The PC: As I’ve been saying since 1980, alcohol is a different matter entirely.

The PC: As I’ve been saying since 1980, alcohol is a different matter entirely.

A weekly column by Roger A. Baylor.

35 years ago, give or take a few hats filled with hollow, my friend Bob and I were seated on a bench in the public “commons” area of Indiana University Southeast in New Albany.

The topic of our conversation that particular day has long since been forgotten, but to be candid, it easily could have been a discussion of where we'd go for beers after class. After all, while not exactly Animal House, our informally chartered local "fraternity" had a reputation for tippling. We drank; therefore we were.

In fact, I believe it was proudly written into our constitution.

As we sat, comparing notes on who knows what, a female classmate with whom we enjoyed a casual campus acquaintance walked up, sheets of paper in hand.

"You two might be interested in this test," she said, and walked away.

It’s been a long time, and I can’t speak for Bob, but I’ve never forgotten the sensation of thinking I’d done something wrong, almost like being rebuked, even before so much as looking at the words on the page. Maybe it was something in her tone of voice, which was brusque, sad, annoyed and exasperated all at once.

Something like 15 numbered questions were on the sheet, with instructions to reply "yes" or "no," then to flip over the paper to learn the meaning of the results. First puzzled, we promptly saw our fully intended reflection in a mirror of wayward, dissolute youth.

Do you ever drink alone?
Do you ever black out while drinking?
Do you ever drink and drive?

The test’s aim was obvious, but we vowed to be as honest as possible, and began scribbling: Yes, no, yes …

Two or three of the questions could not be answered in black and white; as an example, both of us were uncomfortably between jobs, so missing work because of drinking fell into the "N/A" category – and this wasn’t funny, not at all, because there'd need to be employment fairly soon, or we'd be completely depleted of beer money.

And then what?

When the “exam” was finished, we'd each replied affirmatively to 9 or 10 of the questions. It was time to take our diagnostic medicine. The paper's back side tersely revealed that just one "yes" constituted flagrant problem drinking, two affirmatives pointed to full-blown alcoholism, and three ... well, three was really bad.

Had we selected our tombstones yet?

I'm being slightly facetious, and it was easy enough to dismiss the whole exercise as transparent propaganda.

Seriously, you mean to tell me that a man or woman living alone, enjoying an alcoholic beverage each evening (but never more than one) was barreling headlong down the road to perdition? Now, a quart of vodka ingested alone – that would be different, wouldn’t it?

Except for me, it wasn’t about the slanted wording of the ambush. Rather, it was unsettling to me because in effect, someone I barely knew was in my yard, on my porch, religious tract in hand, trying to frighten me, or save me, or move me, or wield some other obscure motive, when all I wanted to do was muddle through life until something finally made sense.

This I proceeded to do, and 35 years later, it’s still the way I feel. Deciding what you want to do when you grow up is hard. Having a few beers? That’s easy.

If memory serves, I didn’t see her around school much after that. Maybe we both graduated. Surely we both moved on.

---

Lots of miles have accumulated since then, and nowadays Bob is a skilled amateur winemaker, and as you know, I (as yet) own a brewery and know a little bit about beer.

At various points during the last 35 years, I'll freely admit to have gone through periods of elevated alcohol consumption, compared with what I’m told is the average, but never once has it become a physical addiction with me. I drink, and then I don't. There are no tremors, crawly spiders or drunken delusions that differ substantively from the ones I assiduously cultivate while perfectly sober.

Since March 1, I've had exactly two beers, both consumed on the same evening with a pleasant dinner of fish and chips. I may drink five beers tomorrow, but more likely none, because I have a head cold, and customarily refrain from drinking when I can neither smell nor taste it. During my last medical checkup, the sawbones declared me healthier than at any point in a decade.

At the same time, I’m not blind to the realities of life.

I have absolutely no doubt that alcohol is sheer and unmitigated poison for some people, and that their only recourse is to stop drinking altogether, lest it kill them. I’ve seen it happen, and mourned at the funerals. But I know just as squarely that for others, this isn't the case at all. They manage low-intensity social consumption just fine, and merely need to be left alone to live their lives free from the interference of do-gooders, well-intentioned or otherwise.

