In Defense of Drunks

Perhaps it is time for an attempt to reinvent ?public space? for our day, to create possibilities of communion that are not only virtual but visceral?where people gather around something other than a screen?perhaps even around a glass

Photo by David W Cerny/Reuters

Watering holes in America are turning into waxing salons. Vineyards are being displaced by pharmaceutical plants, wine bottles by pill bottles. And as far as one can tell from recent journalism, we?re pleased as punch about it.

?My feeling is one of liberation!? exclaims Lee Siegel in his New York Times essay ?Bye-Bye Bohemia,? cheering the installation of a hair-removal shop in the home of Manhattan?s legendary Cedar Tavern, where poets, painters, and filmmakers used to convene to debate, seduce, inspire, and offend one another. Those folks were just a crowd of cantankerous winos, Siegel tells us. One dark day, he adds ominously, a painter in their group even went so far as to ask another painter to ?step outside? to resolve an artistic difference. Imagine that.

In our day, that artist might simply have assumed a few pseudonyms and blasted his detractors from the comfort of his home computer (Siegel knows this: He lost a job at the New Republic for doing it.) That artist would also, in all likelihood, have put down his wine glass and picked up?permanently?a vial of anti-depressants.

?I?ve taken anti-depressants for around 20 years,? proclaims another journalist recently in ?Getting Sober with Zoloft,? an all-too-hackneyed contemporary coming-of-age story: the rueful user of nonprescription drugs (e.g. alcohol) who becomes a pious user of prescription drugs (i.e. Zoloft and others). ?My only regret about taking (these) medications,? she proudly concludes her piece, ?is not having done so sooner?in fact, I wonder if I might have skipped addiction entirely had these drugs been available in my teens.? What she does not admit, however obvious it may seem, is that she has simply swapped one addiction for another addiction, at least equally powerful.

For this is what we usually do, as societies and as individuals: We do not eradicate our addictions and obsessions so much as we trade up for new, more virtuous, ones. The 18^th-century obsession with reading mediocre serial novels becomes the 20^th-century habit of watching middling soap operas and the 21^st-century habit of following the lives of a thousand semi-friends on Facebook. The preoccupation of earlier eras with white skin becomes the modern preoccupation with tan skin; the obsession with small women?s feet becomes the obsession with small women?s waistlines. A commitment to repetitive religious rituals becomes a commitment to repetitive physical exercises; the cult of the soul becomes the cult of the body. The worship of the Christ child becomes the worship of the Super child. The favored drugs of yesteryear?wine, whisky, beer?become the favored drugs of today: Prozac, Wellbutrin, Xanax.

The question, quite possibly, is not how to banish obsession, addiction, idolatry, and habit altogether, for they are inherently linked and ineradicable parts of human nature. The better question might be: How to choose one?s habits and addictions wisely?or, if not wisely, at least relatively pleasantly or interestingly?and not just according to despotic current fashion.

I would propose that the contempt we increasingly heap upon alcohol drinkers, upon bars and upon individuals actually willing to face off about their disputes on the sidewalk rather than on the Internet is misplaced. The drinkers of old?and there were hard ones, to be sure, perhaps especially in the milieu of art?had the advantage that at least their vice tended to draw them into the public sphere: It did not isolate them in the bathroom studying the fine print on a prescription label, or throwing back capsules with toothpaste water before repairing to a lonely night of video streaming.

You clink with wine glasses?not pill-containers. ?You make a toast to your comrades with pints?not milligrams. So even if and when the buzz wears off, you still have real-life contacts, social skills, a flesh-and-blood community. Your friends may sock it to you sometimes, but at least they recognize your face on the street. They know about the trips you take and sometimes accompany you on them: They don?t take off alone in the bathroom by their medicine cabinet.

What is it with the clich? of the lazy and lonely drunken artist? Take the case of one of the most maligned of the last century?s famous poet-drunkards, Dylan Thomas. Thomas may have been miserable off and on, but he was never isolated, rarely depleted, and arguably never depressed. If he urged his dying father,

"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light,"

it was first, because he had caring relations with his family-members and second, and most important, because he loved life with an incandescent fervor?raw and red-hot as it seemed to him. It is a sign of our times that his colleagues today are so often vituperatively dismissive of his life?accusing him, like the unnamed editors of Wikipedia, of having a relationship to his wife that was ?defined by alcoholism and was mutually destructive? and a career that was a shambles:

"In the early part of his marriage, Thomas and his family lived hand-to-mouth. ? Although Thomas was appreciated as a popular poet in his lifetime, he found earning a living as a writer difficult ?"

Source: http://www.slate.com/articles/double_x/doublex/2013/07/in_defense_of_drunks_the_rest_of_us_just_trade_wine_for_anti_depressants.html

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