Freedom Isn’t Just Another Word

August 31, 2009 12:00 pm Richard Uncategorized 1 Comment

Read a strange and disturbing thing at the bar the other night. (Yes, I’m the whack-a-doo who reads in bars.) Was making my way through an interesting tome called Booze by Craig Hebron, a Canadian with all sorts of stimulating and diverting stuff to say about the history of drinking in his native land.

It seems that when the Prohibitionistas started running rampant through Canada in the 1920s, one of the philosophical underpinnings of their tedious movement was the notion that abstaining from intoxicating spirits would help people enjoy a higher degree of freedom, and assist them along the road toward more complete individuality.

Did your Bullshit Meter just go off like a midnight banshee? It should have.

The concept is, prima facie, idiotic and reckless. It turns any reasonable definition of “freedom” inside-out and back-asswards.

Simply put, people do not achieve an extra measure, or ascend to some higher level, of freedom by denying themselves access to life’s experiences. Sublimation is closure. Autonomy is born of acceptance. Life is just chock-full of experiences, after all. Our daily existence is defined by how we process and react to the second-by-second torrent of data that comes our way. A satisfying life is one that is lived in full engagement with variety; one that regularly enjoys a few shots with the unexpected and the uncommon; one that hoists its tankard and joins in a jolly toast with Life the Universe and Everything.

Qualifying events and occurances doesn’t broaden life at all. It truncates it. And that’s the polar opposite of freedom.

Yes, some behaviors, some actions and activities, are absolutely to be avoided. Rape, Murder, Child Abuse—come on. Who would advocate shit like that? But I’m not talking about getting your snuggle on with acts where one person damages—to any degree—another person. I’m talking about the things we do that effect us as individuals. And if there is anything more personal than one’s relationship with booze, I haven’t the foggiest what it might be.

Alcoholic intoxication provokes a wide range of responses in each of us, responses which are entirely dependent upon the psychological, sociological, and biological vagaries at-large in each of us, and which are as variable as our reactions to a movie, a sculpture, a Snicker’s bar, or a poke in the eye with a pointy stick. (And I’m not even going to get into the fact that the responses aroused by alcohol vary wildly from one type of alcohol to another—e.g., a tequila drunk differs quite a lot from a rum drunk.)

Cutting yourself off from something as illuminating, sociable, and complex as a booze-born high is the same as amputating a limbic limb; as puncturing your inner authority. It is the philosophical equivalent of performing dental work on yourself with a soldering iron and a Makita screw gun.

Temperance is low-rent fence-sitting. Abstinence is an exercise in delusional self-aggrandizement. And as far as revealing a triptych to freedom, neither does the job.

Anti-alcohol zealots are gaining strength in this country. Groups like M.A.D.D., and their lickspittles in government, will stop at nothing to take away your right to drink. And from the time such people first slithered from their soggy dens, one of their more repellant tactics has been to go after our language and change it around so that it fits with their topsy-turvy ideology.

So, go out and drink, friends. Get drunk. Raise your wrist with pride. And if some teetotaling douche-bag starts mouthing off about how “free” he is because he doesn’t drink, just flash him your best H.R. Drunkenstuff grin—and ignore the silly bastard.

Cheers.

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