Your humble correspondent cleared out last Wednesday for an
early Memorial Day weekend vacation and headed down I-5 in the
recently revived ‘91 Sunbird. A day and a night in Seattle, then I
drove to a youth hostel/art gallery/all ages rock club in Anacortes
— run by a few (mostly) reformed commie friends from my alma mater
— and parked it there for a few days. Though the laptop stayed
behind, this wasn’t a strictly non-working vacation. I met with a
playwright future profilee, read through Ray Bradbury’s wretched
new novel, and brought a stack of Modern Drunkard
magazines along for the ride. Never let it be said that this column
isn’t road tested.
Given the self-help literature on the subject, it was fun to see
denial was the first reaction most people had when they saw
Modern Drunkard. Several asked if this was some sort of
elaborate joke. With cover lines such as “The Lost Art of
Staggering,” “How to Beat an Intervention,” and “In Defense of
Dionysus,” along with the long-running Dead Celebrity Drink Off
contest, I could understand their disbelief.
But readers soon learned that, though they are usually happy
drunks, the staff of Modern Drunkard Magazine are dead
serious about their booze. In fact, that they were denied entry to
the Absolut Vodka party at this year’s Bar and Nightclub
Convention. Shown the door on the hilarious grounds that they were
promoting drunkenness, the Drunkards retaliated by passing out
hundreds of copies to people going into the melee. Though the
guards tried to confiscate the issues, they finally gave up “when a
growing group of hasslees started wondering why the literature they
were carrying was any of Absolut’s business.”
This orneriness — this refusal to be cowed by convention or
moderation — is one of the things that makes this magazine so
fascinating. When the Drunkards give readers tips on how to beat an
intervention, or take aim at the latest anti-alcohol “propaganda,”
or enlist the lubricious exuberance of some of America’s founders
(“dedicated, rampant boozers”) in the service of tying one on, they
are merrily trampling on all sorts of cherished American
taboos.
And they have a point: anti-prohibitionists won the war over
legal boozing, but you’d hardly know it from the kind of reactions
this magazine provokes, or the general moral fervors that alcohol
usage is capable of producing. In his old “Hill of Beans” column,
frequent globetrotter Christopher Caldwell wrote that absolutist
U.S. laws against underage drinking were one of the two things that
he couldn’t convince foreigners were true of his own country (the
other, strangely enough, was partial birth abortion).
“There are no customs on Earth more bizarre than America’s
alcohol laws,” Caldwell wrote. “When you think of them, think of
suttee, foot-binding, and ritual scarification.” It’s almost as if
the price of breaking prohibition was that everyone would try very
hard to make alcohol use as miserable as possible.
Of this year’s Great American Beer Festival (where the magazine
was denied press credentials), Modern Drunkard editor
Frank Kelly Rich opined that the festival “is how we Americans, as
a conquered people would have been forced to drink beer had the
Third Reich won the war.” People dutifully forked out the $40 entry
fee in exchange for “a plastic cup and the right to stand in line
to receive a one ounce ration of beer at a time.”
Though this column’s drug of choice is more caffeinated and less
demanding than Rich’s, even I could feel his pain.
