The Noble Experiment
..or the charming, darling quite alarming Moon Shine (the sparkly word that sparkles and dazzles almost as much as Chappaquiddick does). What in tarnation* do I mean?

http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/miami/peopleevents/pande06.html

""If anyone wants to go to hell in a hurry," a distressed minister told the "New York Times" in 1925, "there are greased banks aplenty in Miami." During Prohibition, Miami Beach joined many American cities in openly flouting the 18th Amendment. "

Sumptuary Law from Wiki:

"The first written Greek law code (Locrian code), by Zaleucus in the seventh century BC, stipulated that "no free woman should be allowed any more than one maid to follow her, unless she was drunk: nor was to stir out of the city by night, wear jewels of gold about her, or go in an embroidered robe, unless she was a professed and public prostitute; that, bravos excepted, no man was to wear a gold ring, nor be seen in one of those effeminate robes woven in the city of Miletus." (Quoted from Montaigne, see below.) It also banned the drinking of undiluted wine except for medical purposes."

The symposium** continues at Ron Silliman's house as to the social tragedy of the legend of the artist drunkard. It is an interesting discussion wherever one encounters it and one encounters it almost everyday and not just amongst artists and writers. I've little doubt that airline pilot lounges and teacher's lounges and sheesh even Catholic parishes (where wine is elevated not only to a sacramental element of the ritual but to the level of being the actual blood of GOD) are just chock full of the party line.

The workplace in America.

I work with a variety of people in a relatively large institution (for a small town). My boss drinks, her administrative assistant drinks and her star pupil (for now) drinks...all heavily. The finance lady drinks also and all four of them pepper their speech each and every day with splendid talk about getting TO a drink once they get home and sometimes it even veers into getting absolutely GASSED. (I also work with a few people who drink occassionally and one who never drinks at all and an older woman who never did and a nurse whose son is a chronic and suicidal.) It is amazing to me that the level of this problem in this country is so underwhelmingly underestimated when in fact I am certain that I am not unusual in my experience. If anything, I probably work in a LOW INCIDENCE population when it comes to this thing popularly referred to as "addiction". That is probably because we work at a HEALTH INSTITUTION where in fact we are all supposed to be...er..healthy.

In contrast, I smoke. Although it is very harmful to one's health, smoking is not associated with as many characteristics which could be called matters of one's missing ethical piece i.e. extramarital sex is never a result of smoking too many cigarettes but drinking tee many martoonis definitely can and does land people in the wrong bed at night sometimes. Therefore, smoking can never lead to syphillis, HIV or unwanted/unplanned pregnancy which I think is a real selling point even if my lungs probably are as black as tar. I have the stats to prove it because I collect stats for a living. Ninety percent of all those whom I test for HIV and STD admit to having sex while intoxicated. Of course that may mean with their spouse but that would take a bit more time to come up with how many people that I test who are actually married which is not that many as most people are only getting tested between partners or when they suspect infidelity or have been unfaithful plus those who choose to have sex before they get married to someone (most of our teens).

I'm not justifying it but making a comparison between one "habit" or "choice misbehavior" and another.

Coffee...I drink way too much coffee also. Hasn't really done me wrong but my teeth are probably not as white as they should be and my breasts are probably more likely to develop tumors. As well, coffee has never landed me or anyone I know in the hooskow even though I am absolutely certain that some car accidents are directly related to either spilling a cup of joe or dropping a fag in the wrong place.

I bite my nails. I'm actually a binge biter and can get down to my nubbins in a matter of minutes but only on occassion.

What I find truly fascinating about America is the campaign that has been waged and won against cigarette smoking. This society is successful in transitioning from one of encouraging and advocating the use of tobacco to one that is not only intolerant of it but is working on OUTLAWING it. Just like intoxicants were outlawed in early Islamic society when it eventually became a punishable offense (some say).

If it works for tobacco (even if it hasn't worked for me proving that the law isn't always on my side) why hasn't it been tried with alcohol?

Oh...I forgot...it has. It ended up in class/gang warfare and is now known nostalgically in movies and history books as THE PROHIBITION DAYS.

It literally has it's own word and is glamourized in movies ya see? (that's my best Cagney impersonation).

And let's not forget that one Moonshiner in particular created a political dynasty that exists to this day and in fact, got one of his son's elected to be the Head Counsel for the country and whose name we all know by heart.

JFK...not to mention all the hardship that family has had to endure and let's just not go there because by now it ought to be pretty much lodged in our archetypical and mythological natural history as a nation.

*The word tarnation is rooted in the word ETERNAL and is a colloquial term my mother used all the damn time and one of my favorite words which I used to think had something to do with negroes.

**Symposia often were held for specific occasions. For example the most famous symposium of all, the one immortalised by Plato, was being hosted by the poet Agathon on the occasion of his first victory at the theater contest of the 416 BC Dionysia, but was upstaged by the unexpected entrance of the toast of the town, the young Alcibiades dropping in almost totally drunk and almost totally naked, having just left another symposium.

Nothing like the blind and perhaps naked and also drunk leading the same.