Media:

...And no American private eye would be worth his salt (and his lime and tequila...

...But the percentage of female alcoholism is-again, if statistics mean anything- rather rapidly approaching fifty percent of the total addicted population...

...It is melodramatic stuff, to be sure...

...Why, you gather at your favorite bar, and you start calling for the beer, probably with that most macho of American phrases, "Run a tab, Rosie...

...Because the liberal myth of American society is precisely that you needn't feel rotten: and if you do, if you happen to be black in a white world or female in a male world or chemically addicted in a "normal" world, then there must be something wrong with you...

...FRANK McCONNELL (Frank McConnell is a member of the English Department at the University of California, Santa Barbara...

...They are, like the rest of us, poor souls struggling between heaven and earth and trying to make a buck on route...

...Very few liquor ads involve women alone (except for sherry, which, as we all know, is "downright upright," right...

...a second-rate Dickens couldn't have done worse...

...James Bond-the last public school gentleman or the first punk rocker-can consume infinite vodka martinis per diem and still be razor-sharp when he confronts the vile machinations of SPECTRE...

...But this time around, my subject is liquor and anti-liquor advertising in America, which is to say the ways we try to come to terms with (or don't try to come to terms with) a disease which is among the major causes of death in this country...

...I, for one, would like to see one of those brandy or sherry commercials where the elegant man and woman congregate over their bottle and glasses, with a slow dissolve to the next morning: sprawled on the bed, hair dishevelled and sweaty, dry mouth, and unable to get up before noon...

...It is a chemically-authenticated denial of the Fall (after the third beer, do you feel that anything is wrong with you...

...It's because the use-and abuse-of alcohol is so deeply ingrained in, and sanctioned by, our culture that not drinking is perceived as the abnormal, and of course only the abnormal, the outsider, can be the clown or the fool and get a laugh...

...But Eucharist is not euphoria, and what liquor advertising in America sells is euphoria: the camaraderie of ex-football players downing lite beer after lite beer, the romanticism of a man in a tuxedo and a woman in an evening dress sharing a sniffer of brandy, or the pure success-myth of a wealthy entertainer and businesswoman extolling the virtues of her favorite brand of vodka...

...Now this is a media column, and I am concerned with the ways media reflect both the national self-image and the national self-delusions: I am not, fear not, about to preach you a sermon on the evil of demon rum...

...You have the right to feel rotten,'' said my alcohol counselor, and it was an insight and a revelation of some cultural as well as personal import...

...When in trouble, play with that line, and the audience roars (one reason, of course, being that probably half of them are snockered, so the joke becomes self-defense: that poor boob, thank God we're not like him, we can handle the stuff, can't we...

...It is a curious disease, moreover...

...Any recovering alcoholic (and yes, I'm a member of the club) can tell you...

...But:''If you've got the time, we've got the beer.'' A group of healthy, shiny-faced American males go out for a day's Marlin fishing (Hemingway sport), or mountain climbing, or hang-glider flying, just all buddies together and having a heck of a good, invigorating time...

...Now that's what I call a disease...

...and it is marketed as such...

...Like tooth decay and hypertension, it is a disease of civilization...

...At the very least, we ought to be able to train ourselves to laugh as hard at "If you've got the time, we've got the beer" as we do at "Don't take the car, you'll kill yourself.'' The first one, after all, is the sillier line...

...I try not to be a moralist in these columns and I am not- repeat not-advocating a new prohibition or a ban on liquor advertising...

...How to fix it...

...So why isn't anybody laughing...

...The point of this sacrament is not that it conduces toward transcendence, but precisely that it reintroduces us into the secular city where, already, we felt so hopeless and alone...

...And it is also significant, surely, that the most powerful of anti-alcohol ads on television are those which show us the suburban housewife asleep at noon on the sofa, with an empty bottle overturned at her feet and a cigarette smoldering in the ashtray...

...In fact, given the demographics of Commonweal's readership-heavily Irish and German-it is probably more like four or five in ten, since the evidence is that a predisposition, at least, to the sickness is genetically transmitted, sorry...

...As a slogan, it's about as broad and silly as "Don't take the car, etc...

