Fascism sought to bring people together, to heal the fragmentation of society, to remedy the alienation that the individual feels in the ruthlessly competitive atmosphere of the free market. But, at the same time, fascism wanted to preserve and improve all the material benefits of industrialism and trade. So far it sounds—as I’ve pointed out before—like a New Democrat’s campaign platform. But instead of recounting votes in Palm Beach County, Mussolini, Hitler, Franco, and Tojo believed they could accomplish their aims with mindless patriotism, genocide, and secret police. It didn’t work.
Neither did communism. Communism was the notion that, if you took everything away from people and made them go sit in Siberia, people would behave like perfect little angels. Communism was hell’s own time-out, Mom being Joseph Stalin. It fizzled when permissive parent Mikhail Gorbachev put a VCR and some Blue’s Clues tapes in Yakutsk so the little gulagers wouldn’t cry.
The wonder is that communism lasted so long. But, then again, modern poetry lasted a long time too. Communism appealed to the kind of progressive intellectuals who liked to read dinosaur-turd sonnets while sitting on Bauhaus ass-crampers inside Le Corbusier terrariums lit by yard-sale lamps. They could dig the modern literature and design because it seemed so dumb that anybody—even a progressive intellectual—could do it. And the same went for thinking the large thoughts behind communism. Everyone knows that life ought to be fair and that God’s a lousy guy for not making it happen. Everyone should get what everyone else gets. And, if everyone gets broke, hungry, and dead, well, fair’s fair.
Then there was communism’s weak-tea sister, socialism. Socialists maintained that we shouldn’t take all the money away from all the people since all the people don’t have money. We should take all the money away from only the people who make money. Then, when we run out of that, we could take more money from the people who…hey, wait! Where’d you people go? What do you mean you’re “tax exiles in Monaco”?
And last, and most dead, but not quite sure whether to lie down, is liberalism. Liberals believe that bad things are bad. Except for people. There are no bad people, just bad things that people do. Such as start wars. That’s a bad thing. A very bad thing. There’s nothing worse than war. Unless it’s the war in Kosovo where liberals saved a bunch of people’s lives or would have if those people hadn’t gotten killed first. That was a good thing. Liberals, even the liberal draft-dodgers in the Clinton White House, agreed that the war in Kosovo was a good thing. Liberals believe that good things are good. Prosperity is a good thing. There’s nothing better than prosperity. Unless the prosperity is in the alienated suburbs where “smart growth” has not been practiced. Then it causes teenagers to kill everyone in their high school. Which shows that weapons are a bad thing. A very bad thing. Unless the people who didn’t dodge the draft use the weapons in Kosovo when the people who did dodge the draft tell them to.
Since the time of Jimmy Carter, liberals have been chasing their tail, and, last heard, they’d caught it and begun eating and had chewed their way up to the back of their own ears.
The ridiculous abstractions of the twentieth century were not, however, limited to the artistic and the political. The social sciences plagued almost the whole hundred years. It wasn’t until we were in college and looking for gut courses so we could slide through senior year that we realized Anthropology is just travel writing about places that don’t have room service, Sociology is journalism without news, and Psychology is peeking into your sister’s diary after your parents have sent her to rehab. Freudian psychology was more interesting but, unfortunately, it was past its sell-by date before I started searching for an easy B in a class that met after 11 A.M.
As for why our folks shipped Sis to Silver Hill, Sigmund Freud held that the whole problem with everything in life is that we want to boff the ’rents. What was this guy snorting? In point of fact, Sigmund was whacked on blow most of the time. Go down to the Jacuzzi at the assisted-living facility and take a look at Mom and Dad in their swimsuits. No. Way.
Psychology, of course, is not an issue anymore. We discovered that if you’re crazy you can take drugs. Unless you’re crazy because you’ve been taking drugs. In that case you can stop taking drugs and start taking other drugs.
Philosophy is not an issue anymore either. Amazing to think that people once took philosophy seriously. They would sit around Plato’s symposium for days at a time asking each other, “What is truth?” while Plato ran his hand up under their togas. But philosophy topped out with Existentialism.
