The Angry Exile: Drinkers - you ARE the new smokers

The Hangman

Into our town the Hangman came,
Smelling of gold and blood and flame.
And he paced our bricks with a diffident air,
And built his frame in the courthouse square.
The scaffold stood by the courthouse side,
Only as wide as the door was wide;
A frame as tall, or little more,
Than the capping sill of the courthouse door.
And we wondered, whenever we had the time,
Who the criminal, what the crime
That the Hangman judged with the yellow twist
of knotted hemp in his busy fist.
And innocent though we were, with dread,
We passed those eyes of buckshot lead --
Till one cried: "Hangman, who is he
For whom you raised the gallows-tree?"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
And he gave us a riddle instead of reply:
"He who serves me best," said he,
"Shall earn the rope of the gallows-tree."
And he stepped down, and laid his hand
On a man who came from another land.
And we breathed again, for another's grief
At the Hangman's hand was our relief
And the gallows-frame on the courthouse lawn
By tomorrow's sun would be struck and gone.
So we gave him way, and no one spoke,
Out of respect for his Hangman's cloak.
The next day's sun looked mildly down
On roof and street in our quiet town,
And stark and black in the morning air
Was the gallows-tree in the courthouse square.
And the Hangman stood at his usual stand
With the yellow hemp in his busy hand;
With his buckshot eye and his jaw like a pike
And his air so knowing and business-like.
And we cried, "Hangman, have you not done
Yesterday, with the foreign one?"
Then we fell silent, and stood amazed,
"Oh, not for him was the gallows raised."
He laughed a laugh as he looked at us:
"Did you think I'd gone to all this fuss
To hang one man? That's a thing I do
To stretch a rope when the rope is new."
Then one cried "Murder!" and one cried "Shame!"
And into our midst the Hangman came
To that man's place. "Do you hold," said he,
"with him that was meant for the gallows-tree?"
And he laid his hand on that one's arm.
And we shrank back in quick alarm!
And we gave him way, and no one spoke
Out of fear of his Hangman's cloak.
That night we saw with dread surprise
The Hangman's scaffold had grown in size.
Fed by the blood beneath the chute,
The gallows-tree had taken root;
Now as wide, or a little more,
Than the steps that led to the courthouse door,
As tall as the writing, or nearly as tall,
Halfway up on the courthouse wall.
The third he took -- we had all heard tell --
Was a usurer, and an infidel.
"What," said the Hangman "have you to do
With the gallows-bound, and he a Jew?"
And we cried out, "Is this one he
Who has served you well and faithfully?"
The Hangman smiled: "It's a clever scheme
to try the strength of the gallows-beam."
The fourth man's dark, accusing song
Had scratched our comfort hard and long;
"And what concern," he gave us back.
"Have you for the doomed -- the doomed and Black?"
The fifth. The sixth. And we cried again,
"Hangman, Hangman, is this the man?"
"It's a trick," he said. "that we hangmen know
For easing the trap when the trap springs slow."
And so we ceased, and asked no more,
As the Hangman tallied his bloody score.
And sun by sun, and night by night,
The gallows grew to monstrous height.
The wings of the scaffold opened wide
Till they covered the square from side to side;
And the monster cross-beam, looking down,
Cast its shadow across the town.
Then through the town the Hangman came,
Through the empty streets, and called my name --
And I looked at the gallows soaring tall,
And thought, "There is no one left at all
For hanging, and so he calls to me
To help pull down the gallows-tree."
So I went out with right good hope
To the Hangman's tree and the Hangman's rope.
He smiled at me as I came down
To the courthouse square through the silent town.
And supple and stretched in his busy hand
Was the yellow twist of the hempen strand.
And he whistled his tune as he tried the trap,
And it sprang down with a ready snap --
And then with a smile of awful command
He laid his hand upon my hand.
"You tricked me. Hangman!," I shouted then,
"That your scaffold was built for other men...
And I no henchman of yours," I cried,
"You lied to me, Hangman. Foully lied!"
Then a twinkle grew in the buckshot eye,
"Lied to you? Tricked you?" he said. "Not I.
For I answered straight and I told you true --
The scaffold was raised for none but you.
For who has served me more faithfully
Then you with your coward's hope?" said he,
"And where are the others who might have stood
Side by your side in the common good?"
"Dead," I whispered. And amiably
"Murdered," the Hangman corrected me:
"First the foreigner, then the Jew...
I did no more than you let me do."
Beneath the beam that blocked the sky
None had stood so alone as I.
The Hangman noosed me, and no voice there
Cried "Stop!" for me in the empty square.

Maurice Ogden

Monday 11 July 2011

Drinkers - you ARE the new smokers

Those of us who've been paying attention to the ban-ny nannies and their antics have been warning you about this for long enough, and if you want to be able to enjoy a glass of cheap plonk in the future you seriously need to wake the fuck up. They've nearly got their way with smoking and are confident enough to have shifted a significant amount of their attention to their next target.

