A Tragedy Made in America + A Musician Made in England , A Photographer Made in Cambridge
This week: The backstory on the opioid nightmare with Jessie Gaeta, Kathleen Frydl, Michael Clune, Michael Patrick MacDonald, and Donna Murch. Listen today at 2 pm on WBUR or anytime on our website. And you can read a transcript of the show here (thank you Kevin!).
MM: We’re not in Concord anymore, Toto. I for one have been avoiding these stories; they’re just too awful. But I learned a whole lot this week, thanks to Zach Goldhammer’s terrific work digging up voices who tell a story you don’t read much about in the daily dispatches from Opioid Alley. There’s the neoliberal angle (drink) and the deregulated market for pain meds that kills its customers and keeps growing (now that’s a business model); the modern opium war angle (deadly synthetics like fentanyl imported from China); and the very different racial story than the one we were fed in the 90’s during the crack epidemic when it was about black victims, not white, fueled by the rage response, not the empathy one.
ZG: Some credit for this show should also go to OS producer emeritus Max Larkin. Max urged us to do a show on the crisis that didn’t have the desaturated David Fincher feel of so much somber, sober, and straight reporting on drugs. You have to take into account the appeal of these drugs in order to really understand their consequences.
This doesn’t mean going full Gonzo—hard to imagine Chris dangling a Hunter S. Thompson-style cigarette-holder or Susan Coyne going for the Ralph Steadman treatment—but it does mean you need to find people who can speak honestly and openly about their initial highs as well as their later lows.
The memoirist Michael W. Clune ended up being our guide to heroin’s euphoric phase as well as the “deep memory disease” that sets in later. It’s a hard line to walk as a writer: describing positive experiences—with appropriate literary style and flair—while still balancing their psychic toll. As the New Yorker critic Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes in his review of Clune’s book White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin, the junkie memoir genre is almost always morally fraught:
Any critic with a sense of social responsibility .. has got to have some qualms about conceding that Michael W. Clune’s “White Out: The Secret Life of Heroin” is as good as it is. Clune, an English professor at Case Western Reserve, has been clean for ten years. This memoir has been put out by the publishing wing of Hazelden, a network of addiction-treatment centers, so it’s at least prima facie a warning about the zombie preoccupation of the heroin user. The trouble is that Clune’s dreamily exact writing — sensual and hilarious — makes an exactingly dreamy argument for smack. It must be terrible for someone from his previous life — the people he stole from, deceived, and sold out — to read this, but now one would be hard put to think of a book that makes you so glad the writer has ruined so many years of his life in heroin’s thrall.
This might be overstating the case—it’s hard to really envy any of the experiences Clune describes—but what is striking about listening to Clune is his emotional honesty about the high, the surrounding “dope white” mythology, and the deeply disappointing reality.
You can watch a video clip from his interview and decide for yourself what to make of his narrative:
A slightly more plainspoken answer to the question “why opioids” came from one of our local Boston literary heroes, Michael Patrick MacDonald.
“Heroin works” he says for trauma and PTSD. There is no perfect chemical fix for poverty, violence and fear, but for many who grew up in the impoverished, gang-plagued Irish neighborhood of South Boston in the 90s—just after Whitey fled the city—opioids provided temporary cover from past horrors. MacDonald sees the need to replace this ultimately deadly and debilitating remedy with something safer. a talking cure, or written accounts of communal trauma. That was how MacDonald first made his name—as the author of the family memoir All Souls—and he encourages other trauma survivors to surface their own stories and narratives as a form of healing. It works he says.
Some of MacDonald’s ideas parallel Donna Murch’s call for a “Truth & Reconciliation”-style process for black neighborhoods that have been torn up by the drug wars. But Murch’s analysis is grounded in policy more than psychology. As staunch critic of the carceral state, her concern is about getting non-violent drug offenders out of jail and rolling back the hypermilitarized police forces that put them there in the first place. A big piece of her study on the crack epidemic in LA looks at community groups who develop an alternative means of addressing the drug crisis instead of calling in the feds.
Still, the star of our show may have been the guest who took the big picture view. Kathleen Frydl’s Medium piece on the “oxy electorate” first turned up in a thread Max and I were following on Jed Purdy’s wall. It might be one of the best pieces written about the opioid addiction and voting patterns in the 2016. But Fydl’s scope goes beyond that. One of the most interesting points she made, in my mind, is the fact that the drug trade is a globalize trade network just like any other. The expansion of free trade through NAFTA greatly increased the flow of illicit narcotics into the U.S.
As Mary mentions, spotting the neoliberal critique theme in any given OS show could easily turn into a drinking game— we might even risk being scolded by Jon Chait—but Frydl makes a strong case for the relevance of the term. Check out her piece in Dissent Magazine for more. Frydl also encourages you to reach out to her directly on Twitter (@kfrydl) if you have any questions about her work.
Next Week: Billy Bragg
Coming soon: we’ve got a really exciting and fun interview with the great, left-wing British rocker Billy Bragg. He’ll be talking primarily about his latest book, Roots, Radicals and Rockers: How Skiffle Changed the World, which outlines the musical prequel to the British Invasion. But we also got him to open up on lots of other topics—particularly on the broad, 60 year transnational history of what he calls “music of dissent:” the sound of real rebellion in politics, culture, and love.
I first came to know Billy Bragg in middle school through the Mermaid Avenue albums—the great Wilco-assisted recordings of Woody Guthrie’s unpublished lyrics. More recently, I felt a strong connection to Bragg’s early political music from the ‘80s. I told Bragg that his version of “There Is Power In a Union”— which comes in at the end of Pride, the 2014 movie about the UK miners strike and their radical LGBT allies—made me cry. He said he cried at the end of the film too. He knew the film’s protagonist—the gay labor activist Mark Ashton— and knew what the final credit sequence would say about his fate:
For me, the film showed, as Bragg says, “what real solidarity work can do for you”; especially when left-progressives aren’t caught up in circuitous debates about the relevance of class versus identity.
Stay tuned for more updates on the Bragg show, and please send us your favorite tracks and Billy B jams that you want to hear included in the final program!
Don’t Miss: The B-Side
MM: Errol Morris doesn’t subject portrait photographer Elsa Dorfman to the interrotron, and good thing. Elsa is is his good friend (and ours; so is he); his documentary is a loving portrait and made me proud to be an owner of a 20x24 Polaroid of my husband and kids. The B-Side is playing at the Kendall Theatre for just another week or so.
Reading:
Josh Green’s book about Steve Bannon is sure to be a best-seller, but it may do Bannon in finally. Trump is said to be furious about it, and Bannon is on the outs lately (he lost the “Mooch” battle in a public way). Green draws a portrait of the most cynical, base kind of co-dependent political marriage: Bannon rescues Trump’s campaign, and Trump becomes a vessel for Bannon’s populist/nationalist ideas, and only after the Sarah Palin and Michelle Bachmann road tests. As big a deal as Trump’s victory was, an even bigger prize might be the credit he gets for doing what so many others couldn’t — he vanquished the Clinton dynasty, reviviving the vast right wing conspiracy with right wing media and Robert Spencer’s money, finishing the job once and for all. Green says “the whole saga of Bannon is every bit as strange and unlikely as that of Trump. He’s like an organism that could have grown and blossomed under a precise and exacting set of conditions — a black orchid.
Still Reading: Moby Dick
The Open Source book club is about a third of the way through the book, give or take. There’s time to catch up; it’s a page-turner and a hell of a yarn. We’re looking towards a late August or early September show. Send us all your ideas!
Ahoy!
Mary, Zach and the OS crew
