Subject: Re: I'm telling mom!
From: Scottie Bowman (rbowman@indigo.ie)
Date: Thu Aug 09 2001 - 02:42:13 GMT
It took my aging brain a minute to realise that Dead Pan Pete
was giving us his old three card trick. Up to that point,
I was getting ready to launch a paean to alcohol & the virtues
of excess in general.
I’d certainly make an immediate exception in the case of people
who’ve had to carry an alcoholic parent & learned thereby
to loathe the stuff. But otherwise I admit to a certain suspicion
& uneasiness with the abstemious young. I feel it’s very much like
communism. If you aren’t one at eighteen you’ve no heart &
if you’re still one at thirty eight you’ve no brain. Similarly
with drink. If you aren’t getting legless at twenty you’re being
a little too careful & if you’re still doing it twenty years later
you really ought to be looking for the number of the local
AA meeting.
As someone who took rather longer than that to reach the hepatic
ward, I speak with absolute authority. And for the past twenty
years it would take restraining belts & a funnel between the clamped
teeth to get the stuff down my gullet. Yet I owe it an awful lot -
great pleasure, social confidence, the friendship of a lot of marvelous
eejits & racy women ... & so on. I’m sorry I drank quite so much.
But I’m damned glad I gave it a pretty good whirl.
Legislation will, of course, accomplish nothing - except maybe repeat
the catastrophe of Prohibition. But something else may, I think,
produce at least a superficial social change.
I was reading only yesterday a survey of the correlation - in these
islands
at least - between intelligence/education & health. The more affordable
alcohol becomes the more people drink. But the brighter & better
educated they are the less likely are they to smoke, to eat crap, to
neglect
exercise - & to drink to excess.
It looks as though the richer we get the fatter, lazier & drunker we
grow.
But the cleverer & more educated we are, the thinner, livelier,
longer-lived
- & clearer headed we also become.
Which will bring us back once more to the condition I described in one
of my last posts: a world with the swinish, hopeless, Proletariat
vomiting
drunkenly in the gutter & us slenderly elegant Masters sipping our wine
fastidiously & discreetly in our chateaux, while discussing Greek texts.
Scottie B.
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