IVIV (12): Straight is Hip

[kelber at mindspring.com]

The equilibrium GF maintains between profiteering from pushing drugs and profiteering from drug rehab, kind of reminds me of the US government's underfunding of schools, overfunding of prisons, and attempts to privatize both systems for maximum profit.

Laura

-----Original Message-----
>From: Michael Bailey <michael.lee.bailey at gmail.com>

>> " ... if the Golden Fang could get its customers strung out, why not turn around and also sell them a program to help them kick?  Get them coming and going, twice as much revenue and no worries about new customers -- as long as American life was something to be escaped from, the cartel could always be sure of a bottomless pool of new customers."
>>
>
>
>that is pretty horrible, on a par with the abuse of Japonica
>but stretched over a whole population.
>"American life [as] something to be escaped from"
>is something that Doc is partly engaging in
>(both the experience of it and the attempt to escape):
>the "childhood that he never really wanted to escape
>from" is put up in opposition to it, and also his rather
>constant partaking of hemp combustion byproducts.
>
>Doc's thinking is none too fluent here
>(if GF felt a threat to their heroin market
>from their rehab efforts, I think the correct marketing
>term would be "churn" or "customer retention"
>rather than "new customers") but he's hitting upon
>a big idea as to the extent of the GF.  Basically
>the notion is that it's so big it includes both the
>underworld and the establishment.
>
>Whether it's demonstrably true in the world at large,
>it does seem to be so within the world of IV, and the
>forces that Doc has to range against GF - personal
>friendships, family ties, old music, chemically aided
>intuition - are themselves implicated in many of the
>same problems.  But there's something like a Turing
>test of sympathetic subjectivity that Doc manages
>to pass, imho.
>