A Painful Case

Wednesday's Times front-page story, “Ohio CountyLosing Its Young to Painkillers’ Grip,” illustrates a sad and strangely futuristic trend through the description of a single, painful case. The first thing that grabs you about the piece is the arresting headline. Alcohol and drugs are not uncommon news items, but it’s less common to talk about painkillers. Soma was the fictional drug that helped people flee a harsh reality in Brave New World (1932). But the very real OxyContin has become all the rage in Portsmouth, in Ohio’s Scioto County, where it’s taken not for the physical pain for which it’s normally prescribed but apparently to cure the pain of living. The Times piece tells the story of Nina Mannering: “In January 2010, Ms. Mannering was killed less than a mile from her parents’ house. A man broke into the house where she was staying with a 65-year-old veteran who had access to prescriptions and shot them both, looking for pills, the police said. She was 29. Her daughter, who was 8 at the time, watched.” The Times describes the Mannerings as occupying a deceptively “pretty hollow” where “11 houses on their country road were dealing the drug (including a woman in her 70s called Granny)....” Nina’s brother Chad eventually became an addict and the parents ultimately exhausted their savings “on legal fees and rehab programs.” The way Times reporter Sabrina Tavernise describes the story is very different from your ordinary shoot ‘em up, crack and cocaine tale. “Judy Mannering,” she writes, “discovered her daughter’s body at dusk, bathed in the light of a flickering, soundless television.” This telling of Nina Mannering’s demise reads less like a murder scene than like an account of someone who became overly sedated at a funeral.

Diasporic Dining: Episode III

Every 8 seconds a new baby is born in the United States. That’s 15 babies in the last two minutes. But have you asked yourself how many new Dunkin’ Donuts have opened in that span of time? Even if you figure in a much shorter gestation period, Dunkin’ Donuts’s parents must fuck like bunnies. The proliferation of Dunkin’ Donuts has unleashed a jihad of food fundamentalists willing to throw themselves from the frying pan into the fire.

Since Dunkin’ Donuts is not a form of organic life and doesn’t contain DNA or the messenger protein RNA (which would enable it to transform into a retrovirus), what accounts for its enormous growth? The answer may be found in the poppy fields of Afghanistan, for donuts are a mood-altering, addictive substance.

The glazed variety is the OxyContin of donuts. It is a painkiller, which when inhaled can produce feelings of euphoria. Then there are the crullers, with their rococo architecture, the iced strawberry with sprinkles, the custard filled, the chocolate covered, the sugar dusted, and the spicy cinnamon. They sound like characters from a sequel to Debbie Does Dallas.—“Spicy’s in the sack with Dusty!”

There was the thousand years of Rome, the Napoleonic Dynasty, and the British Empire. What kind of global dominion is brewing in Dunkin’ Donuts’s famed coffee? Is it a nation-state, a fiefdom, or a monarchy, like the House of Windsor (or the House of Pancakes)? Let’s face it: Dunkin’ Donuts is as ubiquitous as water and potentially more plentiful. It has cracked the space-time continuum by being in all places at all times, impervious to past or present, producing the accord between the general and special theories of relativity that Einstein failed to deliver.

The creators of Dunkin’ Donuts have no beef with science or culture. They have nothing to prove. Whether or not Dunkin’ Donuts conforms to the laws of thermodynamics, quantum mechanics or string theory is irrelevant. It’s like the guy who says, “I can’t complain,” when you ask him how things are going. Dunkin’ Donuts doesn’t aspire to greatness, only triumph. Armed with hot coffee and jelly donuts, it is now on the verge of an exploit that eluded both Hitler and Napoleon—conquering the Russian winter.