Theological Disputation
Madame Levy left an offhand comment lying in the path on my daily blog stroll:
“Madeline” has left the building. She disappeared for a few days then resurfaced. She’s going back to the clinic today. But like I’ve said before, it’s one of those clinics for rich people where they medicate them to the eyeballs and then trust them to come and go. There’s the ping-pong table. Cocaine is truly evil. My kids are playing scrabble on a French board…
I wonder if French Scrabble comes with accented vowels. “Non! Non! ‘Lycée’ requires the accent aigu. Pas de grave! Pas de grave!” It would give the game a whole new dimension for dispute. But I’m not here to dispute matters relating to ping-pong or Scrabble, pursuits in which I retain an amateur status at best. Non. It is in the matter of cocaine and whether it can be said to be evil that I feel a leading.
For Leslie, the observation that “Cocaine is truly evil” was offhand, just some shitting and cooing from a perch on a blog. Contextually, it’s difficult to discern whether it’s even Madame Levy who is making the observation. Perhaps it’s a disembodied voice from a “treatment center,” and it really doesn’t matter. It’s not Leslie I feel this compulsion to engage, but rather the concept of cocaine as evil.
I do not think cocaine is evil, any more than I think plutonium is in itself evil. I think it is a medium for evil. Like agar in a petri dish, it feeds evil. Delicious cultures of evil grow out of the dish and subsume their surroundings in a miasma, a toxic backwash, a flourishing culture of evil that would have remained in its spore state without the addition of the nutrient.
I have witnessed these evil growths. I have seen death come at an early age to some who found themselves falsely nourished in the culture of evil emerging off the cocaine substrate. Evil exists, and cocaine helps to crystallize its existence, to magnify it.
This I believe.
For meatier theological discourse today, I commend you to the blog of AKMA, whose scribblings on a napkin with Margaret after a vegetarian dinner are humbling indeed.