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American Canto XIII


Michael Ceraolo




And the Anglos appeared on the shores of American

And they decreed:
There shall be no intoxicants other than God
(their god)
��And
all other intoxicants would be strictly prohibited

And the adverb was absolutely appropriate,
��for
from this day forward
the strictness
��of the prohibition
would differ only in degree,
not in kind

��And
the uniquely American disease,
that of making a moral issue out of a matter of style,
had its longest-lasting manifestation

And thus was born the War on Drugs:

“the flood of excessive drinking will drown Christianity”

��the scarlet letter D
��or the word
��Drunkard
that habitual offenders were forced to wear

��And
the first prohibition was tried in the colony of Georgia
from 1735 to 1743;
��all the vices
later displayed nationwide were here:
bootlegging
bribery
and other varieties of organized crime,
which would be forgotten as they receded
into the myth-mists of history
(American amnesia?)


��In the theocracies
of New England,
��and elsewhere,
excessive drinking was deemed responsible for
“swearing, poverty,
and the distaste for religion”

��And yet
the Founding Fathers fairly floated on a sea of whiskey
(as did the Founding Mothers and all other relatives)
A rebellion was even fought when a tax was imposed on distilled spirits
(Distillers had long been paying higher prices than millers for grain;
the trumping of economics over morals is also firmly
in the American grain)

And in the nineteenth century,
when actual consumption decreased,
the perception of a problem increased inversely,
��and
prohibition again became possible

Maine in 1851
And the road to today was paved with the first good intention

And,
��as Maine goes,
��so goes the nation
��(so the cliche goes):
a dozen or more states soon followed suit;
the state-by-state step
toward nationwide prohibition
slowly sauntered ahead
Demon Rum was put on the run


But the law of unintended consequences was still in effect:
as alcohol was increasingly banned,
��patent medicines
(marvelously monikered,
��because
they had little medicinal purpose
��and
they were unpatented,
��because then
the manufacturers would have to disclose
what was actually in them)
��containing cocaine or opiates
rushed to fill the void
��(But of course
it wasn’t real Americans using those nostrums:
it was the Chinese with their opium
and the Negroes with their cocaine)

��And so
a whole host of bugaboos came together
to litter the twentieth century with legislation,
laws too numerous to enumerate here
And with some laughable propaganda
(think Reefer Madness)
it was inevitable that a religion of drug use,
with its own apostles of pot
and heralds of hallucinogens,
��would arise,
and give rise to equally false idols,
��causing
the anti-drug Crusaders to redouble their mission,
preaching the gospel of punishment,
encouraging children to inform on their parents
in neo-Orwellian fashion,
��trampling
common sense and the Constitution

��AD NAUSEAM






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