It must have been a great moment, in that Paris café with a bunch of French guys who were one Pernod over the line, when suddenly Sartre (or maybe it was Camus) said, “I’m me! Here I am! This is now! And here I am right now being me!”
There were, I believe, further developments in twentieth-century philosophy, but the class was at 9 A.M. and mathematical symbols were involved, and getting a B would have meant breaking into the professor’s office and stealing the exam.
There was also a sort of general informal philosophy afoot in the twentieth century. This came into full blossom in the 1960s. The dictionary word for it is antinomism, although we usually say whatever. The basic idea—assuming there was a basic idea, which there wasn’t—was anything goes.
Everything went. And when it went it didn’t go well. The wild, prophetic voices of the sixties can still be heard muttering in doorways and begging with paper cups. And the nonconformists long ago exhausted the supply of stuff with which not to conform. They’ve been reduced to wearing tongue studs.
The rest of us got over it, the same way we got over sexual liberation when we found out that the viruses were having all the reproductive fun. We got over feminism, too. At least you women did—the moment you were hired for those prestigious jobs that only men used to have. It turns out work sucks. I don’t know what women thought we were doing at the office all day. Maybe we needed a double vodka gimlet when we got home because we were tuckered out from all the prestige. Furthermore, women discovered that, even if they were running the State Department, they still had to take care of the kids. Not that we men didn’t want to help, but if you leave us in charge, the rug monkeys wind up with their mouths diapered, watching the Spice Channel instead of Sesame Street, and when they open their school lunches there’s a Tickle-Me Elmo with mayo between two slices of rye.
The forces that drove the twentieth century are now driving off the ends of the earth. The nationalism that caused the wealthiest and most sophisticated nations to sacrifice ten million of their citizens in World War I now causes an occasional Slobodan Milosevic. The religious zealotry that once shook empires now shakes Afghanistan, the Gaza Strip, and the New Hampshire presidential primary. Even capitalism teeters since we entered the information age. These days a successful business depends not on an enormous accumulation of capital but on an enormous accumulation of—if I properly understand what Charles Schwab has been telling me—bullshit.
Things were rotten at the end of the old millennium. But that’s okay. They were rotten things. The bullshit of capitalism, the offal of fanatic beliefs, the moldy fruit of goofball thinking—they’re compost now. Mix the offscourings of the twentieth-century mind with the loam of human hope and effort and you get fertile soil and a badly strained metaphor.
Like most annoying older people who don’t have a life, I garden. I know about these things. Think of the garden bed out back as being enriched with theories, conceits, abstractions, and orthodoxies that had been festering in a large, wilted heap since the modern era ran out of steam about the time Sgt. Pepper was released. And bursting from this garden covered in organic spoil there teems, in wild abundance, a new and vigorous crop of…Christina Aguilera, Compassionate Conservatism, and PalmPilots.
Weeds! Damn weeds! Just like in my real garden. Nothing but useless, ugly weeds spreading everywhere, as high as my head. Decline and dissolution? I wish. I’ve got to go get the brush hog and a fifty-gallon drum of Agent Orange.
; “Honey, that’s ridiculous. There’s a foot of snow outside,” said my wife, who I don’t think had been listening closely.
Well, all the more reason not to go to the neighbors’ New Year’s Eve party, I said.
“That and the fact that we weren’t invited and they aren’t speaking to us.”
You don’t mind staying home, do you? I consider New Year’s Eve to be the Special Olympics of inebriation. I thought we’d just sit here, build a fire, and I’d do a little research on the article I’m writing about how to get drunk.
“Well,” said my wife, “even if I drive, I’d probably flunk the Breathalyzer just from kissing you at midnight.”