Is it nature or nurture?

Bob and I were raised in what amounted to non-drinking households. Our parents set excellent examples of teetotality, which subsequently, when older, we chose to ignore. His folks abstained entirely, as did my mother, and by the time I was in grade school, my father would nurse a beer or cocktail only on widely scattered occasions. He said drinking made him sleepy, so he refrained.

I was an athlete in high school, and against all odds, hung out with an intelligent, artistic and mostly non-athletic crowd that enjoyed drinking beer and partying, although with rare exceptions, my drinking was confined to the off season, in summer, and never during training. Once the season started, I generally played it straight.

Wait -- are there gasps in the peanut gallery? This must be the magical moment of confession, so yes, that’s right: I drank beer before the legal age. Strange, isn't it? When you're in the beer business, you spend an inordinate amount of time trying to stop this from happening.

Readers can make of this what they will, although to me, it's primarily indicative of a relatively normal Southern Indiana upbringing, which led eventually to the highly sought after 21-year age threshold, when drinking at last became a legal pursuit, then later to a reasonably productive adulthood, much of which has been spent in the business of alcoholic beverages when not engaged in consuming them, thereby destroying the evidence.

You're bound to be asking: What prompted this rant?

It’s simple. Want to critique the business of selling drugs? Then go into pharmaceuticals, or enlist in the DEA. I’m a beer guy … and that’s just plain different.

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Recently an area Boy Scout wrote a letter to the editor of the local newspaper about "the drug problem in our schools and neighborhoods," and the editor duly asked for adults to respond.

A response: Drug problem is complex, by Shea Van Hoy (News and Tribune)

I am a Boy Scout with a troop from Floyds Knobs. I am writing about the drug problem in our schools and neighborhoods.

Too many kids my age can get drugs and sell them. How can this problem be so bad with all the laws and police officers we have? I feel like more resource officers and locker searches may help in our schools. The officers in schools should be more open and visible.

I also think that more drug testing needs to be done on athletes and students. This is how me and a lot of my friends feel.

Do you have the sense that this young man is referring to drugs, drug sales and locker searches in the context of alcoholic beverages? Is he pointing a finger at the dangerous classmate who is bootlegging liquor out of his backpack before geography class?

I don't think so.

The executive director of Our Place Drug and Alcohol Education Services Inc., an agency in New Albany, provided commentary on the scout’s concerns

She warned that it isn't possible for police to "arrest" these sorts of community issues, and correctly noted the civil liberties aspect of drug testing. But as one interested in words and their uses, what followed strikes me as noteworthy.

Substance abuse is an issue that is multifaceted and requires an entire community to work together to address the problem. From parents, to schools, to businesses and community leaders, we all need to be on the same page in order to address the issues surrounding substance abuse.

First, the wording shifts away from “drugs" to "substance abuse." Next, supply, demand and poor parenting.

This starts with parents setting good examples with their own behavior, and not buying into a negative community norms that “all kids use” so it is no big deal, or looking the other way — claiming “not my child.” Worse yet are parents who mistakenly believe if they supply it, kids will stay home and use, believing that this is a safer alternative.

Seems the concepts are being broadened. Are we still talking about drugs – or alcohol? Granted, some parents would supply marijuana or methamphetamines to their children in the hope of keeping them home, but in reality, most of us read alcohol into this example, because we delineate between the illegal-for-all-ages-at-all-times substances and the more socially and culturally malleable alcohol. Kids "who stay home and use" with the cooperation of their parents tend to be drinking, not smoking crack.

It is about business leaders who recognize that sometimes making money is less important than doing the right thing and getting their product sold is less important than the safety of those potentially buying it. If we are concerned about drug and alcohol abuse, then is it OK for stores to sell “moonshine” with cute bows on it next to the candy aisle?

BOOM – there it is. It may have taken a couple hundred words, but now the linkage has become explicit, and heroin officially is conflated with Bud Light. From drugs to substance abuse, and now to "drug and alcohol" abuse.

