Let’s pretend I got in the car this morning, drove the hour to Denver, shopped at one of the dozens of green cross stores doing a brisk over-the-counter business this day, provided identification to prove I was at least 21 years old, bought a quantity of herbal medicine along with some mechanism to smoke it, drove the hour back home, lit up the newly-legal substance, and began to hallucinate about the new year.
It could happen. Well, not likely. But let’s say I could bend time, distance, the snowy weather, and a will to enter an altered mental state this morning with false drugs. What unbounded world might I imagine under the influence of that smoky herb?
The first thing I’d dump out of my paradise would be all of the junk science. Every study that presumed an outcome, every conclusion drawn from suspicious facts, every fact constructed from tainted measurements, would instantly evaporate into thin air. Every derivative and related book, movie, journal, email, article, lawsuit, government agency, statute, regulation, non-governmental agency, think tank, funding group, issue litigant, activist, and militant, would be gone, never to trouble the world again.
Wow. That’s a big chunk of negatives to *Poof* unburden the world from.
I expect everyone has seen the Hunger Games movies or read the books, and has an image of Panem’s brilliant capitol city surrounded by impoverished districts that support it. Some folks have probably visited the real-life Panem capitol city of Washington D.C. and noticed its startling similarity to the look and feel of the fictional one. Block after block, mile after mile of massive architectures draped in marble colonnades house our government offices and the thousands of law firms, foundations, lobbyists, and issue peddlers who siphon public money out of the government, and redirect a fair amount of it back into the private fortunes of elected and appointed officials.
That “shining city on a hill?” I don’t think most Americans realize that federal bureaucrats actually built one for themselves, hundreds of miles around, with our money. Well, we’re never going to get the money back. Those massive buildings aren’t coming home to the pilfered districts that funded them. But I can at least stop the hemorrhaging. *Poof* Fairy dust twinkles to the ground as the shining city on their hill evaporates in my newly-legal altered mental state.
Realizing how much real good can be accomplished under a chemically altered imagination, my thought turns to casuistry, or has Hitchens frames it, crowd pleasing – the ability to speak without a conscience. Ooh this is a big one. *Poof* The fairy dust flies all over the world. Suddenly all politicians turn into statesman who speak with moral authority. Cheating of all forms simply stops. Lying fades into the fog of memory. Gamesmanship goes out of human evolution. Sharp dealing exits all marketplaces.
My imaginary world is really shaping up. But after another whiff of herbal false drugs, things don’t seem quite right yet. Ah yes, metaphysically based coercions – that is, all those people who use eschatological belief systems to justify some degree of force against other people. *Poof* they stand and exit my dream world in single file, destined for a place in Dante Alighieri’s seventh – quite hot and close to Satan – circle of Hell, whence the most exquisite tortures for all eternity await them. I sweep up the excess fairy dust which is starting to accumulate.
Okay, just a couple more details to clean up in my imaginary paradise. All of the federal, state, county and local statutes and regulations that don’t deal with at least recklessly negligent crimes are hereby repealed. *Poof*, recycled paper bins all over the country fill up, and then magically dissolve into sparkly dusty piles.
With many of the negatives of bureaucratic culture now magically purged from the world, great overhead weights are lifted from our daily existence. The fever has broken. The disease cured. Mankind’s fetters gone in a twinkle. Now, the fun part begins.
B_Imperial