Civilisation's Oldest Enemy Returns

The thing about living in a bubble is that there are no normal people around to point out even the most absurd contradictions in your position. Take the Beeb's efforts last Wednesday - on the same channel, on the same night, the Beeb ran both The Power of Nightmares and a supposed expose of the evils of the booze industry. So the people flying airliners into buildings aren't a threat, but the brewers are going to kill us all.

The program itself, The Booze Business: Consuming Spirits, was a masterpiece of the Beeb's po-faced, finger-wagging moralising. The program tracked a group of young ladies out on the town. Now take a wild shot in the dark which town it was filmed in ? Yep - Newcastle. Let no man say the Beeb is obsessed with stereotypes. The actual report was a perfect example of the 'gorillas in the mist' style Beeb reporters adopt every time they pass the Watford Gap, combined with the aforementioned sermonising, and no little humbuggery. The voice-over informed us that the ladies had spent over £100 on booze - no, actually they'd spent £20 on booze and £80 on tax. Hearing a whiny Liberal complain that people are spending too much on booze when it's people like him who have driven prices up in the first place is like hearing the guy who killed his parents lay claim to the sympathy of the court because he's an orphan.

Still, the Beeb was proving, once again, to be a perfect exemplar of the prejudices of lemon-sucking, Metropolitan Liberals. There's no two ways about it: foul stench, reports of unusual activity in the sewers...yep, the prohibitionists are back, and with them one of the defining battles of human civilisation.

Alcohol has been one of the common factors in the development of modern life. As far back as archaeologists go, they find evidence of hooch. Hell, man may even be a Johnny Come Lately here. Not only will several higher mammals make special efforts to drink booze when it's available, but even in the wild several primates will go out of their way to obtain those types of fruits which are prone to fermentation. What we do know for certain is that booze has been our loyal companion through the long march of human civilisation [if only there was a large group of people who didn't drink, we could see if their civilisation really was as rich and civilised as the prohibs say it must be] .

Booze has been with us from the dawn of history, and quite possibly so have the pinch-mouthed battalions of lemon-sucking freaks pushing prohibition. They say booze isn't healthy, yet what of those studies claiming that consuming certain forms of alcohol can improve health ? Shouldn't these freaks be out encouraging teetotallers to sink a few ? Maybe it isn't health per se that motivates them. They say people spend too much on booze, but they happily rake off the proceeds of punitive taxation. They claim booze is linked to violence amongst young people, so how come our schools are so violent ? As I recall, most comprehensives only serve lager, so maybe youth violence is down to the actual youths, rather than the sinister brewing collectives.

No, you want to know what really motivates these twisted human leeches ? Check out this 'ere poster. That's how they see it - drunks refusing to play their part in society, refusing to accept their responsibilities to be worker bees in the sociological hive. I doubt that one prohib in a thousand would question the fact that the poster is from the USSR, that the drunk is being criticised for not allowing himself to be a willing slave in the service of evil. To fellow drunks, this bloke isn't a waster, he's a hero, an almost Randian figure refusing to allow his mind to be enslaved by a Satanic regime. But don't expect the prohibs to see that. The prohib, almost by definition, is a collectivist - who else would rant & rave about someone else drinking ?

The prohib may have a laundry list of complaints against vitamin XXX, but it all boils down to one thing, a peevish, schoolmarmey rant that people aren't taking the right things seriously. This seems like a simple thing, yet it lies at the heart of the great divide between drunks and the paisty-faced creeps who wish to persecute us.

To the prohib, all life is a grim struggle, all individuality is the enemy. Think of a prohib and you think of some screechy, red-faced hag. Think of a drunk and you think of Dean Martin. The prohib trades on the supposed horrors awaiting the drunk, the drunk has no need of such fear mongering, he simply points out that life is good, and it can be even better with vodka.

Prohibs claim that drunks are irresponsible losers and deadbeats, that all the successful people are maniacal teetotallers: after all, how can a mind rotted by alcohol possibly match the spotless mind of the teetotaller ? I believe we tested this hypothesis some years ago, when we compared the performance of two Chief Executives, one sober and one drunk.

That's really what it's all about: who your role model is. Whether you think life is just great as is, or whether you want to ascend to the glory of your inner something and claim your eternal something else and then….. Who cares ? If you really can't stand booze then we, unlike YOU, are not forcing our lifestyle on anyone. Leave us alone, shut it and just sit in the corner and enjoy an evian or something.