So the Antipodean authorities have uncovered a subterranean fortress of filth, a cocaine bunker holding enough powder to sedate every living soul in the United Kingdom twice over. 650 million pounds of nose candy, destined for British nostrils, intercepted in what is being called the largest drug bust in Australian history. How very modern, how very Roman.
We are now living in the final days of a civilisation that has traded its empire for a keyhole and its ambition for a nasal spray. The bunker itself, buried in the New South Wales bush, is a monument to the logistical wizardry that has made the drug trade the most efficient global enterprise since the East India Company. These are not your father’s coked-up rock stars.
These are accountants with machetes. The operation, a labyrinth of tunnels and sealed rooms, could have been designed by the same engineers who built the Sydney Opera House, if the Opera House were designed to fill the Queen’s subjects with a powdered disregard for tomorrow. And where does this marvellous cargo end up?
Not in the billiard rooms of Belgravia, but in the cracked bathroom tiles of Bolton and the student flats of Bristol. Britain, once the workshop of the world, now a workshop for the consumption of South American plant matter. We have become a nation of passive drains, a giant colander through which the world’s worst habits pour.
The irony is exquisite: the very people who fret about the carbon footprint of avocados are shovelling this chemical excrement into their faces, funding the cartels that would slit your throat for a misplaced decimal point. But let us not be naive. This is not a failure of policing or a momentary lapse in virtue.
This is the logical endpoint of a society that has abandoned all notions of duty, honour, and self-control. We have replaced the stiff upper lip with a nostril full of powder. The Victorians, with their temperance societies and their terror of self-abuse, would look upon this and weep.
They built an empire on discipline and disgust for the sensual. We have built a bunker to hide our shame. The drug trade is not a crime problem; it is a symptom of a civilisation that has lost the will to live for anything other than sensation.
And the politicians, oh the politicians, they will hold press conferences, they will announce funding for rehabilitation, they will tut-tut and shake their heads. But they will not touch the real issue: that a culture which worships pleasure and flees from pain will inevitably find itself kneeling before the altar of cocaine. They will not ask why a young man in Wolverhampton would rather snort a line than read a book.
They will not ask why the very concept of deferred gratification has been replaced by a frantic, panic-stricken hedonism. They will not ask because the answer is too terrifying: we have become a nation of children, demanding our sweets now, and we will burn the house down to get them. The Australian bust is a victory for the forces of order, but it is a battle in a war we have already lost.
The bunker will be filled again. The routes will shift. The cocaine will find its way, because the demand is bottomless.
And the demand is bottomless because the soul is empty. So let the pundits praise the police and the politicians claim their photo ops. I see only a vast, mocking symbol: a hole in the ground, stuffed with the dreams of a decadent age.
The Romans had their vomitoriums. We have our bunkers. The difference is that they at least knew they were in decline.
We are too busy snorting to notice.
