We’re one week into the Biden administration, and I can confirm that my colleague Reiss Becker was correct in his evaluation that the President is a “political opioid.” At the time, I thought that my fellow columnist was speaking figuratively to justify voting for Donald Trump. Now I can see that Becker was being literal—Biden has drugged America.
My experience with drugs and politics runs deep; I once smoked weed with Kamala Harris. Even considering the time that the future-Veep and I consumed edibles together, I have never felt so sedated as I do these days.
I think that these feelings started during the inauguration. As Biden placed his wrinkled hand upon his family’s bible, I felt all the acute pain dissipate from my body. The octogenarian’s call for unity reached the receptors in my nervous system like a drug prescribed as recovery for wisdom tooth removal. With each carfentanilic executive order, I eased further into comfort. By the time Biden phoned Emmanuel Macron this week, my political opioid tolerance had kicked in and the effects were waning, but at least my political cough was strongly politically suppressed.
I know that my fellow Americans feel the same. Who among us can not say that we’ve experienced political itchiness, nausea, respiratory depression, constipation, and euphoria alike over the last week?
I also agree with Becker that Biden is “a warm glass of milk” (in addition to being a political Vicodin). But luckily I’ve been taking Mitch McConnell, who is a political Lactaid, and my stomach hasn’t been acting up as much as I would have expected during this administration.
Some other realizations I’ve had this week: Nancy Pelosi is political ketamine. She causes increased heart rate and blood pressure, nausea, vomiting, numbness, depression, amnesia, hallucinations and potentially fatal respiratory problems. She is injected into horses and other animals as a form of veterinary anesthesia. What a rush! Ted Cruz is a seditious acid trip. Ingestion is known to result in hallucination, including the belief that a pedophilic cabal plotting against Trump is being slowly exposed on 4chan.
Bernie Sanders is political liquor and AOC is medical grade political marijuana; taking them together results in a sick socialist cross-fade. Not for the faint of heart.
It would seem, at face value, impossible for politicians to be drugs. Surely, politicians are just those who are professionally involved in politics as elected officials whose policymaking is responsible for impacting their constituents' lives and experiences. Becker must be figurative, for if we are all being drugged by the Biden administration and our nation’s political system at large, how could we trust the very perception which allows our rational evaluation of politics and drugs to function? For the sake of preserving the mutually accepted base of perception upon which our rational discourse as writer and reader must be founded, I, in turn, must be dismissed as some nonsense chronicler whose reportage in this paper’s esteemed opinion section is tied to his own search for vanity and attention through the publication of headlines that will generate clicks.
But alas, my current hangover suggests otherwise; I suspect that yours does too. For what is participation in our polity but a literal addiction—one to the frequent consumption of that which harms us yet repeatedly promises to alleviate our suffering, one to the reliance upon a dealer whose monopoly on and enforcement of violence ensures its users’ continued reliance upon it, one to the comparison of public servants whose collective inaction in regards to a pandemic has killed over 420,000 Americans to different narcotics? But then again, how could we reasonably expect Congress to respond to such a crisis after a good huff of Andrew Cuomo?
This is all to say—as with any high, there are only two real options to treat this situation. We can ride the high of the Biden administration, numbing our pain at the risk of adverse side effects of the drugs overprescribed to us due to the pharmaceutical industry’s monied interests. One day, perhaps we can sober up and stop expecting politicians working within oppressive systems to offer us real relief from the systemic problems we face. Alternatively, we can have a huge panic attack and make our friends call EMS on us.
Either way, Hillary Clinton is poppers.
Jordan Diamond is a Trinity senior. His column “Diamond in the rough” runs on alternate Wednesdays.
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