They say that The Hangover was based on a true story. It doesn't surprise me that the sort of dissolute flyboy who gets to tell stories in Hollywood would have something like that experience in their past.
I keep noticing that a lot of people who love Michael Jackson get mad when you tell the ugly truth about him, and so I notice the parallel. Stay with me I'm going to dig a little bit deep here, but first understand about me that I never got drunk until I was 26 years old. I always resisted the cult of beer. I really never had what I thought was a good reason to step into oblivion. I don't know how much of a survivor's mentality I have, but I feel like I have it.
If you ask me what it is that keeps me from a great deal of sin, it would be that my temptation has a very specific address. And what seemed like a infinite plain of beautiful black women in my youth has shrunk to a small dot on the map. At some point in my young adulthood I began to notice how many black women from the 'hood who looked so delicious at age 19 did not look so hot at age 29. It was not simply age, but aging poorly. My rationalization was that I was simply comparing them to the sort of women who did have ample access to dermatology and orthodontics, not to mention gyms, leisure sports and healthy food. Let me be clear about it, I was a spoiled young man, and developed a rather discriminating taste, but the backside of that is that I behaved with the prejudice that a lot of black women simply didn't know how to live well.
Such a stigma is not well deserved for the legions of good upstanding women who simply don't obsess over their appearance for the likes of Lotharios like me. But when it came to vice, well, I don't apologized for my dismissals. Yes that includes smoking herb, cursing, baby-mamaship and fingernails that are way too long for working hands.
The Cult of Beer includes mostly white boys who wear polo shirts, but for the sake of argument I extend that soul-killing vice to the 'round the way girls with bad skin and poor taste in men. It obviously includes the likes who find Las Vegas attractive for just about any reason. And now that I think about it, I do have to amend my story.
The first time I got drunk, I must have been about 22, having taken a bus trip with my friends to Las Vegas after they dragged me into it. I was sitting somewhere towards the rear of the Oriental Palace, the big purple casino, drinking my second drink. The first was a Singapore Sling and the second was similar. Oh yeah, a Navy Grog. Not knowing what kind of drunk I would be, I quickly discovered that I was a happy, aggressive drunk. Still am. And so to the first such person that passed my sight, I said 'Yo whassap Rabbi'. Except that he was Arab with two very large bodyguards. He asked me again what did I say, and I repeated myself, unembarrassable. The two large bodyguards grabbed me by the shoulders and told me the Arab's long name, and I made it stutteringly known that I meant no offense. The Arab recognized my stupor and forgave me, but I'm sure the two dudes were going to squeeze an apology out of me one way or another. And so it was like the 16 year old girl who gets pregnant the first time. I was just doing the alcohol because nobody could see why I wouldn't - I didn't need it to behave as stupidly as they seemed to want to do, and with it, my stupidity took me straight to the danger zone. So I sobered up the rest of the evening thinking what a stupid place Las Vegas is, since all anybody wants to do is work themselves up into a state that they lack the courage to approach without the influence. It's still the way I think about getting high, although I expect that when I retire, I might actually enjoy experimenting with drugs simply for the sake of experimentation.
In the meantime, I don't work for beer, much less live for it and I find all of the cultists appropriately flawed. Which brings me back to Michael Jackson, and Mike Tyson, and Bobby Brown, and Michael Vick, and you get the picture.
In my family I have cancer survivors still alive over the age of 70. So why does Michael Jackson, who has managed to give away over 300 million dollars in a lifetime of charitable giving, die weighing 110 pounds? And the simple unavoidable answer is that he didn't know how to live. He joined the Cult of Beer.
There are people whose character flaws disable them. And somehow we've managed to produce so many apologies for such flaws that there is an industry of rotgut entertainment that puts them at ease. The Hangover is one such film, although it's the best of its kind which makes it slightly transcendent. I could go into the tripartite character of the three amigos who search for their missing friend as three heads of today's contemporary American dude, but that's beside the point. The point is that Vegas invites such flawed characters, and as the popular wisdom says, wealth amplifies character and accelerates desire. All of those dudes were headed for a brick wall of some sort, but instead of giving them the safety zone it would give a normally righteous individual, it gave gasoline to their dysfunctional fires.
The Cult of Beer is a wish for dissolution. It's a perverse pride in self-destruction, a flirting with doom. Like Bill Clinton wanting to get caught. What do you give the man who has everything? An irresistible opportunity to throw it all away. Sometimes they provide it for themselves.
I'm interested in character and in the judgment of character. I want to live in a society that is not afraid of judgment, a civil society. A civil society is self-correcting. An out of control society does what Van Der Luen says, it gives up hope, determines itself to be on the wrong track and accelerates on the bad vector hoping to jump the rails. I understand the perversity of hopelessness. And sometimes I am callous enough to encourage it. It's how I felt about Nationalist South Africa. I said forget the Anti-Apartheid Movement, just let the evil spin out of control until the people couldn't take it any longer. But I don't play that game any longer. I want judgment, daily. I want people to say out loud what they know to be true. Michael Jackson was a freak and he died like a freak because he didn't want to live right. And he had every, every, every opportunity and no excuse.
This is the Era of No Excuses. Beware of the Cult of Beer.
