Speakeasy Monarchists

Sing a song of sixpence,
A case full of rye;
Four-and-twenty Yankees
Started going dry.
When the case was opened,
The yanks began to sing,
To Hell with the Stars-and-Stripes
And God save the King!
-Reputed Prohibition-Era Drinking Song
via Charles Coulombe

Coulombe scores another rhetorical point:

Now it might well be objected that smoking does indeed pose a threat to an individual’s health, and this I cannot and will not dispute. But it must be submitted that the governments who are so interested in the health of the taxpayer on this point have interesting lacunae elsewhere. Statistically, an active participant in certain “risky” forms of behavior is far likelier to contract AIDS than a ten-pack-a-day smoker is to come down with lung cancer. Yet the Supreme Court has ruled that such behavior is a human right, and cannot be outlawed.

St. Brigid’s Prayer

I'd like to give a lake of beer to God.
I'd love the Heavenly
Host to be tippling there
For all eternity.

I'd love the men of Heaven to live with me,
To dance and sing.
If they wanted, I'd put at their disposal
Vats of suffering.

White cups of love I'd give them,
With a heart and a half;
Sweet pitchers of mercy I'd offer
To every man.

I'd make Heaven a cheerful spot,
Because the happy heart is true.
I'd make the men contented for their own sake
I'd like Jesus to love me too.

I'd like the people of heaven to gather
From all the parishes around,
I'd give a special welcome to the women,
The three Marys of great renown.

I'd sit with the men, the women of God
There by the lake of beer
We'd be drinking good health forever
And every drop would be a prayer.

I was surprised to find that I had not posted this wonderful little representation of divine inebriation. I first discovered this in Noirin ni Riain's version on her album Vox de Nube.

Beer Blessing

From the Rituale Romanum (no 58)

Bene+dic, Domine, creaturam istam cerevisae, quam ex adipe frumenti producere dignatus es: ut sit remedium salutare humano generi: et praesta per invocationem nominis tui sancti, ut, quicumque ex ea biberint, sanitatem corporis, et animae tutelam percipiant. Per Christum Dominum nostrum. Amen

Bless, O Lord, this creature beer, that Thou hast been pleased to bring forth from the sweetness of the grain: that it might be a salutary remedy for the human race: and grant by the invocation of Thy holy name, that, whosoever drinks of it may obtain health of body and a sure safeguard for the soul. Through Christ our Lord. Amen.

via Michael Novak, who normally gives me the howling fantods

Drinking for the Lord: In Vino Veritas est

We don't tend to associate Thomas Aquinas with the idea of drunkenness. We regard him rather – and for good reason – as a very brilliant but sober intellectual. Thomas, however, no less than Jordan of Saxony, uses the image of drinking and of being made drunk to explore some of the most basic aspects of Christian and Dominican experience. "Wine," he notes in his commentary on Boethius' De Trinitate, "often signifies divine wisdom," whereas "water signifies secular wisdom." St Thomas, in his own work as a theologian, draws again and again on the wisdom of secular, non-Christian sources, a fact which disturbed more than a few of his own contemporaries. Was there not a danger, they wondered, that such reliance on secular knowledge would in some way water down the great wine of God's teaching ? Thomas confronted this question head on, and answered it with what would seem to be an allusion to Christ's first miracle at Cana in Galilee. Human learning in itself is not, according to Thomas, the problem. If teachers make accurate use of "the water" of secular knowledge, they don't so much "mix water with wine," Thomas argues, but rather change the water of human learning into the wine of Gospel truth!

Dominicans and the New Wine of the Gospel

"Do you have feelings of inadequacy? Do you suffer from shyness? Do you sometimes wish you were more assertive?

If you answered yes to any of these questions, ask your doctor or pharmacist about Tequila®."

From the Korrektiv marketing agency, via Matthew Lickona

In Public, There is no Beer

via Dappled Things, an argument for allowing supervised underage drinking parties. This paragraph particularly caught my eye:

Not only do such uncompromising approaches do little to make our roads safer, they often make them worse. The data don't lie. High school kids drink, particularly during prom season. We might not be comfortable with that, but it's going to happen. It always has. The question, then, is do we want them drinking in their cars, in parking lots, in vacant lots and in rented motel rooms? Or do we want them drinking at parties with adult supervision, where they're denied access to the roads once they enter?