Did I expect this merging of targets to occur?

Of course I did. However, whenever I see this game of ideological semantics being played, it annoys me. In this specific instance, given what the scout originally asked, his obvious concern pertained to substances other than alcoholic beverages. However, by the time the drug and alcohol educator is finished, we’re back to digging the foundations of Prohibition – and not only for the teens.

We support efforts to reduce social availability of alcohol and we also work in collaboration with Indiana University Southeast to address college-age issues.

And so we come full circle. It’s ironic, isn’t it? I'm the one feeling brusque, sad, annoyed and exasperated all at once.

35 years later, and the two of us remain on opposite sides of the alcohol divide. One went into promotion, and the other prevention. Somehow I expect to see an alcoholism self-test atop the patio furniture tomorrow morning. I'll be sure to file it along with the Watchtowers and candidate spiels.

Nope, sorry. Alcohol and drugs are different. But for the first time in days, a beer sounds really good right about now.

"From Gin Lane to the height of sophistication," now with interaction.

Thanks to B for this link.

When gin was full of sulphuric acid and turpentine, by Finlo Rohrer (BBC News Magazine)

It's 250 years since the death of William Hogarth. His famous work Gin Lane still informs the way people think about the drink.

It's arguably the most potent anti-drug poster ever conceived. A woman, her clothes in disarray, her head thrown back in intoxicated oblivion, allows her baby to slip from her grasp, surely to its death in a stairwell below.

She's the centrepiece in an eye-wateringly grim urban melee - full of death, misery, starvation and fighting.

The year was 1751. The drug in question was gin. And the engraving was a conscious effort by William Hogarth, along with his friend novelist Henry Fielding, to force the government to do something about a drink that was threatening to tear apart the social fabric of England.

The PC: If only we had H.L. Mencken to help us define “craft” beer.

The PC: If only we had H.L. Mencken to help us define “craft” beer.

A weekly web column by Roger A. Baylor.

The whole life of the inferior man, including especially his so-called thinking, is purely a biochemical process, and exactly comparable to what goes on in a barrel of cider.
-- HL Mencken

It is said that the fabled American journalist, writer and social commentator H.L. Mencken (1880-1956) celebrated the repeal of Prohibition by drinking a glass of cold water.

“My first in 13 years,” he succinctly explained.

Who was this wordsmith known as “The Sage of Baltimore”? The Encyclopedia Brittanica provides background.

H.L. Mencken, in full Henry Louis Mencken … controversialist, humorous journalist, and pungent critic of American life who powerfully influenced U.S. fiction through the 1920s … Mencken was probably the most influential American literary critic in the 1920s, and he often used his criticism as a point of departure to jab at various American social and cultural weaknesses.

Controversialist – now there’s a wonderful word, indeed. Mencken’s written output of curmudgeonly feistiness verifies his mastery of the polemical arts, and as such, you can count him among my most prominent role models.

In addition, as a militant German-American enduring a “dry” era brought about by the same religious zealots, health fascists, cultural terrorists and bubble-headed activists now inhabiting local health departments nationwide, Mencken was not averse to the merits of the tall, cool one.

Mencken was one of the earliest advocates of unrestricted bile as a means of equal opportunity, and understood that common sense is remarkably uncommon.

All professional philosophers tend to assume that common sense means the mental habit of the common man. Nothing could be further from the mark. The common man is chiefly to be distinguished by his plentiful lack of common sense: he believes things on evidence that is too scanty, or that distorts the plain facts, or that is full of non-sequiturs. Common sense really involves making full use of all the demonstrable evidence and of nothing but the demonstrable evidence.

In short, he was an iconoclast of the highest order, and so the word itself is worth revisiting.

Iconoclast

1. A breaker or destroyer of images, esp. those set up for religious veneration (like the bicentennial junta’s year-long fixation on the year 1872).

2. A person who attacks cherished beliefs, traditional institutions, etc., as being based on error or superstition … rather like your humble correspondent.