Which is you. Yes, you with the glass in your hand. Don't put it down as if it's got nothing to do with you, we know you were drinking from it just now.

SURGEON John Crozier operates on some of the 1500 Australians sent to hospital every week as a result of alcohol and can't understand why wine should sell for as little as $2 a bottle.

''If a bottle of water is more expensive than a bottle of wine, something is fundamentally wrong,'' says Dr Crozier.

Oh, fuck me, not that "cheaper than water" crap again. Look, Doc, if there is something fundamentally wrong with that it's that companies feel able to charge ridiculous amounts of money for bottles of water with a mountain on the front, which some people are clearly prepared to pay.

Assuming for the moment, Dr Crozier, that it's really top quality water, the very finest blend of two parts hydrogen and one part oxygen to be found, then wouldn't a fairer comparison with wine be something like a $100+ bottle of 2002 Nuit St George than three quarters of a litre of Chateau Lafaeces you picked up for a couple of bucks? And if in fact the water is no better than what comes out the tap then wouldn't a fair comparison of the cost of a bottle of cheap piss be with the price of tap water?

Of course that wouldn't support the doctor and his friend's plans for you drinkers.

Dr Crozier, a surgeon at Sydney's Liverpool Hospital, has added his voice to the growing clamour from health groups for heavier taxes, particularly on wine.

The result is that alcohol tax reform is now likely to get a serious hearing at the October tax summit.

Wine attracts a tax of about 7¢ a standard drink, compared to 28¢ tax on full-strength beer and 91¢ on alcopops.

Michael Thorn, chief executive of the Alcohol Education and Rehabilitation Foundation, says the significant increase in alcohol intake by Australians - up by about 15 per cent in the past decade - meant that too many people were drinking too much.

I can't answer Michael Thorn any better than The Daily Mash put it more than two years ago:

"As an adult, I think a reasonable daily limit is me drinking as much as I fucking want.

"If it affects my work I'll get sacked. If it affects my relationships I'll be all lonely and sad.

"And as for my health, following a quick glance at my tax bill I've decided that the NHS will treat me and the government can keep its fucking opinions to itself."

Besides which, cheap wine might not even be the problem.

... Stephen Strachan, who heads the Winemakers Federation of Australia, rejects the focus on wine tax as ''dishonest''.

Mr Strachan said a 2008 government survey showed that wine was not the choice of young ''risky'' drinkers, although it was for older men and women.

Naturally another Righteous doesn't see it in terms of who's buying it, just that it's too cheap as far as he's concerned.

''We are only picking on it because is so grossly cheap and I don't see how anyone can defend wine at 30¢ a standard drink,'' said Professor Daube, who is director at the McCusker Centre for Action on Alcohol and Youth.

I can defend it quite easily. First comparisons with water are disingenuous at best and deliberately misleading at worst. Second, what people spend their money on is up to them, not you, and talking about extra costs to the public health system is a bit iffy when they've paid for that healthcare in advance and under threat of force - if they had to pay for it on an ad hoc basis maybe they wouldn't drink as much. Third, the health care system is a fine one to lecture the wine industry and its customers when it's apparently unable to stop its patients from drinking the fucking sanitiser gel in hospital wards. And fourth, have you lot failed to notice what's happened where these paternalistic attitudes have banned or restricted or imposed minimum prices on alcohol to save drinkers from themselves? Yes, that's right, they end up smuggling the stuff, making moonshine, and sniffing, or even drinking, things like meths and petrol instead. Face facts, people want to get off their dials. Stop them because of the harm one option can do and they're more than willing to choose an even more dangerous alternative, and if that's one which the rest of society simply can't do without then you have a worse health problem than if you'd done nothing at all.

Not that any of that stands even a remote chance of swaying opinion among the Righteous - as the C.S. Lewis quote in the sidebar has it, tyrannies acting for the good of their victims can be the most oppressive and those who torment us for our own good will never stop because they do it with the approval of their own consciences. As the title of this post suggests I'm aiming this more at the drinkers than the anti-drinkers. Drinkers may not have seen it coming but are the new smokers and have been for a while, and I feel that's in no small part due to the fact that drinkers were largely too quiet and too reticent to speak up for the smokers when the bans began coming in. Those like me who neither smoke nor drink are not safe either - we know the takeaway fans and salad dodgers are next in the firing line and even those who aren't really fat but could lose a couple of kilos will eventually cop their turn. The neo-puritans, as Lewis warned, will not stop unless they are made to stop.

Their strategy is plain, divide and conquer, and their weapon of choice is piecemeal denormalisation of anything and everything they disapprove of - which is a growing list. They split the smokers off from the drinkers, and now they're splitting the drinkers off too along with anyone not of the approved weight. If you don't want your own lifestyle to come under attack then you have no choice - you must stand with those who are already fighting for the freedom to do as they've done. Drivers must stand with cyclists, cyclists with joggers and gym freaks, joggers must stand with salad dodgers, salad dodgers with drinker and drinkers with smokers.

Hang together or hang separately, folks. Those are the only options.