17 March 2009: "What is the most authentic body part 2 do blow off of?"

This post is about post-colonialism. During the dismantling of colonial regimes and the sabotage that accompanied the transition from the departing colonial oligarchs to their native successors, various paramilitary powers and quasi-mafioso crime rings sprang to life to fill the power void left behind by the departing raj, as it were. Drugs, of course, have been rendered illegal in the so-called developed nations precisely to give these brigands, frequently rightist agents, leverage over their country's nascent and struggling left-wing leaderships as the illicit trade establishes itself as a steady flow of funding. We have seen how this plays out in Central America and Colombia, Bolivia and Vietnam, and most recently, Afghanistan. It has been a standard move in subjugation and exploitation playbook since the British perpetrated their opium wars in China.

Carles' innovation in this interventionary text is to recontextualize the struggle between the dominating and dominated nations as a relationship among individuals within those dominating nations:

Sometimes I wonder what I’m looking for in a friend/’bff.’ A lot of ppl say that a true friend would ’suck the venom out of ur butt’ if u were bitten by a poisonous snake. However, I don’t think I will ever be in the desert, so I think my ultimate friend would let me ‘do blow’ off any part of their body.

Once the developed countries provided protection -- sucking the venom, metaphorically speaking. Now what's done in the imperial exploiter nations -- false friends by any definition -- is the sucking up of the black-market exports from the their "ultimate friends" in exploited postcolonial nations. No compromising position between these parties is to be considered too shameful.