An Anniversary With Blood And Nightmares A Week Before A Big Drinking Holiday Weekend

ONE OF THE ALCOHOLIC ANNIVERSARIES in my family is approaching, we have more than one, memories of a really ghastly day, not one of the death days, but the kind you remember against your will and can see best with your eyes closed. And you wish you couldn't.  The too real denouement of the reality of how drinking is falsely depicted in fiction, on stage and on screen.  When I watched a video of Falstaff being played last year, the first time I'd watched one of the plays featuring him since the death of my first alcoholic brother, I found nothing in it that was amusing or charming or endearing.  If there's one thing that will never be the same, its how you see dramatic, cinematic depictions of comic drunks after seeing something like that not depicted but entirely real, at the closing.  It's such a cheap, predictable and predictably cheap theatrical device that even the best writers use.  That doesn't make it any less a detestable lie.

This year the remembrance includes the recently gained knowledge that three of the next generation of my family are following that family propensity, ages 26 to 31, possibly others who I haven't been told about.  Apparently the younger generation thinks they're being kind by shielding me from such stuff till it can't be hidden.  I said it was a "family propensity" when it's one of the most common addictions in the human species.  I doubt there are many families untouched by it.

I took care of all three when they were children - the gay uncle with no family of his own was regularly seen as a free baby-sitting service.  I would bet you that lots of LGBTQ people have done that service to the world without much acknowledgement.

To see those who I knew as once happy children so destructively addicted to alcohol, their terrible unhappiness, that of their loved ones, knowing the likely end of that in maybe twenty or thirty years, if not far sooner, knowing that one of the common alternatives is a car crash that gets them or others killed can really make you think.  And, alcohol being what it is and how it's commonly used, you certainly don't have to be an alcoholic to get that kind of result.  And that's only one kind of accident that alcohol use frequently leads to.

Or to get beaten up by a drunk or attacked by one or attacked and raped or robbed while being drunk, maybe by some piece of slime who stays sober the better to take advantage.  Being drunk is being a volunteer to take a chance at being attacked and taken advantage of.  Drunks make themselves targets, it doesn't matter how much you whine about "blaming the victim," such victims are self-made AND THEM BEING VICTIMS MADE THUS ARE ALL THAT REALLY MATTERS, NO MATTER WHO YOU "BLAME."  I'm not a court, I'm not a lawyer trying to prejudice a jury, my "blaming" would have no effect, my not mentioning it can have an effect.  If I kept silent about that all it would make me is an enabler of those who prey on them. Those who cry "you're blaming the victim" IN FACT ARE SUCH ENABLERS.  It's a slogan of enablement of the scenario leading to the victimization.

Which leads to another important unconsidered consideration of the language involved in this. I didn't rob them, especially Women, of their "rights" to get drunk like a man, as they are idiotically considered to have a "right" to do so.  In fact, such a "right" is no right at all, it is the voluntary self-obliteration of rights.

The idea that there is a "right" involved in getting drunk is to have the stupidest and shallowest of ideas about what "rights" are and why having them is important.  In the idiotic side of "rights" babble of the late 20th and early 21st century, those parts of it are never really considered.  It is to mistake the equivalent legalized ability to make yourself an idiot and fool or a victim such as described as being "rights" is one of those addle-minded follies of modern life.  Rights are notable for being positive in their effects on those who can exercise them, producing wellness, soundness, safety, durable happiness, an enhancement to life and personal well being.  Drinking does none of that, no matter what the liquor and wine industry have paid people in the nutrition racket to announce as their paid-for "findings."  The strictly sober are the ones who, as a group, demonstrably enjoy longer life and fewer health problems.  More well-being.

Drunks and the near intoxicated surrender their ability to exercise their real rights by putting themselves in that position. How can getting drunk be a "right" anymore than getting slipped a date rape drug is, since they both have the same results?  Both are a loss of the right to think clearly and keeping yourself safe. Voluntarily or involuntarily, the results are the same.  That's a fact even if I repeated the current slogans surrounding that like an idiot computer parrot bot.  

Reality is real, slogans are made for beer coasters.  

I say that thinking about one of my nieces who I've recently discovered is often to be found sitting alone in bars while very drunk and very vulnerable where no one is around to help her. Not her family which has no "right" to intervene, the courts would certainly prevent any family from doing that.  Certainly not a single champion of such "rights" demolished above who spouts those lines would lift a finger to protect her when some creep takes advantage of her.  I'd like to ask them where the rights of her parents, grandparents, etc. to having their loved one safe are in their conception of that.  If the courts don't recognize such rights of those who care about them above a "right" to drink themselves into rape or theft or sadistic attack or a car crash (what about the rights of the ones who get killed by them?) or the kind of horrible death I started describing, then, as I've so often said here recently, the law is willfully and criminally stupid and unworthy of respect.

In case you wondered about some of the things I've said here in the past week or so, yes, that does have something to do with why I said it.  

The biggest problem with prohibition was that it didn't work.  I won't recount in detail the time I scandalized the kew-el repeaters of the common received, mandatory, unconsidered, non-wisdom about that on one of the then big-name lefty blogs when I made that observation.  If it had, if alcohol had truly been able to be banned during the infamous and failed trial of that, untold tens, hundreds of thousands, millions would have lived full lives, more wives and children would have probably never have been beaten up or murdered,  not to mention others, families driven into poverty or destitution, countless people not suffering the many health problems  which are seldom mentioned from even moderate drinking, etc.  

If even ten percent more of the population or a quarter more of the population lived lives of sobriety, the benefits to the country and the world would likely be incredible to imagine.  If enough did there would be far less of a need for police and others who spend such a large amount of their work life dealing with drinking and its aftermath.  Probably a larger percentage of the announced lefty agenda would come into effect without other government action (which is not going to be forthcoming) than the play-lefty, "civil libertarians" have ever even attempted to make real.  

Remember that during the next commercial for liquor on TV you watch, the next time you see a show with a comic drunk scene, the next time you hear a stand-up tell a drunk joke. Those have never been funny. The next time you hear a report of a "study" paid for by the alcohol industries.

In a period when the intended comic song "Baby It's Cold Outside" is widely and fashionably and arguably justly condemned as "rapey" it's remarkable how few have ever made the link between that song about a guy trying to seduce a gal through getting her drunk and the seemingly enormous increase in consumption of the very thing in the song which is so fashionably condemned  AND THE REAL LIFE CONSEQUENCES OF THAT FLOOD OF LIQUOR.  In that scenario, the condemned song is of nugatory power to produce the effect but it is the real substance which creates the real effect is what is praised.  I would bet you that many if not most of those who would fashionably condemn it would be enraged by what I've said here about the alcohol mentioned in the song having that effect. I will mention that it was never my favorite Johnny Mercer lyric, he wrote much better.  I couldn't care less if it were never heard again.

Sobriety is presented as the vice in modern pop-kulcha and the common received unwisdom, we are as addled by that as we are by booze. The neurotic, hypocritical, sanctimonious,etc. teetotaler is a pretty common stock character villain in pop songs, fiction and theatrical writing, even more so in junk produced for screen. I have no doubt that's how we were supposed to imagine the "maiden aunt" whose tongue was vicious in the song just mentioned. It's pretty remarkable how embedded all of those stereotypes are in so many minds. TV-movie-fiction informed society could be said to be drunk on them.  They clearly cloud our thinking about these things.