I’m going to tell you some things which, if you’re over 40, you already know.
Bob, in Accounting, goes to three company parties a year with his wife, and every year he puts that lampshade on his head, makes a total fool of himself and has to be driven home by the wife. Although he’s never been seen out drinking any other time, with or without co-workers, and he and Darlene are still married after 25 years, and never had a DUI, still the whisper goes around is that Bob’s an alcoholic.
It only takes a couple of Christmas parties for that tag to be hung on a fellow.
Bob is what we call a “social drunk”, only no one bothered to do a count, so no one knew that Bob only gets social three times a year, and always with the same crowd.
The more serious kinds of drunks are those who drink alone. I knew an Army judge who polished off two quarts of Jack Daniels every weekend, his wife and daughter having to seek refuge with friends at least twice a month…but he showed up for work every Monday, bright eyed and bushy-tailed. I doubt he ever made the colonel’s list, he wasn’t that good a lawyer, let alone a judge, and I never knew whether his wife stayed married to him, or most of all, whether anyone in the command ever suggested, recommended, or ordered him into counseling. As I said, after all he showed up for work every day clean and sober, and what he did in his leisure time was his business. Right?
Except for family and close friends, I actually hold to that “none of my business” axiom. That’s a law of survival in nature. Still there are lines you shouldn’t cross without serious blowback.
In the old USSR almost everyone was a drunk who was a rank-and-file worker, or “apparatchik” (members of the apparatus), assuming they could find cheap vodka in large quantities. The lives their management plans had drawn up for them since Stalin had designed the Soviet “nomenklatura” (middle managers) in the 30s, literally shouted out “quitting time”. Working in the USSR was oppressively dull and tedious.
I have visited a few working-class saloons in the Communist East and Far East Japan, and confess I was stunned at how much, and how fast those men could put away a week’s paycheck. I also dined with Soviet bosses from the political class and note they too could put away copious quantities of vodka, only of a much higher quality.
The Soviet economy, both their offices and factory floors, couldn’t “produce” in part because at any given time they had 25% absenteeism in their socialist utopia. (Hung-over?) In both production and clerical areas it took 7 people to do the work normally that required only four in Memphis. The Soviets wanted to boast full employment more than they wanted to produce to fill actual needs. Turns out Marx-Stalin had designed the perfect system for full employment, while totally ignorant, or indifferent (no one knows for sure), for actually achieving a purpose. And they stretched out their production lines, only their crack socialist planners had neglected to take note that if one person didn’t show up in the production line, the entire line could shut down…which was often.
I don’t believe the Totalitarian State had any kind of intervention for heavy drinking in those days because their own bosses knew that such aimless lives would end up this way. A kind of fatalism.
At the time the Soviet Union finally collapsed (1992) it had one of the lowest life expectancy rates in the modern world. And I’m told it hasn’t gotten much better since, 30 years later.
So, bottom line, is Nancy Pelosi a drunk? Or is it really her dentures that cause her to slur her speech? They did my father.
The point is, we don’t know. We can’t know. What we do know is that someone on the internet on our side that you respect, very likely on Twitter, says Nancy is a drunk when she slurs her speech, thereby telegraphing to you and thousands like you, that “drunk”-title is OK to believe, making saps out of all of us, since, in the process what we’re justifying is every sort of inflammatory lie about Donald Trump, for instance, his womanizing (even Stormy Daniels finally fessed up that she never had sex with Trump; i.e, she’d lied)…And did you know there is not one, not one, verified case of his cheating on any of his wives? And anyone who compares him to Hitler, or his administration to the Third Reich, is a lie told to children who never read a book comparing the Nazis with any American political party.
This is where we are.
It places “truth” and “fact” in perilous position, when their pursuit ultimately ends in which side of an argument can garner the most votes, or agreement…irrespective of how Nature might vote.
You see, Nature decides the bottom line, good or ill, based on rigid laws of survival, regardless of how people vote or believe in misinformation.
And that places a culture or population’s survival in jeopardy when they accept as truth or fact based solely on the loudest or broadest reportage, which 70 years ago would have been rejected out of hand, for it challenged every common sense method at arriving at a rejection of faulty reasoning, which we once upon a time referred to as “balderdash”.
(How many under-40’s even know what that word even means?)
At this site I have entire sections, or departments, dedicated to “natural law”, and “how things work” based on easy and obvious observation of various actions, from the individual level to family level, and that larger collective pursuits, such as family, corporation, or nation, can utterly collapse, and in the process, in their demise, take many, many more into the pit they’ve marched into that pit with them..
In a single family the damage that alcohol, or drugs, or a propensity to lie or steal, can mean the destruction of just that family. Even the Biden family name will be laughed at for little more than a generation. Then be forgotten. But as early as 1938, just five years after Adolf Hitler came to power in Germany, most Americans who simply went to the theater and followed the Saturday newsreels knew that Hitler was leading the world into war. The rest of Europe saw the same darkness falling on their futures, only through different lenses.
No one knew how that might have to happen, or at what cost. It would be another seven (7) years and millions of lives lost for the end-chapter to be written, before civilization could do a “U-turn” and begin rebuilding, and re-assessing what it had done wrong…and here’s the rub…
…It would take another 70+ years, three generations, always three generations, before not just the memories, but the lessons, had all been lost, and presumably re-learned, the hard way.
Those lessons have to be taught.
Civilizations, entire populations, have been known to collapse and fail…many with a great deal of predictability and warning, with that 70-year generational cycle in full dress regalia, going back to the dynastic flip-flops from the early IV Dynasty of Egypt, c2800 BC, to the fall of the Hohenzollerns in 1918. The similarities are stunning, as the commonalities that are ignored.
The most important lesson here, called “a takeaway” these days, is that it is likely as revealing the true nature of the party whisperer as it is the party drinker.
My purpose here is to challenge readers to begin thinking about what is at stake if we continue on this path of knowing nothing and feeling everything.
