We can’t talk directly about what is going on. We could, but it might attract attention. Amanda is taking a late Saturday approach to the morning oversight duty, but we know the rules. If you notice some of the crap going on, there is the real opportunity to be censured and even lose the chance of a cot in the country out of the rain.

That is a relatively new phenomenon here in the United States, not the sleeping outside part which appears to be gaining in popularity, but the rest of it. We are not supposed to notice the change. If you have, and mention it even in passing, you have doubtless heard one of those dismissive family comments that go: “You are listening to too much Fox!’ Is usually said with a tinge of contempt. We agree with that, of course, since the Fauxians are part of all this, working in some fashion crafted into the strands of Narrative we are supposed to believe.

But not believing what has been denied is the usual state of things now. The mildly entertaining one this week involved families that occupy positions of trust. We took a local poll. Our favorite is the recent popularity of an old phrase meaning “believable lies,” since that is entwined in our business, too. It popped up again as a thing called “plausible deniability,” which is to say “nothing to see here, move along.”

So we all moved along, although that story is moving still. One of the other stories that it appears acceptable to notice is the one about what is killing American citizens. No, not the tens of thousands of old people in the big pandemic thing. We already left that behind without a single hearing. With the predictable cries about other horrors, it gets tiresome. Of late, the wild shooting deaths occurring in our big cities was briefly noticeable as called “Gun Violence.”

We won’t quibble with the term, since the “violence” does involve firearms. But mostly the hail of bullets is rained down by guns in the hands of people for whom possession is already illegal. “Common Sense” laws are already in effect which should prevent such usage, but of course that would imply enforcement of those laws. That is the part we are not supposed to notice, since the perpetrators have been released early from jail because of some other crisis we are assured is real but which we don’t quite understand.

If you understand the goal of it all, it would seem to be the confiscation of all the hundreds of millions of guns already floating around. Although there is a Constitutional means of limiting what were considered inalienable rights, we would have to talk about the ‘who’ and ‘why’ things must be changed. That would involve subjecting some of our current situation to discussion and debate. And that, obviously is not how we roll these days. We deny it by smothering it.

So let’s talk about something serious that appears to have no constituency at the moment. Discussing where it comes from, how it gets here and who benefits from its distribution is discouraged, since we would theoretically have to do something about the number one killer of American adults. In 2020, fentanyl killed more young and middle-aged adults than car accidents, suicides, guns, heart attacks, cigarettes, alcohol and obesity.

Fentanyl. Reportedly, that is part of what got Mr. George Floyd in trouble, but that is part of something else we are not supposed to talk about.

That drug is pretty amazing stuff. It is supposed to be a buzz equivalent to heroin. We don’t know if any of us have taken it, since it is commonly used as an additive in other things due to its power and tiny effective dosage. To give you an idea of the raw power, it is lethal when taken in a dose as small as two milligrams.

We are not a metric-based culture, so we asked one of the interns to look it up to give us an idea of relative size. The intern was blown away when she returned from a reliable power source with satellite access and informed us, somewhat breathlessly, that a mosquito weighs just about two milligrams.

That should serve to give us a clue about the stuff we are permitted to talk about. Something that is now the number one killer of adult Americans. Numero uno. Smaller than a tiny, if irritating, bug. But it apparently comes in big packages.

For something new, it would appear to be a dramatic public health crisis, but we have just exhausted that line of panic, at least for a while. That last one cost many of our kids two years of education, not that we have much emphasis on what we used to know as the “three Rs.” We can talk about guns only to the point that we have to talk about who is using them. We talked about the sensation of the car driven through a holiday parade only until we got to the actual identity of the individual, and then it fell under social taboo.

That is something else that is only permitted to be mentioned in one context. At least fentanyl is one of those small stories. Until we notice. So we thought we should mention it while we can. While we can still use the deniability line, whether it is plausible or not.

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