Puritans! I said. America is plagued by puritans. It always has been plagued by puritans. Take the Puritans, just for instance. Within a year of landing at Plymouth Rock they had dragged the poor Wampanoag Indians to one of those family Thanksgivings full of religious aunts, Rotarian uncles, and Donna Shalala–type girl cousins all eating overdone turkey, with no booze in the log shelter and nothing worth popping in the bathroom medicine cabinet. And I’ll bet the meal was timed so that the Wampanoag tribe missed the Michigan/Michigan State kickoff. Then there was the eighteenth-century Great Awakening, the nineteenth-century Revival Movement, twentieth-century Prohibition, and now cable TV advertisements for Buns of Steel.
These puritans are ruining my essay on how to get hit by a whiskey truck with grace, style, and wit. I meant to address important questions such as: When is it appropriate to get drunk? (When you’re sober.) When is it appropriate to sober up? (When you come to and find a soda straw in the empty windshield-washer-fluid reservoir of your car and your dog is wearing a negligee.) Are there things you shouldn’t say with three sheets waving in the wind after letting go of the water wagon with both hands while having a brick under your hat? (“I do.”) Then there were the myriad matters of technique: When making a dry martini you can use, as an emergency vermouth substitute, more gin—obvious when you think about it. And so forth.
Alas, health, fitness, and self-approval are in vogue. A man who drinks in a healthy, fit, and self-approving manner will mix vodka with yogurt and get tangled in the Nautilus machine trying to kiss his own ass. Thus I am compelled to skip the do’s and don’t-you-dare’s, the how-to’s and here’s how’s. Instead I must explain why readers should knee-walk into the attached garage of the psyche, tear the MADD bumper sticker off the Oldsmobile of their superego, make John Barleycorn their designated driver, and weave across both lanes of life with nothing on but their fog lights.
Metaphorically speaking, my dear, of course.
Do it for the sake of humanity, I say. Lushes are morally superior to uninebriated people. Compare, for example, drunken impromptu bar fights to soberly calculated professional wrestling matches in terms of the adverse effects upon society. Are children taught that violence is normative by cartoon network shows based on hooch-sodden donnybrooks in Boston’s South End? Are the poor economically exploited by product endorsements from enraged Micks with noses like Rose Bowl floats? Are there any action figures in the toy stores depicting O’Rourkes with a fat lip and a shiner? Did my rum-dum cousin Kevin, who’s got an attempted manslaughter conviction, run for president on the Reform Party ticket?
Beerjerkers, mug blots, and pot wallopers are careless and bad-tempered, it’s true. But consider the greatest evils of history. Is “careless” the word you’d use to describe Auschwitz? Was the Rape of Nanking something Tojo did instead of kicking the cat? It’s smoking in bed versus the firebombing of Dresden. Real evil requires the kind of thoughtful planning that is hard to do when you’re wearing the soup tureen on your head and trying not to let your wife notice you’re taking a leak in the potted palm. The worst people always have an abstemious streak. Hitler was a teetotaler. What if he’d been a soak? What if Himmler and Göring emerged from the Reich Chancellery asking each other, “How do we persecute the gnus?” Real evil also requires lying, and in vino veritas. “Adolf, you really oughta shave that booger broom.” A drinking man couldn’t have written Mein Kampf. Give Shicklgruber a couple of silly milks, you get Turn Your Head and Kampf. And think of all the suffering that mankind would have been spared if the Communist Manifesto said, “Workers of the world, it’s Miller Time.”
“Maybe,” said my wife, removing the empty martini shaker, “you should switch to wine.”
Speaking of which, I said, there’s a problem with wine writing. That is, there’s a problem worse than wine writers’ using “fleshy,” “supple,” or “elegant” when they aren’t writing about…well, about you, my dear.
Recall your first childhood savor of the vintner’s art. Perhaps it was the swig out of the cooking-sherry bottle, or the sip at dinner from the would-be sophisticate parent, or a glass of first aid administered by a Methodist grandmother who thought there was no excuse for drink in the house except to treat such conditions as croup, rheumatism, lumbago, and having a grandson who, at 11:30 P.M., insisted there was something under the bed. Anyway: ugh.
