I grew up in Indiana, where you can't drink on the beach or buy beer on Sunday. Blue laws improve the character of the community. If you need to drive to Michigan to get beer, you have a problem. Some states let you buy beer on Election Day. That explains Katherine Harris.
It's technically illegal for me to drink a beer. I would have to rent out a motel room in Tennessee and get juiced there. Hauling alcohol to my house in my car could get me charged with transporting a controlled substance. When north Alabama was all dry, it was an idealistic, utopian place with an intangible spiritual glow, but it causes retail bleed-out. There was Third World poverty. People had bad teeth and drove cars with no hubcaps. Young wives wore cubic zirconium. Old men swaggered into public places arguing theology as in 6th century Byzantium. It was egalitarian: if you were a teetotaller, you attained respectability. Social conservatives voted Democratic: you can't get people to panic about social pathology that they rarely see.
Athens, Alabama went wet on New Years Day 2004. The mushrooming economy created a cheap labor vacuum. New people showed up, as did social problems. Guess who got the blame? While restrictions on alcohol sales produce positive results, revanchist movements to bring back prohibition don't. In fact, they bring in other problems.
My wife & I spent a weekend in Ft.Payne when it was dry. The politeness and civility was utterly Victorian. A Pentecostal tent revival next to the hotel carried on until 10 PM with pounding drums, squealing guitars, and chants of "Jesus Jesus Jesus." Today Ft.Payne is the embarassed hometown of a militia movement that plotted mass extermination of Hispanics.
When the Bible is selectively interpreted to be all about sex and drugs, a slaveowner morality emerges. Slaves were forbidden to marry and encouraged to get schnonkered. So a cut-and-paste job is done on the Bible to make it all about us & them, whites & others. What are the logical consequences of making alcohol the only social issue?
In medieval Poland, the king herded Jews into the liquor business. Drunkenness has to be blamed on someone. If you're not man enough to blame yourself, and blaming the king gets you decapitated, whose fault is it?
The heir to the Smirnoff vodka fortune is a Jew who shamed Swiss banks into paying Nazi deposits to Holocaust victims. Is that Jew a good guy or a bad guy?
My grandfather resisted the Nazis in Holland, served in the British Army, and developed a fondness for whiskey after he became terminally ill. Adolph Hitler was a teetotaller. Which man best served the LORD?
BOGGED DOWN IN YUGOSLAVIA
The Nazis had an emotional preoccupation with regaining former Austrian possessions in the Balkans, which cost them Stalingrad. Today, the politico-religious machine of Athens wants to put Duncan Hunter (a genial Tancredo) in the White House, and destroy the Ford Motor Company, which gave generously to Jewish charities starting in 1996. But the holy rollers can't restrain themselves from waging war on Spuds McKenzie again. They need 1/4 of city registered voters to sign a petition by June 15 before the wet/dry issue can even come up for a vote. If they win, they will suffer two defeats. First, in a dry county religion is religion, not politics. There will be nothing left to fight for. Second, going dry will force a 1c sales tax increase, which will be blamed on the far-right. If they lose, and they will, then we can't blame South Asian merchants for a choice that mostly white voters made twice.
DAD, CAN I GO GET A BURGER?
Ever hear of a teenager going out for fast food and coming home stoned? The same churches that are pushing the wet/dry petition are also passing around petitions against hate crime laws. Whenever politico-religious types mobilize over a moral issue, watch for subtext.
There were Hispanics here when we were dry, but the far-right is circulating the rumor that the Messicans came here for the booze. That would explain all the foreign labor in Qatar: they came for the nightlife.
WELCOME TO OUR CHURCH. MAY WE MEASURE YOUR FOREHEAD?
On April 22 evangelist Chuch Cofty delivered a sermon in Ardmore entitled "The Stigma in You." He traced his ancestry to colonial Georgia and found not one convict, criminal, or drunkard. My momma's people were drunks, card sharks, and con-men going clear back to Germany. The dry county spirituality cannot be regained where the theology is irredentist.
The dry people, if they can't get Duncan Hunter elected, will hold their noses and settle for John McCain. From the May 22 Birmingham News, p. 4A, McCain said this to Romney:
"And maybe his solution will be to get out his small-varmint gun and drive those Guatemalans off his lawn."
My daddy stepped off a boat in 1953, my sister was born in 1959, and my daddy became a citizen during the Kennedy administration. I've got drunkards on one side of the family, and aliens on the other. The Bible says once you accept Christ, you are one of God's children. I'm beginning to suspect that I'm not a man, but an animal, and that the best way for me to serve the LORD is to shoot myself in the head.
WE ADMITTED THAT WE WERE POWERLESS
When fundies do alcohol politics, stay out of their way, let them waste their energy charging with bayonets, but watch and listen closely. If you suspect that you may have a problem with alcohol, there's Alcoholics Anonymous and there are religious recovery programs. But Reformers Unanimous is a shell for an anti-Semitic kool-aid suicide cult based in Murfreesboro, TN, the Independent Baptists. Have you heard of the Rev. Phelps of Westboro KS, the guy who pickets funerals? He's one of them.
THERE'S ONE IN THE SPOTLIGHT, HE DON'T LOOK RIGHT TO ME
The Ind. Baptists publish a piece of racist filth called the Sword of the Lord, edited by the evil Dr. Shelton Smith. He says that Jews are snakes, that Israel is Sodom and Gomorrah because they don't stone the gays to death anymore. He can't mention homosexuality or Judaism without mentioning them both in the same breath. Jews and faggots, jews and faggots, that's his mantra. There is no mass exodus of Baptists converting to Judaism, so what goes on in American synagogues is none of his business.
CARTOON NETWORK THING TO DO
If you are not a Christian, write to the diabolical Dr. Smith and explain why you can't be one. His office is flooded with fan mail faster than his secretary can open it; in the South he is the pope. Send him your old tax returns so he can judge whether you make enough money to receive Christ's forgiveness. Send him your liquor store receipts. Maybe a diagram of your family tree or a packet of hair and fingernail clippings so he can analyze your DNA and see if you are Aryan enough to be a Christian. Ask your postmaster if it is legal to send him a stool sample so you can disclose your drug habits. The address:
Sword of the Lord Publishers
ATTN: Dr. Shelton Smith
P.O. Box 1099
Murfreesboro TN 37133