Oddly enough, this is one of the arguments also used to justify enabling teenage rutting. I think a better argument for supervised drinking must describe the merits of drinking itself. Rather than focus on avoiding all the illnesses and deaths that can accompany overconsumption of spirited beverages, focus on conviviality and building concord among the generations. Typical of late Liberalism, we are only allowed to appeal to the relatively minor public goods of health and safety rather than the good life. And I'd bet "joys of drinking" lectures beat "safe sex" ones anyday.

As for drunk driving concerns, nobody seems conscious that such problems are exacerbated by the strictures of zoning regulations. In much of suburbia, there is no such thing as a neighborhood bar or, better, a pub. To be manipulative, how many people must die before we can walk home drunk?

Pope bet on his own election!

Irish Journalist has the story

Considering that betting on the papal election is punishable by excommunication, this could be fodder for people who want to ignore the last few years of Cardinal Ratzinger's tenure at the CDF. The odd radical trad might use this to justify their continuing disobedience, but fortunately all excommunications are automatically lifted for electors in a papal election.

On a related note, Father Joseph Komonchak has published an article titled The Church in Crisis. It seems flawed at points, and Jamie Blosser offers his take.

That Old Time Education

I went drifting
through the capitals of tin
where men can't walk or freely talk
and sons turn their fathers in

An elderly woman reflects on her experiences as a young girl under prohibition. One of her teachers was an enthusiastic teetotaler, who "would discourse on the evils of liquor and the lawbreakers who made it and consumed it."

This being the Prohibition Era, most everyone had a still of their own, including this woman's father. So as a girl this woman seriously debated whether or not to turn her father in to the police.

She writes "After her diatribes, I began to feel that every horrible thing that had ever happened, from slavery to war, was caused by alcohol's evil influence." I think this was something like the intended effect of the environmentalist events in my elementary school which I recently wrote about. Nothing new under the sun.

Note to Self: Read This Book

The Dalkey Archive is a novel by the Irish writer Flann O'Brien. It is his fifth and final novel, published in 1964, two years before his death. It features a mad scientist, De Selby, who tries to destroy the world by sucking all the air out of the world. He has also very many inventions. He has exploited the theory of relativity and invented a kind of time traveling machine, which he uses to age his whiskey, creating brew that has been aged for many decades in a swift hour.

Viking Rites Controversy

"...they are not to be considered rightly baptized who are baptized in beer."

-Gregory IX, Cum Sicut Ex,

written to a Norse bishop regarding the question of the validity of beer-baptisms.

Family History makes it into History Textbook

...but family history is more accurate.

On another note of local interest, my sister has sent me a link to one of her Colorado history class textbooks, Thomas Noel's The City and the Saloon: Denver, 1858-1916. My great-grandfather Michael Flaherty is the bartender on the far left of the cover photo. Professor Noel, a historian at CU-Denver, claims that Flaherty was owner of the bar along with his brother. This is a rather strange claim, since my family knows he was only the bartender and an orphan who didn't have a brother here. Noel is a friend of my cousin, who I would think could have set him straight on this.

Addendum: turns out my cousin was actually the source of the error. His memory tricked him.

I knew a man once that was given to drinking, and I made up this rule for him to distinguish between Bacchus and the Devil. To wit: that he should never drink what has been made and sold since the Reformation—I mean especially spirits and champagne. Let him (said I) drink red wine and white, good beer and mead—if he could get it—liqueurs made by monks, and, in a word, all those feeding, fortifying, and confirming beverages that our fathers drank in old time; but not whisky, nor brandy, nor sparkling wines, not absinthe, nor the kind of drink called gin. This he promised to do, and all went well. He became a merry companion, and began to write odes. His prose clarified and set, that had before been very mixed and cloudy. He slept well; he comprehended divine things; he was already half a republican, when one fatal day—it was the feast of the eleven thousand virgins, and they were too busy up in heaven to consider the needs of us poor hobbling, polyktonous and betempted wretches of men—I went with him to the Society for the Prevention of Annoyances to the Rich, where a certain usurer's son was to read a paper on the cruelty of Spaniards to their mules. As we were all seated there round a table with a staring green cloth on it, and a damnable gas pendant above, the host of that evening offered him whisky and water, and, my back being turned, he took it. Then when I would have taken it from him he used these words—

'After all, it is the intention of a pledge that matters;' and I saw that all was over, for he had abandoned definition, and was plunged back into the horrible mazes of Conscience and Natural Religion.

What do you think, then, was the consequence? Why, he had to take some nasty pledge or other to drink nothing whatever, and become a spectacle and a judgement, whereas if he had kept his exact word he might by this time have been a happy man.

-Hilaire Belloc, The Path to Rome