M. Simon’s post about cannibalism got me in the mood to cannibalize. Especially Brett’s comment:
I say anyone who indulges in alcohol has no business criticizing anyone else’ vices.
A salient but overlooked reason for the chaos of American society is that we have become a nation of drunks, not least among the governing classes.
Very, very true. They were even drunker during the drunken days of Prohibition, when illegal alcohol flowed freely. My dad was born in 1909 and he would be 104 today. In his boyhood, you could walk into a pharmacy and buy heroin and cocaine over the counter (or order it by mail from the Sears Roebuck catalog), and marijuana was an unregulated plant that grew in the ground. The latter wasn’t made illegal until 1937, when my dad was 28. He caught me smoking pot as a teenager and I considered myself lucky to survive his savage outburst (and even luckier not to have been packed off to the local military school, which was a very real threat) but years later when I was in my thirties he told me — to my utter astonishment — that he had himself smoked weed as a kid! I guess he thought that I couldn’t have handled hearing that as a teenager.
Anyway, the man survived the dangers of legal drugs, and during Prohibition he learned to drink booze. He did not have his first legal drink until 1933, when he was a grown adult. My father had many stories about Prohibition, especially the ridiculous antics of the ruling classes (who of course had the power to exempt themselves from any real enforcement).
Consider the case of Marine General Smedley Butler, who was actually sent by President Coolidge to Philadelphia to save the city from alcohol:
In 1924, almost five years into Prohibition, President Calvin Coolidge sent in Marine Gen. Smedley Butler to crack down on the illegal booze as the city’s director of public safety. A West Chester native and Haverford School grad, Butler was a local hero who dressed in a flowing scarlet-lined cape while leading speakeasy raids.
His task – to clean up “corrupt and contented” Philadelphia – was daunting.
Early on, he uncovered a scam in which a North Philadelphia brewery led entire convoys of beer-filled trucks past unsuspecting cops with a limousine that was identical to Butler’s personal car. The brewery had even found a guy who looked like Butler’s chauffeur to drive the lead car.
Inevitably, anyone picked up would be released immediately by crooked magistrates. Under Butler, more than 10,000 speakeasy operators were arrested, but only 10 percent were brought to trial and fewer than half of those were actually fined.
Local pols snickered at “Old Gimlet Eye” – till he turned his attention on their own posh clubs. In 1925, after raids on the Bellevue-Stratford, the Ritz-Carlton and the Union League, the mayor fired Butler.
“They wanted me for window dressing,” the general declared on the way out of town. The city, he said, was “wet as ever.”
Sounds like raiding the haunts of the ruling class was Butler’s way of begging to be fired.
You might think that Prohibition would have given the ruling class drunks a taste of their own medicine. Apparently not.
They will do what they want, but they will never leave us alone to do what we want.
Oh, and of course there’s too much money involved. Illegal appetites are more expensive than legal ones.
Comments
9 responses to “A taste of their own medicine?”
That reminds me how of many of the G.I. generation became more open to marijuana decriminalization in the early seventies: far too many of their boomer kids had been arrested for what could only be called a venial sin. Does anyone remember Carter promising decriminalization in his 1976 campaign for president? That’s how he got my vote. Being a democrat, he reneged.
Ironically, boomer parents jumped on the drug war bandwagon in the eighties, with crack hysteria and that perennial bullshit claim that the old pot was weaker than the new pot. No, it was just ten times cheaper. I was really flabbergasted to watch the old hippies demand the government come down on their kids.
My fucking generation thinks it has ushered in a golden age. Degenerates.
I always liked this video of a DEA agent where he confirms that the ruling class is off limits:
http://youtu.be/72Lf9ZQK8t0
And BTW thank you for the link which started all this off.
“Ironically, boomer parents jumped on the drug war bandwagon in the eighties, with crack hysteria and that perennial bullshit claim that the old pot was weaker than the new pot.”
Oh good grief. The stuff makes me sneeze and cough – and even I knew about sinsemilla back in the early 70’s.
“I say anyone who indulges in alcohol has no business criticizing anyone else’s vices.”
Really? Someone who, say, has a glass of wine with dinner has no business judging the behavior of someone who is hopelessly crack-addicted? Are you sure you want to conflate liberty with indulgence?
Allow me to turn it around: If you insist that “he who lives in a glass house…” is a moral absolute, don’t be surprised when other people impose their own moral absolutes on you. Judgement and discerning that which is in good taste are part of civilization, and being a libertarian doesn’t give you a free pass to moral absolutism.
Yes, Neil, even a civilized, moderate, and modest imbiber of a single glass of inexpensive Domaine Filliatreau Chateau Fouquet Saumur, who insists that his quiet pleasure remain available to him,despite the millions of drunks and the damage they cause.
Well then, I see little real difference between your position and the prohibitionists. You claim that if moderate behavior is allowed, then destructive behavior must be allowed without opprobrium. They claim that moderate behavior should be cause for opprobrium, lest destructive behavior follow.
The difference is merely in the angle of vector, not the magnitude. Or the two endpoints of a circle, if you prefer that geometric analogy.
Neil–
I never made any such claim about immoderate behavior. The context of most of these posts is substance prohibition. My point was that alcohol is as destructive as any of the currently unfashionable vices that are prohibited or persecuted, though legal. So if the state should lay off the drinker, it should lay off all the other besotted souls.
I think moderation is an excellent thing. I wish governments and their constituents did.
But really, I pushed some button of yours that had nothing to do with my comment. Perhaps a glass of Cherverny, the poor man’s Sancerre, or a zesty Marlborough Sauvignon Blanc? With an ashed Selles-sur-Cher?
Bourbon, actually.
Perhaps you should be more clear, since now I have no idea what you mean by “I say anyone who indulges in alcohol has no business criticizing anyone else’s vices.”
Am I, or am I not allowed to criticize immoderate behavior over a glass of amber liquid? If the state should issue DUI’s, should it not also impose limits on drug use?