The US military spent billions bombing the Ho Chi Minh Trail. You don’t see our Commander-in-chief suggesting that we use our military to protect our country, or the lives of its citizens. No, that’s for Ukraine. And it’s too much, actually. It’s too insulting. It’s too insulting. It’s a middle finger in the face of every American. It’s a very clear statement, which is unmistakable. And that is, ‘We don’t care about you.’”
Yikes.
Brushing aside the Russian propaganda bit in which he creates a Putin-flavored binary between helping Ukraine and helping addicts, it does provoke some questions:
How much is an American life worth?
Would any politician ever answer that question with anything but “priceless?”
How much is the life of an American addict worth?
I’m not on board for turning the war on drugs into a hot war against Mexico even if I do think the cartels and the purportedly cartel-backed politicians like Enrique Peña Nieto, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, and Salvador Cienfuegos have a well-deserved precision strike missile coming to them. At least karmically.
Carlson, on the other hand, seems to be advocating for taking that $175 billion in military aid from Ukraine and converting it into $175 billion of military force to bomb the sh*t out of fentanyl (courtesy of the red, white, and blue). And he’s far from alone on that one.
Last year there were enough lethal doses of fentanyl confiscated in California to kill the entire global human population. Twice. Good luck with that.
What Carlson’s Trumpian ring kissing, Biden Harris baiting, and bad faith rhetorical device here also misses is that fentanyl itself doesn’t cause addiction.
The United States makes up 4% of the global population but accounts for 27% of the world’s overdose deaths. Let that little bit of American exceptionalism settle in. Naloxone vending machines are an actual thing now in red states and blue. It’s not a stretch to say that life in this beautiful country, God bless it, is a cause of addiction.
As renowned addiction expert, Gabor Maté writes, “under certain conditions of stress many people can be made susceptible to addiction, but if circumstances change for the better, the addictive drive will abate.”
It’s likely the “conditions” and “circumstances” on our side of the border are inherently more deadly dangerous than anything coming over it. Fentanyl, like any other addictive substance, is relatively harmless if there isn’t a market for it. The problem is on the demand side.
Put it this way: If fentanyl is the bullets, America is the AR-15.
What if that $175 billion of exported military might Carlson is referencing was used to make a change to the setting, to meaningfully alter the “circumstances” and “conditions” that make America not great, but desperately f*cking addicted?
How far could that money go toward preventing and treating the trauma of childhood abuse at the root of so many addiction stories? How far could that money go to giving American (mostly) males a newfound sense of purpose and pride? How far could that money go to help meet the most baseline needs of the Americans most likely to lose their jobs, their housing, their food security, the custody of their children, etc., that would instantly make them the most likely to succumb to the perils of addiction? Because some of those prostrate fellow citizens Carlson mentions weren’t addicts before they ended up on the street. For many, the street comes before the addiction does.
I recognize this might all be an overly simplistic binary. I mean, look at who I got it from. I’m no economist. But I do understand the concept of opportunity cost. And $175 billion could buy a lot of triage on the prevention front alone.
Bipartisan legislation like the Fentanyl Eradication and Narcotics Deterrence (FEND) Off Fentanyl Act that passed earlier this year is a start. (It’s also a mouthful. And FEND is giving D.A.R.E. which notably (and obviously) didn’t work).
Addiction is as intersectional as it gets. Those numbers Carlson references disproportionately affect Black men, for one. And America’s ongoing mass casualty addiction crisis doesn’t seem to be coming to an end anytime soon.
Does anybody care?
It’s a little perplexing to me that the conspiracy theory white supremacy guy formerly of Fox News is the first high-profile person I’ve ever heard even bother to ask. I suspect that many of the people that perhaps rightly dismiss and disdain Carlson without a second thought are the exact same people who—without a second thought—step over the bodies of their neighbors on their way to sip orange wine at brunch.
And perhaps that’s the most dystopian thing of all.
On TV, Tucker Carlson can rally the Russophile wing of the GOP by feigning empathy for those suffering from addiction in our streets. While IRL, a lot of my privileged, “progressive” peers can’t be bothered to rally themselves to even try.