The famed temperance advocate Carrie Nation, with hatchet and Bible / Wikimedia Commons
I read this review with an eye toward reading Lisa McGirrâs book. You might enjoy the book after you read the review. I pass because I got everything I could possibly get from one sentence in the review:
Less persuasive, and far more tiresome, is McGirrâs second thesis, in which she argues that Prohibition was inextricably tied to racial politics in a racist society.
Pour One Out for Prohibition
Review: Lisa McGirr: âThe War on Alcohol: Prohibition and the Rise of the American Stateâ
BY: Joseph Bottum
January 16, 2016 5:00 am
Pour One Out for Prohibition
I will not read the book because I doubt if Ms. McGirr addresses alcohol addiction. Addiction was more of a force inciting the folks who gave the country Prohibition than was racism. Everything said about addiction from chemical addictions to organized religion to television, and all of the stops in-between, can be said about every addiction.
There have been countless books, seminars, clinics, cures, and TV talk shows devoted to every addiction known to man, except this one: the addiction to television.
Addicts of every stripe come up with creative excuses rather than stop feeding their addictions. Making excuses is one of the symptoms all addicts have in common. If you cannot accept that TV is an addiction, or that you might be an addict, just think about the withdrawal symptoms you will experience should television suddenly disappear from your life. Better still, go cold turkey and pull the plug on your TV. Then examine your withdrawal symptoms when you start missing your daily fixes. Most TV addicts will fall off the wagon in less than a week.
NOTE: It has been my experience that Lefties who vehemently oppose someone elseâs opinion is an addiction within an addiction. The fun begins when idiots express their opinions on television. An idiotâs opinion expressed on television remains the opinion of an idiot.
I would not consider TV an addiction were it not so destructive. In many ways more destructive than alcohol and heroin. Certainly more destructive to individual liberties than illegal drugs whose users only kill themselves. If you doubt me, look back at how TV turned so many Americans against their own country. Without television bombarding the audience with one media betrayal after another during the Vietnam War, winning the war would have been up there where it should have been as a matter of self-preservation if for no other reason.
Every addiction has an overpowering influence on society in that every addiction has it bootleggers making money ââ and addicts who buy whatever is being sold.
No sane person wants drug pushers in their life, yet tens of millions invite television bootleggers into their lives every day. Those same people encourage their children to listen to the bootleggers for hours on end.
Alcoholism is a unique addiction in that drinking well is a social grace.
Alcoholism is called the glass crutch while every other addiction has a crutch of its own. The difference between and addiction to organized religion, television, etc. and a drug addiction is that a substance addiction is easily recognized.
When a drunk is drinking he or she can lick the world. They donât need, or want, anything except their little cup of happiness, or courage, or love, or whatever the individual drunk wants the glass crutch to be.
When drunks go on the wagon they donât throw away their crutch ââ they replace it with a loved one, a friend, an employer; anyone they can find who wonât dump them. People who cannot handle alcohol, but still insist on drinking adult beverages, are social cripples who need a crutch in order to function sober or drunk. Alcoholism is no more complicated than that.
If you allow yourself to become a glass crutch for a sober rummy you have nobody to blame but yourself for whatever comes your way. Family members almost always reach a breaking point and walk away from a drunk; usually after theyâve suffered a great deal of emotional damage. It is called tough love.
There was a time when everyone knew that a reformed drunk was the most annoying person in the world. Once they sobered up they immediately began telling everyone how to live. Amended drunks never have the good sense to take a lesson from tarts who would not dream of telling anyone how to love after they, the tarts, resurrect their virginity. Sensible people understood this and ignored sober drunks, but thatâs getting harder to do nowadays. Suddenly, out of a clear blue sky, prominent rehabilitated drunks have become the Leftâs new gurus.
Thanks to the media a public confession is all that is required to establish credibility as a seer. Public confessions are the Socialist religionâs nod to the in-house confessions encouraged by organized religionâs traditional religions.
Public confessions came about because Socialists/Communists always thought if they did away with private property they would do away with most of the sins in the world. As it turns out they were wrong. Collective ownership of real property, brought about by property taxes, has only led to collective sin followed by collective guilt as public confessions clearly demonstrate.
The best kept secret in all of this soul baring is that only the rich and the famous are granted universal absolution after a media confession. The penance imposed on a famous person after publically admitting to impetuous tippling is always a revitalized career which, I suspect, prompted the confession in the first place.
In my youth, I sailed the seven seas and drank with the best of them who never drew a sober breath. That doesnât mean that Iâll throw in with a reformed lushâs moralizing whether it be in print or on television. I guess Iâm trying to find out why a famous dry drunk, usually from among the ranks of Hollywoodâs legions, has any more to say that is worth listening to than does your average terpentine connoisseur who has also seen the light? Having once been a falling down drunk doesnât give anybody special insight into anything except how to fall down.
The run of the mill booze hound is seen as a social pariah condemned to share his or her guilt on a catch-as-catch-can basis.
I have never been an uptight teetotaler; so I have nothing against any adult who can handle a couple of heave-aheads without losing their job, kicking the dog, attacking illiterate librarians, and all the rest of the charges a few drunks are certainly guilty of. In fact, being around happy drunks when theyâre in their cups is a damned sight more fun than being around Communist/Socialist priests in any condition.
In my mind drunks and environmental addicts have a lot in common. Even if I engage in psycho-babble to the best of my abilities, I doubt if anyone else will see the connection between rum pots and environmentalists the way I see it. Let me try anyway.
The major difference between the two is that drunks lean on individuals; whereas, environmental addicts lean on tax dollars to get through those terrifying nights when sleep wonât come because somewhere in the world someone is stepping on a cockroach. Simply stated: Whoever heard of an environmentalist leaning on family and friends for help? Or going cold turkey for that matter?
Drunks and environmental addicts are social cripples driven to acquire control in order to compensate for their infirmities. Drunks and environmental addicts are absolutely certain that their deficiencies provides them with superior insight.
I have never met an environmental true believer who didnât start preaching about saving this, that, or the next thing the minute they smelled an opening. One time I met one who went on about saving a few patches of dead coral reef because it had taken nature millions of years to make them. He swore they were objects of beauty. I swear they looked just like rocks. The truth: Sober lushes and environmental addicts are not interested in saving rocks or rats; the former wants to save everybody, the latter wants to save the world for posterity, even when they donât need saving.
I just canât shake the notion that drunks and environmental addicts are cut from the same cloth. Sad to say, environmental addicts are much worse than drunks. Theyâve conned the Socialists in government into paying them for saving whatever it is they save. I think the EPA has a budget of 8 BILLION a year. At least the drunk contributes to the economy when he or she is under full sail, but what does the environmental addict contribute by living on tax dollars? (No philosophical touchy-feely responses to my rhetorical question please.)
Finally, charity bootleggers selling institutional compassion are the worst of the lot. Much worse than environmental addicts. Environmental addiction will disappear when the bootleggers no longer get tax dollars. Charity bootleggers will be around forever because addiction-free individuals are forced to feed the addiction . Inevitably, being forced to pay the bootleggers ends up working for the addicts physically, financially, and politically. In short: Bootleggers do not care how many addicts they create well-knowing society will pay to care for them.
