Archive Columns: Smoking & Drinking

No Cheers for the New Prohibition  (Philadelphia Inquirer)

            Conscious that I am opening myself to the ridicule of the majority, I am nonetheless moved today to put in a good word for booze.  Just as the sailor must sometimes hang outside his boat to keep it level, so will I risk a precarious position in order to restore balance to the nation.

              Balance is what’s in order, for one sniffs the ill wind of zealotry these days, a wind that has us heeled over in the direction of a new Prohibition.  The Wall Street Journal reports liquor companies doing acts of conspicuous virtue to avoid the tobacco industry’s fate, and in this very newspaper it is insinuated that an adult having a beer after work has little more to his credit than a crack user.  I am referring here to an article that uncovered the insidious phenomenon that some ballplayers have a beer in the clubhouse after the game, an article whose headline labeled beer, among athletes, the “drug of choice.”

              Oh, we got trouble, my friends!

              But I dare to suggest that the trouble is not liquor.  The trouble is the compulsion to take the universe, large and rich, and extrude it through the confines of one’s pet obsession.  What we are coming to is not a way of life that integrates the many facets of the human spirit.  What we are coming to, that is, is not a culture, but a collection of permissible fetishes.  There are several currently in vogue, but the one most taken for granted is personal health.

              One can spot the fetishist by vocabulary.  The language of everyday life won’t do since, for him or her, the experience can be properly understood only when it is cast in the jargon of the reigning viewpoint.  Thus, having a coffee is a caffeine fix, cigarette smoking is rendered as a nicotine addiction, and now, having a beer is doing drugs.  Medically speaking, these are accurate descriptions, of course.  Unfortunately, the fetishist is not speaking medically; he is simply speaking.

              Increasingly, under the antiseptic gaze of the health sciences, normal multifaceted people are being made to feel that when drinking they are doing something pathological.  I’m not talking about drinking and driving.  I’m not talking about habitual drinking to excess.  I’m just talking about drinking.

              I attribute this health monomania to our unquestioned faith in science’s ability to provide ultimate truths, an ability that, interestingly, science never claimed for itself.

              Since the sciences have gradually diminished the influence of religion and our ability to believe in an afterlife, our concerns have become earth-bound and prosaic.  We can no longer understand, let alone embrace, ideas and things that are inherently transcendental such as irony and gin.

              Under the theological perspective, people sought to make the most of the time allotted to them.  Now, with no life after death, we seek only to allot ourselves the most amount of time.  Not only is this a very different enterprise, but a hopelessly dour one, played out in what must be the worst of all conditions: Pu ritanism during life and no salvation afterward!  Unable to believe in heaven, we have gone about creating a hell on earth, a hell even worse than the old one, for we must live it in real time, denied even the pleasures that formerly one indulged in to get there.

              To the old-fashioned sort who unapologetically likes to drink, the distorting and tyrannical narrowness of the bio-chemical perspective is not redeemed by its tidiness.  Science is a wonderful thing, but when we turn it into a kind of theology-by-default we risk slighting or ignoring large chunks of the human experience that do not naturally fall in its purview.

              All things may be subjected to the scrutiny of science, but not with equal felicity.  To say that drinking is no more than doing drugs is to say that Beethoven’s 5th is no more than a combination of frequencies, a statement that is both correct and untrue.  We confuse knowledge with wisdom but that’s what we like in this country, little narrow, manageable facts.

              The paradox of American obsessiveness is that i t promotes the excesses it wishes to constrain.  We have drinking problems in this country, not because liquor exists, but because we have never been able to create a culture that accommodates the full range of the human spirit.  We go from binge to binge, the last one a corrective for the previous one.

              Other countries, other peoples can somehow temperately embrace life and death, ritual and informality, love and sex, ethics and aesthetics.  We are the only country I know that can earnestly go about trying to avoid death by denying life.  We think of ourselves as the most liberal and yet we are the least liberal, the least capable of understanding the wide and elemental forces of humanity.

              So, if you are going to take away my booze, and not even, as in the last Prohibition for some lofty moral improvement, but just for the sheer mean longevity of it, I might have to find me one of those saner countries.  I’m thinking maybe Belgium.  Nice little country.  There I will go and like the people around me I will be happy and sad.  I will have virtues and vices, joys and regrets.  I will have Flemish moods and Walloonish ones.  In short, I will be full and complicated.  And I will drink.

              To your health.

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