Wine and Civilization
January 4, 2015
THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:
I am responding to “Simplicity is More Fun,” but my topic, not entirely unrelated, is Wine and Civilization: I remember being twelve or thirteen years old when at dinner my paternal grandmother Nellie or my great aunt Herminie would set before me at the table “one finger of wine and one of water” in a glass. My mother, whose background was Protestant, would become perturbed, but the Catholic Nonnas had their explanation: Wine was a civilized custom to which children as they grew older needed to become accustomed. That was how they did back in the “Quarter” in New Orleans. As a consequence, I learned how to drink wine without becoming drunk, an achievement which I consider a social boon and not from an exclusively negative viewpoint.
When once in a while I teach freshman composition, I offer the students a list of two hundred carefully phrased essay-topics, two of which are “wine as a civilized custom” and “beer as a civilized custom.” Student respondents invariably fail to read the qualification, “as a civilized custom.” The result is just as invariably a whiney anti-liquor screed with mountains of statistics downloaded from various Bluestocking websites cut and pasted without any attempt at interpreting them. I hasten to add that few of freshman composition students are unfamiliar with spirit, especially beer, which they drink to excess regularly, using their fake IDs to obtain it. They know the phenomenon of hangover quite well (many of them, anyway).
So why do they write papers that seem made to order for the Junior Prohibitionist League? Because we live in a liberal – that is, an essentially and vehemently prohibitionist society – which is also paradoxically an extremely hedonistic society. (Explaining the paradox is a task for another discussion.) With no middle ground between one extreme position and the other, students have internalized the imperative to say one thing while doing another. They have lost the middle ground in another way: They cannot imagine civilized limits on anything hence they also cannot imagine wine or beer – or gin-and-tonics – as part of civilized behavior.