...The real horror of alcoholism, said Malcolm Lowry, a great novelist (Under the Volcano) and a drunk of Olympic-class proportions, is the terrible sterility of existence as sold to you...

...In adultery, runs the cliche, the wife (or husband) is always the last one to know...

...we might ask...

...Mack Sennett, the master of silent slapstick comedy, said that he always wanted to make a film where the Keystone Kops would, predictably, drive their car into a ditch, and then leave the camera rolling, so that the audience could-would have to-watch the cops crawl, bloody and broken, out of that terrible accident...

...Not that the people who run the distilleries or write the liquor ads are vampires sucking self-respect and productivity out of the soul of the Republic...

...Think about booze as a metaphor for social and sexual roles...

...But it is also supremely intelligent, since, for a number of people, this is really what the specious glamor of the liquor ads comes down to...

...It is also a disease one of whose prime constituents is secrecy...

...I'll drink till I drop down, with one eye on my clothes," sings Roger Daltrey in the Who's brilliant punk-opera, Quad-rophenia...

...Booze-since it tried so hard to kill me, I enjoy calling it by its vulgarest name-is a kind of inverted sacrament...

...But I am saying that a great deal of national distress is attributable to the way in which we market and mythicize this very dangerous substance...

...And ten out of every ten will find themselves, their lives, their loves, affected and probably affected severely, by someone who has the sickness...

...And who does not know that it has become virtually a standard punch-line for every standup comic on the circuit...

...Lately I understand why bread and wine are the materials of the Eucharist-as opposed, say, to water and roast beef...

...Do you know a beer commercial that doesn't include a group...

...They never let him do it...

...because bread and wine are products of civilization, unimaginable topre-Neolithic, which is to say, pre-urban man, and the Eucharist is a blessing, a baruch, on the chances for urban man to exchange his urbanity for something like transcendance...

...And, inevitably, what do you do at the end of a great day like that...

...Not that everyone is fooled, of course...

...We are always in control: that is the message of the fictions of alcohol, and of the advertisements for alcohol...

...If statistics mean anything, three out of ten of you reading this piece will contract or have contracted the sickness...

...Well you know, you can always have a drink...

...Just because, I think, we find the image of a woman drunk still more offensive than the image of a man drunk: sexist perhaps, but also an index of the degree to which we remain faintly embarrassed about using our drug of choice...

...It is, I am convinced, the real root of the disease-the desire for total control of the environment, and the denial that there are things that can happen to us over which we have no control...

...I have sometimes thought, indeed, that as much intellectual energy has been expended by drinkers demonstrating that they don't drink as was expended by Scholastic theologians demonstrating the existence of God...

...I am also, I suppose, suggesting that a large part of our natural and national growing-up process might be to realize that we are an addicted society, and that at least the first step toward a greater sanity might be facing up to that addiction...

...I'll answer for you: you don't, and the reason you don't is that the people who sell us our booze are smart enough to realize that it is a private addiction sanctioned by public, social acceptability...

...Imagine the commercials if heroin (an equivalently dangerous drug) were legal: four old pals, sitting around the apartment, setting up their gimmicks, spoon, match, hypodermic: "This skin-pop's for you...

...Who hasn't seen that commercial by the National Coun-cil on Alcoholism-the drunk husband lurching toward his car and the panicked wife shouting from the porch...

...And sold to whom...

...But alcoholism is a disease, not a sin, and in that condition it is the victim who is always the last to know-if, that is, he is lucky enough to find out...

...But the way they write the ads reflects a great deal about the way we think about alcohol abuse, and the ways we invent to convince ourselves-actually, to con ourselves-to believe there really is no such thing...

...No drinker wants to admit that he (or she) drinks too much, so the heavy drinker goes to elaborate, and sometimes rather brilliant, lengths to invent proofs that he (or she) doesn't drink too much...

...In a very serious way, we use liquor not only as social lubricant ("Ice is nice, but liquor is quicker"-Ogden Nash), but as a way of validating ourselves socially...

...Why the reticence, then...

...Do you know a brandy or bourbon ad that shows one person alone drinking...

...only when men have become civilized enough to ferment grain, precipitate sugar from cane, or evolve the profession of insurance salesmen do these ailments become possible...

...if he did not keep a bottle of something in his lower desk drawer...