The Virtue of Drink

Bernard DeVoto’s The Hour: A Cocktail Manifesto (1948) begins like this:

“We are a pious people but a proud one too, aware of a noble lineage and a great inheritance. Let us candidly admit that there are shameful blemishes on the American past, of which by far the worst is rum.”

On the other hand, if the American experiment had produced nothing more than bourbon and rye, DeVoto says, we would have done the world a princely service. For whiskey has ennobling virtues:

“Look, for instance, at the Irish, for many centuries a breed of half-naked cave dwellers sunk in ignorance and sin and somewhat given to contentiousness. Then gentle, learned St. Patrick appeared among them. He taught them to make usquebaugh and at once they became the most cultured people in the world. No one challenged their supremacy, certainly the Scotch didn’t, till inspiration crossed the Atlantic and set up a still in Pennsylvania.”

Here in Oregon the state holds a monopoly on the sale of liquor. If you want to buy a fifth of Wild Turkey, you must visit one of the few and far-between liquor stores licensed by the bureaucrats in Salem. These shops are privately operated but all the liquor they contain is state property – until, of course, it’s paid for or liberated at gunpoint by a citizen-philosopher.

It’s an old-school system, a relic (maybe) of prohibition sensibilities, which our neighboring states have already discarded. Across the river, in Washington State, you can buy your liquor at the grocery store.

Anyway, it recently came out in the local press that several high-ranking members of the Oregon state liquor control board have for years been using the privileges of office to hoard the good stuff for themselves. And by the good stuff I mean the expensive stuff, bourbons like Pappy Van Winkle that most of us are less likely to see this side of Paradise than to glimpse Sasquatch dancing in the ferny woods.

The bastards.

Not that yours truly would ever shell out the simoleons needed to secure some Pappy Van Winkle. Happily, there is consolation enough for me in the occasional bottle of Russell’s Reserve bourbon or Michter’s straight rye. But the affair nicely illustrates the dangers of generalization. It’s a fine thing to affirm, like DeVoto, that American whiskey is a pure and civilizing spirit, but we see that even pure and civilizing spirits may tempt men into corruption and brigandage.