To innocent tongues the grandest cru smacks of Spic and Span used instead of sugar in the Kool-Aid. Wine—indeed, all booze—tastes horrid. This is because of the alcohol. Alcohol’s flavor is so bad that no one would ever drink an alcoholic beverage—unless, of course, it contained alcohol. Hence the problem with wine writing. Despite all the hooey about attack and finish, fruits and flowers, round robust length upon palate, and the Robert Parker hundred-point scale, we are swallowing the stuff to get high.
That was why, last week, Chris Buckley and I embarked on a Blind (Drunk) Wine Tasting.
“And I,” said my wife, “had to get a sitter and come collect you and take out the toddler seat and fold down the back part of the SUV because you and Chris were too dizzy to sit up.”
We’re both deeply grateful for your efforts. And it has paid off with an important, if I do say so myself, article for Business Fun. Here’s the rough draft of my introduction:
A wide variety of wines were sampled, ranging from the reputedly splendid to the allegedly pitiful. Selection of the better stuff was done by V, proprietor of a quietly chic potables emporium in Washington, D.C. Lesser plonk was chosen on the basis of weird names and ugly labels. Additional expertise came from the pages of Hugh Johnson’s Pocket Encyclopedia of Wine, 1999 edition. This book was chosen because it is wide-ranging, authoritative, concise, and the only wine guide for sale at the local card and gift shop.
The blind tasting was conducted in two rounds. The first commenced at 3:45 P.M., with both participants well lunched and purely uninebriated. The second round began at…. well, no one remembered to consult the time, but it was much later, after all of the No. 5 and most of the No. 7, described below, had been consumed.
There was no spitting into little cups. A hefty gulp of every wine was taken and then some, in many cases. Palates were cleansed with bites of liver pâté and puffs on Monte Cristos.
Chris (or perhaps it was I) claims to recall—from some comparative lit class taken a generation ago—that when the Babylonian gods sat in assembly they thought it incumbent upon themselves to debate each judgment twice—once sober and once blitzed. A good idea, and never better than when judging wine.
“I’m surprised you remember that much,” said my wife.
We were taking notes, I said. Max has typed them up. We’ll present the tasting comments verbatim—more or less, since the notes begin to become illegible even before the Lynch-Moussas is reached in the first round. Here’s what Max has been able to decipher so far:
1. Los Vascos
Les Domaines Barons de Rothschild (Lafite)
Cabernet Sauvignon, 1997
Chile, $8.99
V’s comments: “A more Californian than Bordeaux taste.”
Pocket Encyclopedia of Wine: Two stars (out of four); no vintage info. Wines of Los Vascos are “fair but neglect Chile’s lovely fruit flavours in favour of firm structures.” Of Chilean wine generally: “Its problems…above all [are] old
wooden vats.”
Sober Tasting
C.B.
(whose wife once took a wine-tasting course, sloshes wine around, holds it up to light, and explains that if the wine sticks to the side of the glass it has “legs”)
P.J.
(looks skeptical)
C.B.
Good legs, jejune nose, almost flippant. Acidic in a bad way.
P.J.
What the man said.
C.B.
Nicotine bitterness; deep, almost asphalty finish.
P.J.
Bark mulch undertones.
Drunk Tasting
P.J.
Bland, sweet-smelling, not evil.
C.B.
But pretty evil.
P.J.
Blandly evil.
C.B.
Box wine or Livingston Cellars.
P.J.
Box.
Conclusion (after labels had been revealed): Old wooden vats.
2. Livingston Cellars
“Burgundy” (no vintage)
Modesto, California, $3.99
V: “It’s made by Gallo. They took their name off.”
PEW: E&J Gallo, one to two stars. Livingston not rated separately. “Having mastered the world of commodity wines (with eponymously labeled ‘Hearty Burgundy,’ ‘Pink Chablis’, etc.)…is now unleashing a blizzard of regional varietals.”
The CEO of the Sofa (O'Rourke, P. J.) Page 11
