(Jon Margolis writes political columns for VTDigger.)
[B]y all accounts, Department of Liquor Control Commissioner Patrick Delaney was stone cold sober the other day when he told a Senate committee that the reason people drink hard liquor is to get drunk.
Too bad. If only he had been pie-eyed, he’d have some excuse for his foolishness.
A foolishness that goes far beyond the obvious counterproductivity of a government official trashing the merchandise he has been assigned to promote by the taxpayers who pony up his salary.
For this, he has been ably scolded by an official of the Distilled Spirits Council of Vermont and by some lawmakers, including Sen. Kevin Mullin, R-Rutland, who said he was “alarmed” to hear that “the person we’re charging with trying to grow our sales” was bad-mouthing the product.
But those complaints deal only with the economics of Delaney’s blunder, which was hardly the worst of it.
Just consider how wrong he was, even as he did make one valid point. That’s when he noted that drinking distilled spirits (the quasi-official term for hard liquor) “doesn’t necessarily complement food. … I don’t think we see most people sitting down to dinner and pouring a cocktail.”
So, he concluded, “most people drink spirits for different reasons than to complement cuisine,” and that reason was to get drunk.
Delaney never specifically said hard liquor was therefore more dangerous – perhaps even more shameful – than beer and wine. But that was certainly his implication. Beer and wine, he said, are “essentially food products,” rendering them apparently more wholesome than whiskey and gin, which he seems to think are not food products and do not nourish, but merely get one drunk.
It’s true that people generally have beer and wine with meals, spirits before or after. But whiskey, gin, rum, tequila and vodka are made from grains, potatoes and sugars, all of which qualify as food as much as the grapes crushed to make wine or the barley fermented into beer.
And while spirits generally have more alcohol per ounce of liquid than beer and wine, all have alcohol. That’s why people drink them. Beer is great with pizza and white pinot noir with salmon amandine. But sparkling water would be just fine with either. Or it would be if it had alcohol. People order beer and wine with their meals because beer and wine are alcoholic beverages, and drinking them has consequences. They alter perception, mood, sometimes behavior.
One might even say they get you drunk.
Except that in common usage, the term “get drunk” suggests falling-down sloshed – stumbling steps, slurred speech, illness to follow. Obviously, that’s not what the person who has a beer with pizza or glass of pinot noir with salmon intends to do. Nor is it what he or she usually does.
But neither is that what the person does who has a scotch and soda (or even two) before dinner and a cognac later. The cocktail imbiber does not necessarily “get drunk” any more than the beer and wine drinker.
But all of them got intoxicated to one degree or another. That’s why they ordered alcoholic beverages to begin with.
Worse than Delaney’s offense to logic and commerce was the affront to culture, art and folklore implicit in his belittling of booze. For better or worse (it’s both) whiskey is more American than apple pie. In the early days of the republic, Americans probably drank more whiskey than water (it was cleaner). Farmers turned their corn into whiskey, which then became a currency in some localities. The first rebellion against the U.S. government was over a tax on whiskey.
That rebellion was easily quashed – President George Washington himself riding at the head of the troops – and in retrospect was more comic than heroic. Even earlier, though, Robert Burns proclaimed that “Freedom an’ whiskey gang thegither,” and what mere mortal would have the temerity to dispute Burns?
The American South would not be what it is without mint juleps and white lightning (“to quench the devil’s thirst,” as the great 1958 movie “Thunder Road” explained). The settlement of the West was lubricated by hard liquor, which the trappers at their rendezvous broke out right after the beaver-pelt trading was done.
Hard liquor is often celebrated in song and story, some by writers who drank more of it than was wise. Still one ought to pause before disparaging a product dear to W.H. Auden, Ernest Hemingway, Dorothy Parker, William Faulkner and James Joyce.
There’s nothing like a glass of beer on a hot summer day or fine wine with a fine dinner. But some occasions call for other options. The approaching end of the day, for instance, especially when it’s also the end of the week.
The correlation of distilled spirits and literature brings to mind the wisdom of Ogden Nash, who once noted:
“There is something about a Martini,
A tingle remarkably pleasant;
A yellow, a mellow Martini;
I wish I had one at present.
There is something about a Martini,
Ere the dining and dancing begin,
And to tell you the truth,
It is not the vermouth —
I think that perhaps it’s the gin.”
Perhaps it is. At any rate, it is time to test that proposition, with a toast, in sorrow and pity, to Commissioner Delaney.