Know that my own heroes have always been iconoclasts. From Socrates through Tom Paine, and Mencken through Hunter S. Thompson, there’s nothing as thrilling to me as an iconoclast taking a headlong swipe at cherished, unexamined assumptions. What’s more, as Russell Brand’s recent pro-revolutionary rantings remind us, the most wonderful aspect of iconoclasm is that rampant personal dissipation does not pre-empt the message. It actually may enhance it.

Until his recent, providential resignation, an Indiana state legislator named Bill Davis frequently used his sinecure as chairman of the House’s public policy committee as a bully pulpit to denounce beverage alcohol, often “bottling” up sensible reforms by preventing their passage through committee to a full reading and vote. Davis does not drink, and Mencken well understood the implications of this habit of mind.

Teetotalism does not make for human happiness; it makes for the dull, idiotic happiness of the barnyard. The men who do things in the world, the men worthy of admiration and imitation, are men constitutionally incapable of any such pecksniffian stupidity. Their ideal is not a safe life, but a full life; they do not try to follow the canary bird in a cage, but the eagle in the air. And in particular they do not flee from shadows and bugaboos. The alcohol myth is such a bugaboo. The sort of man it scares is the sort of man whose chief mark is that he is scared all the time.

A single column can only hint at the richness of Mencken’s writing, which reached well beyond newspapers, magazine, essays and polemics to history and etymology. In particular, he was a scholar of the American tongue, documenting the “old” English language’s transformation into something new, vital and distinctly ours. Here is a brief excerpt from Mencken’s seminal The American Language: An Inquiry into the Development of English in the United States (Fourth Edition, 1937):

"An English saloon-keeper is officially a licensed victualler. His saloon is a public house, or, colloquially, a pub. He does not sell beer by the bucket, can, growler, shell, seidel, stein or schooner, but by the pint, half-pint or glass. He and his brethren, taken together, are the licensed trade, or simply the trade. He may divide his establishment into a public-bar, a saloon-bar and a private-bar, the last being the toniest, or he may call his back room a parlour, snug or tap-room. If he has a few upholstered benches in his place he may call it a lounge. He employs no bartenders. Barmaids do the work, with maybe a barman, potman or cellarman to help. 

"Beer, in most parts of Great Britain, means only the thinnest and cheapest form of malt liquor; better stuff is commonly called bitter. When an Englishman speaks of booze he means only ale or beer; for our hard liquor (a term he never uses) he prefers spirits. He uses boozer to indicate a drinking-place as well as a drinker. What we call hard cider is rough cider to him. He never uses rum in the generic sense that is has acquired in the United States, and knows nothing of rum-hounds, rum-dumbs, rum-dealers, the rum-trade, and the rum-evil, or of the Demon Rum. 

"The American bung-starter is a beer-mallet in England, and, as in this country, it is frequently used for assault and homicide."

There's one fewer prohibitionist in the legislature today. Amen.

The Brewers of Indiana Guild has been informed that Representative Bill Davis, Chairman of the House Public Policy committee, has resigned his seat to become Executive Director of Indiana's Office of Community and Rural Affairs.

Why is this of significance? First, BIG's Lee Smith explains the legislative procedure:

All alcoholic beverage bills are automatically assigned to the House or Senate Public Policy committees, and must make it out of committee "alive" to continue through the legislative process. If a bill dies in committee, it is indeed dead and cannot not be debated or amended.

As chairman of the Public Policy Committee, Davis was in a position to squelch legislation to advance craft beer, and as a teetotaling prohibitionist of the old school, this is precisely what he did -- not always, but often enough. Given that Indiana's Republican legislators in the main have been rational about the craft beer business from the pragmatic standpoint of statewide "homegrown" economic development, Davis stood out like a sore Baptist with his self-professed hostility toward beverage alcohol as a valued component of a truly civilized society.

It's hard for me to imagine a successor s hostile, so fingers are crossed. It's morning, but somewhere, it's beer-thirty.

Bill Davis Resigns House Seat To Take Position With Gov. Administration